Ruthless consumption!

This geeky Swiss Army Knife is simply awesome.

Christian Heritage - June 7

That all may be one. That prayer will be fully realized in us when the perfect love with which God has first loved us has passed into the very movement of our heart in fulfillment of that prayer of the Lord; and this prayer of the Lord, we believe, will not be in vain. This will come about when all our love, all our effort, all our search, all that we live and all that we speak, all that we breathe, will be God alone; when the present unity of the Father with the Son, and of the Son with the Father, will have passed into our soul and into our heart. This means: when, imitating the true and indestructible charity with which he loves us, we too shall be united with him by a continual and unalterable charity, so thoroughly attached to him that all our breathing, all our thinking, and all our speaking will be nothing but him.

In this way we shall reach the end about which the Lord in his prayer desired to be fulfilled in us: That all may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that their unity may be complete, and Father, all those you gave me I would have in my company where I am.

It is to this that we are destined, and it must be the goal of all our efforts: to have the grace of possessing, already in this life, the likeness of the future beatitude and a kind of foretaste of the life and the glory of heaven while still in his mortal flesh.

John Cassian (AD 360-435), Conference X, 6-7: PL 49, 827-828

NPR and Darwin

Sittin in a tree
K I S S I N G
First comes love
then comes censorship

The following story (Discovery Institute News, by staff, 27 May 2004) about NPR's suppression of an non-Darwinian biology teacher is very sad. I never knew NPR meant "National Private Radio." Clay footprints everywhere.

On May 21 NPR’s Science Friday program cancelled invited guest Roger Dehart just hours before airing a program discussing the teaching of evolution. ... DeHart was originally slated to appear along with a Texas teacher who opposes the critical examination of Darwinian theory in the classroom. As of Wednesday, May 26 the NPR.org website still listed Roger DeHart as having been a participant in the program. In fact, at the last minute he was asked not to participate, but the Texas teacher was still allowed on the air to promote his views.

...

According to DeHart, the producer who pre-interviewed him for the show said she was an “atheist” and insisted that scientists who are critical of evolutionary theory such as biochemist Michael Behe are merely promoting religion.

“The censorship of DeHart is just another incident in a long list of biased reporting by NPR in what seems to be a campaign of misinformation about criticism of Darwinian evolution,” said Dr. John West, associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

Here is a follow-up article about the list of inaccuracies NPR has aired about non-Darwinian biology.

Now, lest anyone get the "modern age" shivers and think I'm a foaming mouthed anti-evolutionist, let me remind you I am only critical of the philosophical and scientific flaws of Darwinism, not of evolution as such. I agree with Mr. DeHart: "If something in science suddenly becomes so sacrosanct that you can't question it, then it ceases to be science[.] ... I don't even want to teach creationism, I just want to teach the flaws of Darwinism" (as quoted in WorldNetDaily, 4 June 2004).

Also, here is another, slightly longer, article (WorldNetDaily, by Julie Foster, 3 March 2000) about DeHart and another teacher, Kevin Haley, as they've faced opposition for questioning Darwinism. I also agree with Professor Haley: "There's a philosophy behind [evolution]. ... They [sic] only reason we say life comes from non-life is because the naturalistic philosophy demands it. That's fine. The thing that must be understood, though, is that it's a philosophy. If the assumption is "no god," and you work within those parameters, you end up with evolution."

And finally, for the truly hardy, here is a brief article in which Jonathan Wells (of Icons of Evolution fame) discusses some of the key flaws in Darwinism. It's a PDF, so maybe beware of a long opening time.

War - is it good for?

As you might know, I'm not the most "political" person. (I have to qualify even that mundane confession with the truth that, as Aristotle observed and as our being created in the image of the Triune God dictates, all human beings are political by nature. Politics is the balance of hypostases [ie., individuals] and substantial unity [ie., the common good], and not one of us is exempt from nudging that balance. But I digress, as usual.) However, I did find this article by John Keegan very interesting. Keegan speaks well enough for himself below, so I'll spare you my cipher's synopsis. Whether he knows it or not, and whether we like it or not, Keegan reminds us of the plain, biblical fact of where we are: we are in a fallen world. And in a fallen world, war is sometimes a toxic necessity. I don't deny there is such a thing as a just war, but I do deny the USA/Britian met the extremely demanding criteria of a "just war" in the attack on Iraq.

More than that, I wish President Bush had not played so long to the UN crowd when he meant the whole time to storm in without or without any other country. The most compelling argument against the timing, not the goal, of the "war" on Iraq is that the USA was and is not prepared, morally or logistically, to occupy and rehabilitate Iraq. At this point, paradoxically, perhaps the best thing is for the USA just to withdraw and let the Iraqis learn to rule their own country. If the goal of the "war" was truly to overthrow Saddam Hussein, then the war is over and the USA's task is done. The goal certainly was not to usurp Hussein with a US wetnurse government.

At any rate, here's Keegan's article (slightly edited by me). (Digge the coole British sppelinge Keegan uses.)

History tells us that most conflicts end in chaos

By John Keegan

(The Daily Telegraph; filed: 01/06/2004)


History is useful. That, at any rate, is the theme of Alan Bennett's new play, The History Boys. History gets you into a good university. History gets you a good job. History is a key to cracking the secret of life.

Or is it? I have been a dedicated history boy for 50 years but these past few months I have begun to wonder if history is any use at all. Britain and the United States have got into a difficult situation in Iraq and the entire Western media are reacting as if an unprecedented disaster is about to overwhelm their armed forces and governments.

...The British and American media retail with evident satisfaction every scrap of information that implicates its service people in wrongdoing, casts doubt on their operational efficiency and undermines any expectation by readers and viewers of a successful outcome to the Iraqi involvement.

The media's message is clear: Iraq is a mess that should never have been allowed to happen. Yet media people are precisely the sort who know perfectly well that wars usually end in a mess. ...

Because we in the Atlantic region remember 1945 as the year of victory over our deadliest enemies, we usually forget that the Second World War did not end neatly in other parts of the world. In Greece, the guerrilla war against the Germans became a civil war which lasted until 1949 and killed 150,000 people. Peace never really came to Japanese-occupied Asia. In China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma, the Second World War became several wars of national liberation, lasting years and killing hundreds of thousands. In Burma, the civil war persists.

The aftermath of the First World War was worse. On Armistice night, Lloyd George, leaving the House of Commons with Winston Churchill, remarked: "The war of the giants is over. The war of the pygmies is about to begin." The pygmies, in civil wars in Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and above all Russia, went on fighting for years, killing or starving to death millions. A full-blown war of conquest by Greece against Turkey ended in a Greek humiliation but also 300,000 deaths.

And there was, of course, a war in Iraq, caused by Britain's attempt to enforce the mandate to rule granted by the League of Nations. Britain eventually prevailed, but at the cost of 6,000 Iraqi deaths and 500 in its own forces. British casualties in this war scarcely exceed 100. Then, as now, the occupiers complained that "every Iraqi has a rifle". ...

In the second case [i.e., of the current snafu in Iraq -- EBB], the war has not done much harm but has broken the power of the state and encouraged the dispossessed and the irresponsible to grab what they can before order is fully restored. ...

What monopolises the headlines and prime time television at the moment is news from Iraq on the activity of small, localised minorities struggling to entrench themselves before full peace is imposed and an effective state structure is restored. The news is, in fact, very repetitive: disorder in Najaf and Fallujah, misbehaviour by a tiny handful of US Army reservists - not properly trained regular soldiers - in one prison. There is nothing from Iraq's other 8,000 towns and villages, nothing from Kurdistan, where complete peace prevails, very little from Basra, where British forces are on good terms with the residents. ...

It is a regrettable but not wholly to be unexpected outcome of a campaign to overthrow a dangerous Third World dictator. If those who show themselves so eager to denounce the American President and the British Prime Minister feel strongly enough on the issue, please will they explain their reasons for wishing that Saddam Hussein should still be in power in Baghdad.

Christian Heritage - June 6

We are his members and we are nourished by creation, which is his gift to us, for it is he who causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall. He declared that the chalice which comes from his creation was his blood, and he makes it the nourishment of our blood. He affirmed that the bread which comes from his creation was his body, and he makes it the nourishment of our body.

When the chalice we mix and the bread we bake receive the word of God, the eucharistic elements become the body and blood of Christ, by which our bodies live and grow. How then can it be said that flesh belonging to the Lord's own body and nourished by his body and blood is incapable of receiving God's gift of eternal life? Saint Paul says in his Letter to the Ephesians that we are members of his body, of his flesh and bones. He is not speaking of some spiritual and incorporal kind of person, for spirits do not have flesh and bones. He is speaking of a real human body composed of flesh, sinews, and bones, nourished by the chalice of Christ's blood and receiving growth from the bread which is his body.

Irenaeus of Lyons (AD 140-200), Adversus Haereses 5, 2, 2-3: SC 153, 30-38

Christian Heritage - June 5

Listen to what the apostle urges us to do. I appeal to you, he says, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. By this exhortation of his, Paul has raised every one of us to priestly status.

How marvelous is the priesthood of Christians for they are both the victims offered on their own behalf, and the priests who make the offerings! They have no need to go beyond themselves to seek what they are to immolate to God: with themselves and in themselves they bring the sacrifice they are to offer God for themselves. The victims remain and the priests remain, always one and the same. Immolated, the victims still live: the priests who immolate cannot kill. Truly it is an amazing sacrifice in which a body is offered without being slain and blood is offered without being shed.

Peter Chrysologus (AD 400-450), Sermo 108: PL 52, 500