St. John Devouring the Book from The Apocalypse

If you hear a voice from Heaven telling you to eat something, you eat it, no questions asked, no Monday morning left-overs. Whether the Angel server your table has burning columns for legs or not. Then leave a tip even if it maketh thy belly bitter.



Text: "And I heard a voice from heaven again speaking to me, and saying: Go, and take the book that is open, from the hand of the angel who standeth upon the sea, and upon the earth. And I went to the angel, saying unto him, that he should give me the book. And he said to me: Take the book, and eat it up: and it shall make thy belly bitter, but in thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey. And I took the book from the hand of the angel, and ate it up: and it was in my mouth, sweet as honey: and when I had eaten it, my belly was bitter."

I was thinking of changing my top picture to a detail of this one. I'm really sort of a Philistine when it comes to art, but I have an appreciation for Dürer.

Mistaking Gigantism for Genius

Obama's comparison of his behemothic health care plan with something as brilliant and compact as the iPhone should evoke memories of this O'Rourke piece from a year ago. It's short, so I'll republish the entire thing here illegally without requesting any permission.

Let's Cool It With the Big Ideas
P. J. O'Rourke Jun 19 2012

I don’t have a big idea, and I don’t want one. I don’t like big ideas. And I’m not alone. Distaste for grandiose notions is embedded in our language: “What’s the big idea?” “You and your bright ideas.” “Whose idea was this?” “Me and my big ideas.” “Don’t get smart with me.”

When we say our children are “starting to get ideas,” we’re not bragging. It gives us pause to hear our spouse say “I have an idea!” If our boss says it, we panic unless we’re sufficiently quick-witted to spill coffee on the iPad the boss has just used to Google some portentous concept.

This is not anti-intellectualism. This is experience. The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas—fascism, communism, the atomic bomb. Liberty was also a powerful abstraction in the 20th century. But liberty isn’t a big idea. It’s a lot of little ideas about what individuals want to say and do.

I like little ideas. What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text. Thomas Edison’s moment of enlightenment could be sketched in a cartoon thought balloon. (Although once government started having deep thoughts about it, we got compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and now I need to don a hazmat suit if the dog knocks over the floor lamp.) There was Henry Ford’s Model T, of modest dimensions, and the bread box–size gizmo that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were fiddling with in the garage. But in 1875, 1879, 1908, or 1976, we wouldn’t have called any of these Big Ideas. We couldn’t foresee their consequences.

We still don’t know what ideas will have which results. But I fear the bigger, the worse. And we’re back in an era of big ideas. Our financiers have very big ideas. The rest of us are left looking for investment advisers clueless enough to be honest.

“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come,” said Victor Hugo. In either case, run.

Prager responds to Dawkins

Whenever I'm listening to the radio at Noon and I notice that Rush Limbaugh is getting a bit repetitive, I always kick over to Dennis Prager's show. The man is really brilliant, and this article showcases his persuasive, bold and clear defense of the Truth against the serious error of the kind of modern, militant atheism espoused by Richard Dawkins. Excerpts:

Years ago, I interviewed Pearl and Sam Oliner, two professors of sociology at California State University at Humboldt and the authors of one of the most highly-regarded works on altruism, The Altruistic Personality. The book was the product of the Oliners' lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.

The Oliners, it should be noted, are secular, not religious, Jews; they had no religious agenda.

I asked Samuel Oliner, "Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you, would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish artist or a Polish priest?"

Without hesitation, he said, "a Polish priest." And his wife immediately added, "I would prefer a Polish nun."

That alone should be enough to negate the pernicious nonsense that God is not only unnecessary for a moral world, but is detrimental to one.

And:

Perhaps the most powerful proof of the moral decay that follows the death of God is the Western university and its secular intellectuals. Their moral record has been loathsome. Nowhere were Stalin and Mao as venerated as they were at the most anti-religious and secular institutions in Western society, the universities.

Nowhere in the West today is anti-Americanism and Israel-hatred as widespread as it is at universities. And Princeton University awarded its first tenured professorship in bioethics to Peter Singer, an atheist who has argued, among other things, that that "the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee" and that bestiality is not immoral.

Dawkins and his supporters have a right to their atheism. They do not have a right to intellectual dishonesty about atheism.

I have debated the best known atheists, including the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss ("A Universe from Nothing") and Daniel Dennett. Only Richard Dawkins has refused to come on my radio show.

RTWT (Stands for read the whole thang.)

"Oh, Smaug the Stupendous!"

"Crunched in the Head"

Thanks go to J-Carp for pointing this one out. Steve Kellmeyer has a succinct style which comes to the point quickly:

Many Catholics today are getting upset about Rod Dreher's insistence that he can't return to the Catholic Church because it is too touchy-feely. He'll stick with the Orthodox church because it "teaches the hard lessons."

Yes, it is hard to read the sentence above without snorting.
Now I hate the sugary sweet sermons and spinelessness of American Catholics as much as the next guy, but let's get serious.

The Orthodox Church accepts divorce and contraception.

If Rod Dreher was REALLY looking for doctrinal rigor, he wouldn't be Eastern Orthodox.

Now, I'm quite certain he is being honest when he says he can't bring himself to return to the Catholic Church. But I'm also sure that the problem isn't the treacle that American Catholic priests commonly mistake for preaching. God bless his little heart, as they say in Texas, but Rod didn't get where he is today by disagreeing with the mainstream media. His incoherent essay just proves that point again.

Yes, we know this by Dreher's own words.

What if a priest gives a lecture to young engaged couples on the constant teaching of the popes on the topic of contraception and the indissolubility of marriage? He starts with Castii Connubii by Pius XI and goes right up through Humanae Vitae by Paul VI and into John Paul II's Theology of the Body. Oh wait, I heard a priest do this once at a Couple to Couple league gathering. They are not a secret society; I'm sure Dreher would have been allowed to attend the lecture.

Would this be too touchy-feely a talk? Would this lecture lack "doctrinal rigor"? Would this be simply too sugary-sweet, and betray a lack of spine? Hardly. And yet Rod Dreher has gone on record stating that he "never really understood the church's teaching on contraception", but that he doesn't have to accept it because he stopped believing in papal infallibility. Again: Dreher's own words:

Because if any doctrine taught authoritatively by the Roman church is untrue, then it's all up to be questioned. I never really understood the teaching on contraception, but I lived by it because I did believe in the authority of the Roman church to teach these things. If you tell yourself, "Well, the Magisterium got that one wrong," the whole thing logically unravels.

This is not the voice of a man bemoaning wimpiness and lack of character in an institution. This is the voice of someone refusing to accept Christ's hard sayings, a sad reality which existed from the time of Christ Himself.

After this many of his disciples went back; and walked no more with him. Then Jesus said to the twelve: Will you also go away? And Simon Peter answered him: Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have known, that thou art the Christ, the Son of God. (Jn 6:67ff)

Healthcare Site is still DOWN

Yay, Obamacare!! Let's keep hammering it, click here.

Little Sisters Versus Big Brother

Sick and sad.



Obamacare is so wrong. Every part of it.

And this time he really really means it.

Oh goodie.

Rod Dreher was invited by Time magazine to write a piece about Pope Francis.  Of course, he was happy to oblige, and he did so in a way that only Rod Dreher could.  Literally, as it turns out.  I can't set it up any better than Dreher does himself:

I tried to think of something nobody else had said. 

And what might that be, you ask?  The title of the Time piece says it all:

I'm Still Not Going Back to the Catholic Church

And he's exactly right.  No one else had written on whether Rod Dreher is going back to the Catholic Church.

Read the whole thing, as Dreher himself would say (and did say).  Executive Summary:  Dreher goes into some length about how the Church did not preach "God's judgment", in effect preaching "Christ without the Cross", and that this lack of interest in teaching repentance was reflected in its reaction to the Scandal. Pope Francis doesn't help, not because of what he says (which Dreher likes), but because of how Francis will be misinterpreted.  Same old saw, but a bit more expanded.  Whatever.

The odd part about all this is that his Time essay didn't really say why Rod Dreher really isn't going back to the Church -- it just left the impression that it did. Instead, as he says in the TAC pimping of his Time essay, the real reason he isn't going back is "because [he does not] believe in Catholic doctrine any longer".   And he only tells us what the problematic part of the doctrine is when pressed in the comments: it turns out that the stumbling block is papal infallibility.

I'm confused, and at a loss for words.  I'm sure y'all won't be.  

P.S. The Time commenters are a bit rough on him already.