Outside The Asylum

This came from an argument for same sex marriage found here . http://www.gaychristian.net/justins_view.php In it he brings up four very good questions that many Protestants don't understand about Catholic human sexuality. After I answer his four questions, I'm going to throw in a fifth that most people don't understand, and then I'll wrap up with a why at the end. 1. Why should sex by an infertile couple be considered "open to procreation" when sex with a spermicide isn't? This is the Abraham and Sarah answer- Sarah was considered infertile when she has Isaac, the start of the whole Judaeo-Christian world. Sex by an infertile couple is considered open to procreation because miracles of this form have been known to happen throughout human history. I'd point out though that while medical science now can duplicate this miracle- it's still only RCC-approved if GOD does it, not MAN. 2. Is Natural Family Planning considered acceptable only because i...

I got a challenge to place this on my blog instead, as it expands beyond the idea of gay-vs-straight to the outright attack on 1950s middle class America by the upper class going on in economics right now. In the 1950s, The United States experienced the greatest expansion of the middle class the world has ever seen. Despite the fact of the recession/stagflation of the 1970s, this peaked into a middle class that was greater than 50% of the population by the late 1970s. Reagan started reversing this, by cutting the tax rates on the richest 5%. From the 1950s when a single individual could work 40 hours a week and provide for a family of four to six kids, in 2009 we are finding that both parents working can't even provide for a family of 2.1 kids. With the coming depression, this is resulting in some new definitions of what is a family, and what is a household. Homelessness, multi-generational households, friends-with-benefits, couch surfing, and dare I say even polygamy, is all be...

Is America really the "Land of Opportunity" preached about in the third world? Or, over the last 50 years, has our job growth been so slow, so anemic, in comparison to population growth, that we can no longer claim to be offering opportunity to our citizens, let alone new immigrants? I've seen a couple of obvious partisan attacks on Bush the Younger- and he certainly deserves to be attacked, with only a 13.6% of the new workers in this country finding new jobs for them to move into- but I wanted the bigger picture, and that link above at least gave me a chart to play with. I'm placing it here until I can flesh this out into a post fit for my blog at Economic Populist. I'll be putting these numbers into a spreadsheet and graphing them when I get time, but as you can see, America has definitely failed over the last couple of decades to add enough new jobs to exceed population growth, which means everybody claiming that America needs immigrants to fill jobs is lyi...

And the nightmare of a response is- fraud will happen until draconian punishment is applied to stop it.

John Kavenaugh wrote this intriguing article for that left-wing Catholic magazine America. In it, he states that the real problem with moral relativism is that you end up demanding that Other people follow rules that you won't follow yourself - and that the Philosopher Kant argues against this, while arguing for freedom. I find this fascinating, because I myself have a basic philosophical problem with freedom: Political and Religious Freedom contains the Freedom to Do Good, but it also contains the Freedom to Do Evil. Immanuel Kant counters this with the idea that if you're going to hold to a principle, you should hold it yourself as a religious duty to the greater good. After all, what good is having a rule if you won't follow it yourself? This, to me, is the core of morality- to do what is right in the service of the greater good. It's also the core of just about every major religion on the planet, save Protestantism, which has the concept of being saved by Faith ...

Classical liberalism is NOT what we think of in America as liberal- rather it's the economic idea that freedom and the free market is self correcting, and government intervention is not needed. The problem I find, reading the works of Mises and his fellows who commit mathematical dishonesty in support of free markets, is this: Freedom is a knife that cuts both ways, the freedom to do good, and the freedom to do evil. Quite often, under a "free market", due to a lack of information, doing evil pays quite well- especially when committing fraud. So well, in fact, that in September 2008, we discovered that fraud in the banking, stock market, and insurance industries (basically, the financial sector) had attracted huge amounts of well-paid talent. Thanks to some well timed deregulation over the past 30 years or so, that talent found fraud to be a much easier way to get richer than everybody else than actually producing anything worthwhile. So here's the challenge- I ...

I'm emerged in three basic discussions right now: 1. Economic- this very old former FDR Administration economist tells us exactly how bad off we really are , restoring confidence is key, and the lack of confidence was due to the ignorance of historic perspective. 2. Religions- the Emergent Church & postmodernism is busy reinventing the wheel again , this time on Orthodoxy. 3. Government in general- I take a smaller is better approach, not just in terms of libertarian small government, but actually smaller regional government . We may never have Cascadia as separatists like myself have dreamed of since the novel Ecotopia came out, but we need to start looking at self-sufficient regions as a new economic and governmental model.

Supreme Knight, Carl Anderson, wrote in this month's Columbia Magazine that a major portion of the failure of the financial industry was the personal sin of greed . I have no doubt that this is true. But I think, in examining the causes, we haven't gone far enough. The financial industry, as it grew beyond the 6% of GDP in 1965 to the 16% it is today, started paying higher compensation to executives. I'm going to make a radical suggestion: Once the first three levels of Maslow needs have been met, all compensation above that amount only attracts those greedy enough to want and need such a high level of compensation. And just as Jesse James robbed banks because "that's where the money is", today's banksters (unethical executives attracted to the financial industry by high compensation) are in the financial industry precisely because "That's where the money is". If we truly want to bring back ethics and the public good, we really need to r...

Either that or they've got a very different meaning of the word Normal than I do. I just had a homosexual arguing in an emergent Christian blog for same sex marriage tell me both: First, homosexuality has now been considered a normal, non-deviant form of human sexual orientation for over 35 years by the American medical profession, longer, far longer in Europe and Third, sexuality is both immutable and the ratio of gay to straight is somewhere between 3 - 10%, depending on who is making up the numbers. If that 3-10% of us who don't reproduce are really that big a survival threat, then I suggest it is only because you haven't been doing your duty and making babies. Now last time I checked, anything that was practiced outside of the 1st sigma of any given population in statistics was considered "abnormal", while anything inside first sigma was considered "normal". Does anybody believe, even the most radical numbers, that something that is only done by 10%...

I've been doing a lot of talking, thanks to a cousin, and also an old girlfriend, about theology as of late- I'm being pulled back in to that fascinating topic for me, the life cycle of sects in religion and why schisms happen. It's a fascinating topic for me because it's also largely a mystery to me. What I still don't get, as an outsider looking in- Why does Christ need more Brides in his Harem? Ever since the Reformation (and despite being Roman Catholic, I do recognize that Martin Luther fulfilled a valid need- I'm very much a child of Vatican II) we've been splitting apart the Church, the Bride of Christ, into thousands, nay, tens of thousands independent bickering brides over the slightest differences in theology. The challenge I'd present to the emergent movement from the liturgical side of the Church, the very people who defined Orthodoxy to begin with, is why split away? Why form new churches? What the heck was so wrong with the way of the Ap...

NO, this isn't going to be yet another screed on evolution. In fact, in my religion, evolution is an accepted fact, it's the theory of random quantum mechanics that isn't accepted. Still, though, Theology and Science do look at things in one very different way: Dogmas vs Axioms. Axioms in science can actually be disproven- just like any other theory or law or idea. Whole schools of scientific thought have, in the past, had their axioms disproven and they've had to either change or go extinct because of it. Not so with theology- in theology, Dogma is sacred. In Roman Catholic Terms it's the "Deposit of Faith" upon which all else is built. Everything else in theology is explaining the Dogma to new generations- there is never anything added or taken away. In this way, I charge that the so-called soft sciences of Psychology and Economics are not really sciences at all- but rather theologies. Their dogmas, even when apparently destroyed by an aberrant p...