Happy New Year From Mike Ditka

The past is history

The future, a mystery

Today is a gift

That's why they call it the present

On Explaining Death

To live under the sentence of death as we do is no evil. But to go on living forever, knowing what we know, would be both evil and madness, and would make God both unjust and unmerciful.

God shows us his mercy by foreclosing on such an eventuality. Without death, God would not be true to himself. To paraphrase Chesterton, the occurrence of a death only here and there would look odd; the certainty of that outcome for everyone looks like a plot.

Number One Stupid Thing I Heard in Church in 2010

Well, the year isn't over, but I don't think there's much chance that what I heard on Christmas Eve will be bested for its completely uncritical superimposition of contemporary preoccupations on an ancient, remote culture by any other thing I might yet hear before January 1:

The patriarch Jacob "was alone, a fugitive, and a disgrace to all. He himself felt like a failure. ... a poor, helpless, and forsaken man." The prophets might have gone so far as to liken Jacob to a worm, but Genesis does not.

This is the introspective conscience of the West at work on the text, the self-doubt which has nearly reached its apogee in Europe and America and explains its decline. It deliberately glosses over the evidence about Jacob, who consistently to the end strives with the God of Abraham and Isaac, acquires a large family and great wealth, and throughout retains the promise and blessing of God, who in fact frequently deigns to visit and contend with him.

Pretty good for an aplastic man on whom people could not quite get a handle, unlike his brother who had made his mark on the world but of whom none of these things would be said. Jacob's virtue was that he was clay in the potter's hand. The latter may be in control, but the clay has properties of its own.  Of Esau, well, let's just say he set up early. His passion had led him elsewhere.

At Christ Church, Presbyterian Church in America, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Four in the Morning Blues

Green grass I have long since stopped mowing,
And it's time for a new kind of growing:
A beard on my face
Has taken its place
It's 10 below and it's snow that I'm blowing.

Marriage Today Serves Only The Need For Self-Fulfillment

"Having divorced marriage from sex and child-rearing, American marriage today serves only the narcissistic need for self-fulfillment. We have forgotten that marriage is not just about adult happiness, but also about the responsibilities of parenthood and preparing future generations to thrive and succeed.

So 'who needs marriage?' Despite the hang-wringing at Time magazine, the answer is really quite obvious. Kids do."

-- Jennifer C. Braceras, here

Crystal Cathedral Declares Bankruptcy

But the true believers forge ahead positively nonetheless from their pile of (clear) rocks:

"Our announcement today to file for the protection of Chapter 11 is just one more chapter in the book that he is continuing to write -- and we know that God's plans are good -- we have no doubt his chapter will be good!"

CNN.com has the full story here.

The Launch of Real Clear Religion

What took them so long?

From Reason Magazine, here:

Real Clear Religion Launches

Brian Doherty | October 18, 2010

The Real Clear campaign of conquering all fields of human thought and endeavor continues apace, with the public launch of Real Clear Religion, edited by former Reason intern and sometime Reason contributor Jeremy Lott. Keep up with the news of all the Gods and all their sayings and all the human hugger-mugger that arises and froths around all that, daily.

Well, I Tried

I frequently hear people attributing a statement to Einstein which goes something like this: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting it to work when it never did even once. That's how I've come to feel about attending services at a congregation of the PCUSA in Forest Hills, MI, although I have posted about what might be considered at least one positive experience there.

But the first Sunday in October was the last straw. I'm never going back there again, not even in a box.

For what seems like the umpteenth time now, the service advertised as "traditional" was anything but. This is a TINO church, Traditional In Name Only, hoping to lure in some poor suckers so that they can enlighten the darkness of their hapless souls with a sentimental gospel of Christian unity, narcissism and multiculturalism.

I'll never forget the time I looked forward to "Holy! Holy! Holy!" as featured during this nine o'clock hour, thinking I'd hear the beautiful old-timey version with its full organ and worshipful, drawn-out tempo. I'd heard such hymns before. Instead we were treated to a staccato version accompanied by enormous African bongo drums. Gee, what would the contemporary rendition sound like at eleven, I wondered?

Or the time the men's chorus not once but twice in the same service performed numbers which would have been completely suited to their beautiful male voices, but NO! Someone decided they should sing arrangements which would have been possible only for Die Wiener Sangerknaben. They looked and sounded absolutely silly as they strained at the notes, which I'm now sure was the whole point. That they didn't understand the joke being played on them made the scene all the more pathetic.

On this most recent Sunday, for the traditional service, the choir sang hymns in untranslated foreign languages. Boy, was that edifying and meaningful.

The liturgy was a cut and paste affair from liturgies used by sister congregations from all over the world, including a benediction from South Africa, which acknowledged that God created us human. Was that ever in question, except perhaps in Winnie Mandela's necklacing neighborhood? The invocation was from Zaire, which asked God for strength to find that obedience which creates unity. I couldn't imagine that there's ever been an historical example of such obedience. Obedience always creates division. Just ask Korah. In point of fact, an obedience which creates unity is no obedience at all. Oh, at the last day there will be unity, yes there will, and every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. But close readers of the Apostle to the Gentiles know what follows after that.

The children's message featured a show and tell of examples of communion ware from Malawi and Nicaragua and two other countries I cannot now remember. There were fewer than eight children up there. Eight. The sanctuary must seat 300 if the day and night are 24 hours long. Where were the children?

And the sermon, celebrating something called World Communion Day, concluded that the church is really what it is supposed to be, more than at any other time, when it celebrates this sacrament and we all participate and mystically become the body of Christ manifested in the world. The Body of Christ! Was I in a protestant reformed church? Why not just join the Catholics and sacrifice the Mass each and every day?


Well, for just a moment there, I almost thought I was listening to President Obama saying "We are the ones we have been waiting for."

Ye shall be as gods!

There they stood, the celebrants male and female, intoning the words of institution and proceeding to feast first upon the elements like the fat cows of Bashan they are. At least in the Lutheran church the celebrants first served the congregation, and symbolically communed last, as servants and good shepherds might do.

Next they distributed communion to the secondary celebrants, one of whom, a single fellow, had hair which looked like he had just crawled out of bed, and another, a female in pants, who was dressed in an outfit reminiscent of a Federation officer from a Star Trek episode, flared capri pants, boots, and all. She even wore a sling for a tricorder. Whereupon the lowest orders of the hierarchy were reached and the cattle filed up and were fed, one after another receiving with hardly a pause and chewing away as they walked back to their seats.
Who-eee, can you feel the mystery!

Speaking of which, our irregular presence in this church was once the occasion for a member to come up and ask me as we were leaving "What brings you here?" ("A Honda," I answered). At the time I did not realize that the question was meant more rhetorically, as in "What are you doing here?"

Because you see, in nearly two years of albeit infrequent attendance at this church not one effort was ever made to contact us at our phone number or mailing address. There has not been even one word from a pastor or elder or any other representative. Nothing. We might as well have not ever attended.
We do not exist.

And the reason? I finally figured it out today. Call me slow. Although this congregation does not appear on a certain gay friendly church list with other PCUSA congregations in our area, you don't see many young people with kids there. And you don't see many young women either, sitting alone in the pews. But you do see a fair number of unattached young men. The Presbyterian Church USA, you see, welcomes sexually active gay people. 

But not us.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, Almighty, I'm free at last!

Dummkopf Bill Frezza Blames Carnage on Christmas

Apparently unable to calculate the enormous numbers of people killed by modern Enlightenment ideologies in the last century, a supposed expert of the shop and till variety decides that monotheism is to blame for all our ills and that we should go back to the days of gods, goddesses, human sacrifice and free love:

For a movement sharing a common heritage claiming peace and love, monotheism seems to do a remarkable job stirring up hatred.

What is it about the business models of these institutions that foment such torrents of violence? What other large scale human endeavor, besides the nation-state, has so much blood on its hands? And not just lately. This has been going on for thousands of years.

"Besides the nation-state"? He must be kidding. Nevermind that the world's last bastion of Christianity interceded to bring an end to the worst war yet only after it was attacked.

Remind me to invest my money with someone who can count.

Of Druids and Fluids

One winter a fearless young Druid

dived into a rotating fluid.

But he was not ready

for such a fast eddy.

The poor fellow's head came unscruid.

-- author unknown (David Lesley, Organizer: The Literary Group Weekly departmental seminar, San Diego State University Department of Mathematical Sciences, since 1974?), 1994

To Infinity! And Beyond!

There was a young fellow from Trinity

Who took the square root of infinity.

But the number of digits

Gave him the fidgets;

He dropped Math and took up Divinity.

-- George Gamow, 1961

Some Religions Are More Equal Than Others in New York City

A Greek Orthodox Church was destroyed on 9/11 at Ground Zero. The official resistance to getting it rebuilt stands in stark contrast to the way officials are bending over backwards to allow a mosque on the site of a nearby coat store, also damaged by the 9/11 attack.

You can read all about it, here.

It Turns Out Glenn Beck is a Mormon

Which explains a lot.

According to CNN.com:

Beck's emerging role as a national leader for Christian conservatives is surprising not only because he has until recently stressed a libertarian ideology that is sometimes at odds with so-called family values conservatism, but also because Beck is a Mormon.

Many of the evangelicals who Beck is speaking to and organizing, including [Rev. Richard] Land [of the Southern Baptist Convention], don't believe he is a Christian. Mormons, who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, call themselves Christian.

"There's a long history of tensions between Mormons and evangelicals and some of that is flat-out theology," says John C. Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron. "Mormons have additional sacred texts (to the Bible) and a different conception of God."

"It's also competitive," Green said, "because evangelicals and Mormons are both proselytizing in the U.S. and around the world."

Don't miss the complete story, here, for which you will not need 3-d glasses.

Barely 3.2% of ELCA Congregations Vote to Separate Over Gay Clergy

Roughly 335 out of over 10,000 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregations are prepared to leave the denomination over the church's decision to allow practicing homosexuals to serve as pastors, according to this story.

Which tells you that the largest Lutheran body in America today doesn't really believe in one of its signature issues: sola scriptura.

Cold comfort to those who have rightly maintained that this Lutheran church left them long ago.

Rome Still Pink As The Day Is Long

The UK Daily Mail reports here on yet another embarrassment for the Roman Catholic Church right in its own backyard:

Catholic sex scandal as undercover reporter 'films priests at gay clubs and having casual flings'

By Nick Pisa

23rd July 2010

A gay priest sex scandal has rocked the Catholic Church in Italy today after a weekly news magazine released details of a shock investigation it had carried out.

Using hidden cameras, a journalist from Panorama magazine - owned by Italian Prime Minister and media baron Silvio Berlusconi - filmed three priests as they attended gay nightspots and had casual sex.

Today there was no immediate comment from the Italian Bishops Conference and the Vatican - which has been rocked by a series of sex scandals involving paedophile priests since the start of the year.

A preview of the Panorama article sent out by email last night added that video footage from the investigation would be made available.

The article describes how the reporter was assisted by a gay 'accomplice' as they 'gate-crashed the wild nights of a number of priests in Rome who live a surprising double-life.'

In its preview, Panorama added: 'By day they are regular priests, complete with dog collar, but, at night it's off with the cassock as they take their place as perfectly integrated members of the Italian capital's gay scene.'

Panorama described its investigation as 'deeply disturbing' as it detailed how three priests - two Italians and a Frenchman - happily took part in gay events and had casual sex.

The Catholic Church forbids priests to have sex and homosexuality is also seen as a 'sin' .

In 2008 the Vatican issued guidelines which said that any would be trainees should not join if they had 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies'.

In one part of the investigation Panorama said that one priest, named as Carlo, willingly put on his cassock to have sex with the reporter's gay accomplice, adding 'all of which was filmed by the hidden camera'.

The magazine also described how they had attended a Mass which was celebrated by Carlo.

In its preview Panorama insisted that it had carried out through checks and established that all three priests were bona fide but would not reveal their real names or any other details.

Panorama editor Giorgio Mule said: 'This was a two week investigation and was not aimed at creating a scandal but showing that a certain section of the clergy behaves very differently.'

HATRED AS SELF-ESTEEM

Shelby Steele cuts to the heart of the failure of nerve which now animates the post-Christian West, the cultural self-doubt which first spelled the end for our society when our parents could no longer bring themselves to say No to their children:

[T]he entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

Read the rest here.

ON "NECESSITY"

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923.

BAGHEERA DIDN'T FIT ON THE NAME TAG . . .

. . . and so I called her Mowgli.

This was her favorite spot, from which she could keep an eye on me in the kitchen, in the hope that I was working on a plate of food for her, and bask in the sun at the same time!

Mowgli was the runt of a litter, born under a backyard deck in Illinois in the spring of 1993. When we bought the house next door to it in the summer and the lady of the house discovered the existence of the kittens, it didn't take long for a trail of food left from the neighbors' deck to ours to produce a fast friendship between us and Mowgli and her remaining sister, Cal. They spent their first winter outside, spooning by night in a little Dogloo I retrofitted with a 100 watt light bulb and some cedar bedding.

Cal was quite inquisitive, a beautiful tortoise shell in greens and blacks and browns. But her curiosity got the better of her in May of 1994, and she didn't make it back across a road one fateful weekend. Mowgli, on the other hand, was a natural survivor. She always hung back, watching, evaluating. And when she was sure of us, it was only natural that she joined the family, even though Little Sheila wasn't too happy about it. They never did get along all that well. But that was ok, because Sheila, a classic cream and tan Turkish Angora, printed on the lady of the house, who is blonde. So Mowgli sort of became mine, and she and I spent many a happy evening together, usually in front of a fire.

When Sheila couldn't go on any longer almost two years ago, Mowgli became the undisputed queen of this castle, once and for all, and took to the role instantly. It was going so well I had forgotten how old she was getting. In truth I didn't want to think about it. It was 17+ years. We, like others, had lost so much in so small a space.

 

I tried to tell myself Mowgli had lots of time left, but she didn't.  

 

"There is no pleasure, no shape of good fortune, no form of glory in which death has not hid himself, and waited silently for his prey."  -- Alexander Smith, 1888

 

And so she is gone, buried next to Little Sheila on Saturday, the 29th of May.

I open the kitchen cupboard and am startled when I reach up to see so many plates stacked so high in the corner, the little ones from which she used to eat every evening, unused. From her spot Mowgli could observe this motion, repeated thousands of times, and be roused instantly from her leisure with every certainty that something good was about to happen. But now it is for me to consider how in this motion, so oft repeated, I . . .

 

"have passed weeks, months, and years which are now no longer in [my] power; that an end must in time be put to every thing great as to every thing little; that to life must come its last hour, and to this system of being its last day, the hour at which probation ceases, and repentance will be vain; the day in which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past." 

 

-- Samuel Johnson, 5 April, 1760

  

THE RELENTLESS MARCH OF HOMOSEXUALITY

In 1993, when President Clinton sought to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the U. S. military, there was an enormous upheaval in the country, a veritable firestorm of outrage which became an integral part of the reaction leading to the Republican takeover of the Congress in the elections of 1994.

Fast forward to today, the day after the U. S. House voted to repeal the Don't Ask, Don't Tell compromise of those years, and you'd hardly even know the measure is on its way to the Senate for a vote. There was nothing on the websites of Bill Bennett, Laura Ingraham or Rush Limbaugh to indicate any reaction to the vote, which represents nothing short of a repudiation of the agreement reached with conservatives on the issue at the time. CNBC.com had the story from about 01:04 AM EDT on its website until the mid-morning, when it disappeared altogether. The House passed the bill in the dead of night, just before the Memorial Day weekend. It seems as if no one, except for the far left, wants to talk about the historic vote.

In less than twenty years, the social conservatives have completely lost the war for traditional morality in America, whether it comes to the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the expenditure of federal funds for abortion or the acceptance of homosexual behavior. The reason for this is clear: a relentless effort by the left to insinuate homosexuality in every venue possible, from prime time television to public school sex education. Inured to the topic and themselves less religiously oriented over the period, the public can hardly muster the will to discuss the matter anymore, save for values interest groups like the Traditional Values Coalition. The Roman Catholic Church, whose seminaries are as pink as the day is long, is utterly incapable of standing against a tide which its own doctrine recognizes as the creation of God. You'd hardly believe it that not that long ago homosexuals discovered on U. S. Navy vessels at sea often didn't set foot on land again.

The Book of Kings informs us that good King Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord and drove out of the land of Israel all the male cult prostitutes. The only group left in the world with a similar moral mission, it seems, is radical Islam. And they say politics makes strange bedfellows.

Time Out

Not for him was there ever any waiting for that wisest of all counselors. The old gray head was always a fool, and could never wait for anything.

Not for him at the end of days will grief do its work now, and bring its gift.

Not for him will loss mean standing alone for once, in command of himself. Only now, after all these years, is it plain that he is not a man in full.

It teaches all things as it grows old, but not to this old goat. He changes women like a pair of too tight pants, like a bull answering the rut before the ashes have even grown cold. Like an ever rolling stream, it has born her away. She flies, forgotten, as a dream dies at the op'ning day.

Some of him is passed on because of you, because you were the same way once, and made the same mistakes. You may yet learn from yours, but he will never really know he made any.

It is said that the truth is the kindest thing we can give another in the end, but it is a pearl as surely trampled on by a certain sort as it is by others redeemed, and treasured, in time.

Babies Know The Difference Between Good And Evil

So says the headline to the story, here.

An astonishing series of experiments is challenging the views of many psychologists and social scientists that human beings are born as 'blank slates'--and that our morality is shaped by our parents and experiences. . . . [T]hey suggest that the difference between good and bad may be hardwired into the brain at birth, 

says the article for the UK Daily Mail by David Derbyshire.

Neither conclusion is inconsistent with the Bible's understanding of the human predicament, however, that notwithstanding our first ancestors' willingly made affirmative answer to the invitation of evil (Genesis 3:5), evil has been ever after "biologically" transmitted to their progeny:

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

 -- Psalm 51:5

The Bible holds these antonyms together in tension. Those who cut one or the other loose inevitably veer off into utopianism of one kind or another or into assorted determinisms as the case may be. In its way, the Bible is a pragmatic, realistic, dare we say conservative, reflection on human experience which people with much of it continue to find compelling for these reasons.

Three Cheers for Tom Watson

This has needed saying for a very long time, quite apart from Tiger Woods' more recent shortcomings:

The 60-year-old Watson, one of golf's elder statesmen, also criticized Woods — a 14-time major winner — for bad language and other on-course behavior.

"I feel that he has not carried the same stature that other great players that have come along like Jack (Nicklaus), Arnold (Palmer), Byron Nelson, the Hogans, in the sense that there was language and club throwing on the golf course," Watson said. "You can grant that of a young person that has not been out here for a while. But I think he needs to clean up his act and show the respect for the game that other people before him have shown."

For more, go here.

To Be or Not To Be

On Fox News Sunday, January 3, 2010, Brit Hume made the following remarks about the Buddhism of Tiger Woods, remarks which have been the subject of much controversy for days:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think is a very open question, and it’s a tragic situation with him. He’s lost his family, it’s not clear to me whether he’ll be able to have a relationship with his children, but the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist, I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith, so my message to Tiger would be 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'

Since Hume is a self-professed Christian, is it reasonable to expect that Tiger's present record of misbehavior wouldn't call into question for such a person the character of Tiger's own religion? Indeed, Tiger's egregious misbehavior suggests that some awfully bad karma from a past life has been manifesting itself in this one just as much as his pre-eminence as an athlete suggests the opposite. What extremes these are. What was he in a past life that he should be what he is in this one?

Christianity explains reality very differently, in terms of tragedy, where human excellence derived from a divine spark becomes co-mingled with total depravity because of a choice taken to disobey, made freely. To the Buddhist, all of this is an illusion, both the good and the evil, along with the idea of personality, whether human or divine. Escaping from the great chain of being represents a rather different religious goal than forgiveness, redemption and eternal life. But Tiger's penchant for the procreative act seems like a strange, deep and willful entanglement in it.

The thing which jumps out at me about this spectacle is how incidental religion has seemed to the careers of the principals involved, and how avocational. Hume should feel as free to speak his mind as I feel to say that his chosen venue was unwise, if he sincerely had Tiger's eternal welfare foremost in his mind.