Progressive again

For sheer, unadulterated pap, you just can’t beat good, old-fashioned normally progressive lines.

Progressivism

They believed in that vague kind of middle-American progressivism that expressed itself in Scandinavian furniture, subscriptions to the New Yorker, and “educational playthings.”

Ancient sex

In antiquity, and throughout the heathen world, the gods indulged in sex. Not so the God of Israel.

Church & poverty

A report in Zenit shows what truly obsesses the Church: "Some 27% of health care centers that attend AIDS patients around the world are administered by the Church; 44% are run by governments, 18% by nongovernmental organizations, 11% by other religious institutions, and 8% by other groups."

M. L. King's loose women

In the early '60s, Robert Kennedy authorized Hoover to bug and tap Dr. Martin Luther King. When the FBI turned up film of King with loose women, LBJ's White House moved the photos to the Washington press.

Hypocrisy

There is a story floating around cyberspace about a church service that was allegedly interrupted by a squad of armed men dressed in black with black ski masks covering their faces. They burst into the full church and fired into the ceiling. The leader stepped forward and announced, "If you're not willing to take a bullet for God leave now." There was a stampede of parishioners for the exits. The minister was left standing at the pulpit with a mere dozen remaining in the congregation. The masked leader announced, "OK, preacher, we got rid of the hypocrites. You can continue with your service." The masked gunmen left.

Giving blood

"If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent." But then again we'd have to ask ourselves, do we want liberal blood coursing through the veins of otherwise innocent people?

Donating

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, 'Who Really Cares,' cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals. Other research has reached similar conclusions. The 'generosity index' from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

Maverick

The media’s definition of a “maverick” which is: “agreeing with the editorial positions of the New York Times.”

Mrs. Palin

Sarah Palin wins Human Events' prestigious "Conservative of the Year" Award for 2008 for her genius at annoying all the right people.

Atheist hymn

I googled "atheist music" and found listings of tunes like "My head hurts, my feet stink and I don't love Jesus".

Academics

Moral relativism – a philosophy so vacuous that only college professors deem it useful.

William L. Hanaway

When there is a conflict between ideology and free imagination, ideology generally wins the battle but always loses the war.

Athanasius

"when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those "sensible" synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen".

Cardinal Dulles

‘I do not particularly strive for originality,” Cardinal Dulles wrote looking back on his career. “Very few new ideas, I suspect, are true.

NCR answered

Submitted by Consistent Ethic (not verified) on Fri, 12/12/2008 - 14:44.
All living organisms die, including human beings. The fact of death does not justify murder. Attempting to justify the murder of newly conceived human beings because many of them die is as absurd as justifying the murder of any other human being because he or she will surely die at some time.

Similarly, accidents happen, and the rare fusion of twins is one. The fact that fusion happens would not justify a project by scientists to make it happen any more than the chance that I might be hit by a car and lose a leg this afternoon justifies purposely hitting me with your car or cutting off my leg. The fact that an accident might happen to me, as death surely will, does not void my personhood. The fact that the accident of twin fusion might happen to fraternal twin embryos does not either prove or disprove the personhood of these embryos or of any human embryo.

It is true that the Church does not presume to judge when ensoulment happens and believes that this will always be a question beyond the scope of our human ability to know. Because the embryo, if it does not die, meet with an accident, or be hindered by human intervention, will surely develop into a fetus, an infant, a child, an adult and an old person, there is a strong probability that it is a person. As long as we can't prove it isn't (and we never will be able to do that), we have absolutely no right to harm it in any way, much less kill it.

Aren't the above obvious? We need to ask what utilitarian motives, including the pursuit of profit, would cause anyone, Christian (as the author says he is) or not, to try to render them unclear?

Finally, scientists like the one who cloned the sheep Dolly are abandoning embryonic stem cell research because alternatives that do not kill embryos (such as induced pluripotent stem cells) are more promising for medical research and treatment, as well as ethically far less problematic. Furthermore, medical pathologies are being treated right now with adult stem cells. No treatments at all have resulted from embryonic stem cell research that is ongoing, not only with the restricted number of stem cell lines eligible for federal funding under Bush administration guidelines but without restriction in US private labs and labs funded by foreign governments. Development of treatments from embryonic stem cells will always be complicated by the tumor-forming properties of embryonic cells. Graft/host rejection issues would present a strong impetus to the immoral cloning of embryos to be destroyed for medical use; excess embryos from in-vitro fertilization (also immoral, if for no other reason than its creation and abandonment of such embryos)are usable only for research, not actual treatments. I can imagine no possible reason for a scientist (or the incoming Presidential administration) to defend embryonic stem cell research or support it with my tax dollars other than the huge financial stake some parts of the medical and scientific community hold in this immoral and unneeded research.

NCR, you can do better. The Vatican has.

Cardinal Dulles

Cardinal Dulles soundly rejected this falsehood:

“Many politicians, like much of the American public, seem to be unaware that abortion and euthanasia are serious violations of the inalienable right to life. These are not just 'Church' issues but are governed by the natural law of God, which is binding upon all human beings. The right to life is the most fundamental of all rights, since a person deprived of life has no other rights.”

R R Reno

The progressive ideal of liberated desire

Henry Morgenthau

"Well, years into the Great Depression, FDR's secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, declared (quoted here verbatim): 'We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!'

Golda Meir

"Don't be so humble," Golda Meir used to say, "you're not that great".

Billings birth control

"In Western countries, in fact, natural methods have continued to be considered not only completely ineffective, but also inconvenient and difficult to apply. And there is another characteristic, which is never mentioned, that has contributed to giving them a bad name: the fact that they are free. No pharmaceutical company had any interest in financing research on this form of birth control. Instead, it was to their advantage to heap ridicule on it and discredit it".