Outside The Asylum

I don't understand Ignatian Spirituality. It seems far too relative for me. And because of that, I have some severe problems with understanding Pope Francis. I also don't often promote ChurchMilitant.TV, but for those of us who are NOT Jesuits, this is a must-watch:

With permission of the author, Mary Rigert, I'm posting this for anybody who wishes to use it. This week marked the celebration of the 2,015th anniversary, give or take a few years, of the miraculous conception of Jesus Christ. March 23/25, Sunday, Tuesday, 2014 Bulletin The Word was made Flesh . . . Following Baby Jesus in the Womb This year, between the Annunciation (March 25) and Christmas, we will remember the nine months Jesus spent growing inside the Blessed Virgin Mary. Everybody loves the beauty and innocence of a newborn baby. We hope to reveal the beauty of babies before birth by describing their steps of growth, as Jesus experienced. He, like each of us, lived through the amazing stages of prenatal development. While the mechanism of His miraculous conception (the Incarnation) is unknown, it is likely that His subsequent journey followed the normal milestones of early human life. At the very moment of conception, a new and unique individual is formed. All ...

And now back to the Autistic Asylum portion of this blog. Earlier this week, while complaining about a right winger using violent terms, a left winger insulted my paticular mental illness . I like Caelum Et Terra- Heaven and Earth- because while I am a horrid social conservative, in fine Catholic fashion I am a fiscal liberal- and the counterculture magazine this blog is a revival of was a staple of midwest distributism in the 1980s and 1990s. I also wasn't offended by the insult. if anything, it shows the great strides we've made as autistics to at least be noticed by society rather than locked away in asylums. But it does bring up an interesting point that people like me, with Asperger's, are extremely bad at. There are a lot of unwritten, arbitrary rules governing what neurotypicals think is civilized behavior. I say think- because some of these rules actively destroy civilization. Not talking about sex in the 1950s, led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s (well,...

I'm posting this newsmax article for a reason because I'm hoping it is true that Obama is a fan of Pope Francis, and not vice versa like previous reports have claimed. I really don't expect Obama to listen to Pope Francis any more than Bush listened to Pope John Paul II's warning that Iraq would be an unjust war. But maybe, just maybe, Obama will read the part of the Papal Mission Statement about the unborn being part of those we habitually exclude from the global economy, and from life.

I didn't hear the homily for the feast of the assumption. For one thing, the closest thing my parish had to a Mass for this holy day of obligation was our standard Tuesday Night Soup Supper & Communion Service. We didn't even have a priest, and the reflection concentrated on Mary's example of saying yes. Likely due to time limitations, as well as the charism of this inner city urban and liberal parish, it didn't touch on three other items that could have been said and talked about. The Gospel for the Feast of the Annunciation is Luke Chapter 1- the angel coming to Mary to try to encourage her to keep the child that the Holy Spirit is planting in her womb. The interesting first thing I noticed was that even God recognizes the need for consent to parenthood- Mary is asked, she could have said no. But also, her consent, once given, is final- there's no going back on this choice. God isn't a rapist- but contraception and abortion are a form of reverse-rape...

An interesting idea from Business Insider indicates that perhaps, no, rich people don't create jobs. Or at least, not lasting ones. Return on investment sucks up cash into investment accounts, instead of using it to buy goods. Give 9000 poor people $1000 each, and you'll get more economic activity than one man earning $9 million.

We say these words in the Nicene Creed- but modern science gives new meaning to them. Today is the Feast of the Annunciation in the Roman Catholic Church, the 2,015th anniversary of the conception of our Lord Jesus Christ. What a profound statement for Pro-life Catholics that is. Ok, I'm well aware of the controversy surrounding the date of Christmas, and this feast by necessity is symbolically tied to that- December 25, minus nine months, is March 25th. But what a gesture of belief in the sanctity of human life, from conception until death, this is, especially in a culture where youth is idealized to the point that many refuse to celebrate their birthday, let alone their conception day. And yet, here we are, the Church is asking us to celebrate the conception day of Our Lord.

I've spent most of my life looking for a more automatic world, but now, I just want my child to learn that we didn't always have it so easy.

I haven't had time for my reading of Papal Economics lately. But two recent blog posts about Pope Francis, One suggesting a sign that the Pope really should have over his desk and the other from Economist magazing going in depth into Pope Francis' economic and governmental history in Argentina are most certainly on topic for the discussion, and suggest that maybe, democratic capitalism alone can't save the world. This Pope had a good deal of formation as a Bishop and Archbishop under the vagaries of Peronism. General Juan Perón was to Argentina what Ronald Reagan would become to the United States- he entirely reformed the economic discussion in his country. Just as another article that crossed my e-mail this weekend suggested that much of American thought about sin, right, and wrong was formed in the "ahistorical" 1960s , so too much of our economic thought in the United States was directly ingrained in the 1980s and all economic thought since then has been...

Knights of Columbus made ethisphere's top 144 World's Most Ethical Companies which I thought was pretty neat, until I started looking at the rest of that list. They must have a very morally relative method of judging ethics. Though, it's nice to know my shady India based consulting company is using Paychex for my Paycheck- and they also made the list.

This is a Papal Economics Book Club Post Prudence is normally thought of as a virtue. It's a virtue of stewardship, and it is an absolutely downright necessary skill to have if you are living under democratic capitalism. Being Imprudent is often seen as a sign of weakness by Democratic Capitalists. But I would say, and Blessed John Paul II seems to say in Centesimus Annus , that generosity is a higher virtue than prudence. This means of course, in the language of Pope Francis, that occasionally there will be accidents, ministries that go bankrupt from being too generous, but that is the price of radical, indiscriminate charity. But shall we consider the other situation? It is said that a heresy is a virtue taken to absolute- and I believe Prudence is a virtue that for many materialists in the United States, has become an absolute. Climbing the wage ladder to get to a point where one has a sustainable lifestyle takes a lot of ambition and just plain hard work; the habits gained...

Once again, Cardinal Reinhard Marx finds a path where few could. How do you still teach that divorce is wrong, yet be merciful to the divorced? By making lack of the eucharist truly penitential, and setting a time limit on it after the person has acknowledged that the divorce was a sin.

More evidence of God's fingerprints today as better data analysis from recent (well, in cosmology terms, within the last 12 years is very recent indeed) experiments on CMBR prove the Big Bang theory correct- especially the controversial expansion period that Fr Spitzer uses to refute the New Atheist view of cosmology. Ok, Steven Hawking, use your worship of gravity to explain THAT.

Has produced the Who-Am-I generation of children biologically unrelated to their parents. They're now telling their heartbreaking stories of why we should have paid attention to Pope Paul VI , who warned us this would come to pass.

I somehow had missed the great-granddaddy of them all Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, inventor of resolution and composition an early form of the Scientific Method, and the world's first Scientific Cosmologist , working at a time when the Church had barely been able to surpress astrology. And of course, as I've blogged about before It turns out that resolution and composition are vulnerable to the decline effect .

The lyrics of Freddy Mercury come back to me reading this article, which I can't decide if it is parody or deep wisdom .

Because Understanding- requires Truth.

John 14:6 identifies Christ as "The Way, The Truth, and The Life.". An early catechism, the Didache, puts it even more strongly "There are two ways, the Way of Life and the Way of Death". When faced with a man who is "The Truth" himself, in John chapter 38, Pilate's retort is "What is Truth?" and the musician Andrew Lloyd Weber expanded upon that in Jesus Christ Superstar with "Are Mine the same as Yours? Recently, in an online discussion, I ran into the odd comment "Christianity is my truth I choose but it's not everyone's truth". That's quite the American Pluralistic sentiment there- what I call the Individualist Christ- Jesus is for me, but he's not necessarily for you. One of the things that separates out American Protestantism from Catholicism is exactly that individualistic attitude, that Christ isn't the Universal Truth he claimed to be, that in fact, other people choose other truths. Want to know w...

Since I was trying to slow down my reading (that, and due to a stubborn bug at work, I don't exactly have the spare brain cycles for the rest of Chapter 2 of Papal Economics right now) I've slowed down on posting to this blog. But a comment in another forum linked to these posts, did give me a good idea. Remember "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute"? Woodsy the Owl, back between 1965-1985, taught us an early form of subsidiarity, the fact that local action could make a difference in pollution. But a libertarian posting to my slashdot journal on how to be Marxist of the Reinhard Variety pointed out to me what we really need is a market that gives a hoot- ordinary consumers, voting with their dollars, buying as locally as possible to keep markets small and local. I think that's exactly what the Popes have been urging us to do all along. Give a Hoot, Buy Local, Don't Pollute, and we can keep America Looking Good. There's only one problem with it, we may be...

And from here on out, a link to this statement will be my response to those promoting fornication and atheism. I just can't be bothered with the lies anymore.

Who said that the Scholastic School of Theology wasn't Based on humor ? 2. Again, if sacred doctrine proceeded by argument, it would argue either on the ground of authority or on the ground of reason. But to argue from authority would be beneath its dignity, since “authority is the weakest kind of proof,” as Boethius says (Topica 6), and to argue by reason would be unworthy of its end, since “faith has no merit when human reason proves it by test,” as Gregory says (Hom. in Evang. 26). It follows that sacred doctrine does not proceed by argument. I think that Thomas Aquinas would have had the same opinion about the New Atheists that I do- that when arguing online, they often accuse the Catholic of Appeal to Authority, insisting that this is a logical fallacy because it's on a list at Changingminds.org (or some other such nonsense, doesn't matter whose list it is on).

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” - Granny Weatherwax, I Shall Wear Midnight , By Terry Pratchet All of this can be summed up by repeating once more that economic freedom is only one element of human freedom. When it becomes autonomous, when man is seen more as a producer or consumer of goods than as a subject who produces and consumes in order to live, then economic freedom loses its necessary relationship to the human person and ends up by alienating and oppressing him. -- Centesimus Annus 39, Pope John Paul II (is it too soon to call him St. Pope John Paul The Great?) In Chapter two, Fr Zieba begins to redeem himself somewhat in my eyes, by identifying, along with Pope John Paul II, the central problem of economics as a science- that it treats human beings as THINGS rather than PEOPLE. As old Granny Weatherwax said in Terry Pratchet's novel, that's the beginning of evil, right there. Price signals aren't enough to tell you if the grapes you buy a...

But the real question is, will any Atheist be able to pick up this gauntlet without Running afoul of the comments policy that I've already told them makes reason impossible ? At Outside the Autistic Asylum, we have no comment policy, and I don't delete arguments that call into question the sinful behavior of other Catholics or myself. I do moderate from time to time, but the worst I ever do is delete completely off topic posts trying to sell something in Korean or Chinese or other non-European character sets. And I've been known not to delete those either, and ridicule their Engrish instead.

I'm not that far ahead in this book club- I only just now made it to chapter 2. Which means I'm about to start reading the market based encyclicals, beginning with Centesimus Annus , the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum , backing up one from the last encyclical we discussed in Chapter 1, Solicitudo Rei Socialis . For the entire timeline, I'd refer you to my post History of Evangelii Gaudium , refreshed from my original history of encyclical links. Ok, now that I've placed my thought process in the book, on to an insight I have had from my position in the lay order, Knights of Columbus. At present time, the church, especially the last 120 years worth of Popes, have been calling us to specific actions in the economic realm. Three separate potential actions for any individual stand out, and I'm going to list them in order of what I feel is their importance: The Preferential Option for the Poor- This is the chief duty that every Pope in all the encyclicals ke...

I have found a way out of my despair. I'm going to start preaching indiscriminate charity. It occurs to me that the appropriate response to the world turning its back on Christ, is to bring Christ to the World. And I have an idea how to do it. Just needs some research into a disruptive technology idea. A quick google shows that the main machinery would cost about $3000. So for $6000, I could start experimenting with pill sized vegetable seed bombs. Take a relatively small seed, like carrots or some other high calorie, high nutrition density vegetable. Mix with dirt, run through the pill press into little pills, easy to carry anywhere. Scatter these pills in urban areas and in the third world, where there are people. Repeat every year as often and as large as possible. Truly indiscriminate charity- anybody can harvest, anybody can eat.