Why am I such an insufferable prude?

                First of all a prude is a contraction referring to someone who is prudent.  I truly aspire to be a prude, much more than I am. 

PRUDENCE: The virtue which disposes a person to discern the good and choose the correct means to accomplish it. One of the cardinal moral virtues that dispose the Christian to live according to the law of Christ, prudence provides the proximate guidance for the judgment of conscience (1806). Catechism of the Catholic Church

                Prudence has become a contraction, prude, which refers specifically to one’s disposition towards sex.  Prudes are individuals who are uptight and unwilling to see sex as simply a way to have a good time.  It’s as if prudes see sex as inseparable from the consequences which are becoming more and more inevitable; these include but are by no means limited to: STDs, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, fatal blood clots due to oral contraceptives, and depression as the oxytocin intended to bond persons together has to be ignored, as if one could truly ignore a neuromodulating hormone, not to mention all the other disordered personality development individuals sink into the development of a “sexual self”.

                  Society at large has become more and more affected by persons pushing their disordered sexual perceptions.  One who has a disordered relationship with sex tends to blame a lack of social tolerance for the high suicide rate associated with their behavior.  As I have stated before one cannot effectively manipulate one’s neromodulating hormones or neurotransmitters for that matter; they react regardless of a nebulous desire but according to our solid actions.  We get stuck in a rut of firing neurons whose plasticity becomes more concrete as the behaviors which are intended to save become more and more a tightening noose.

                They keep on pushing until the television is unwatchable and fashion is more completely exploitative than ever.  Fashion which creates Jours Après Lunes’ lingerie for four year olds and Abercrombie Kids push up bikini bras for seven year olds; an industry which pushes disordered views of female sexuality and body consciousness which the young girls marketed to could not understand consciously, for they cannot understand sex and sexuality, but only as an issue which will obstruct them from happiness, for they simply want to be socialized individuals.  They only feel the effects of that objectification from their earliest moments and throughout their lives as they bring those raw feelings into adulthood and into unhappy relationships with the unstable and destabilizing men which appreciate the artifice the now women had consumed since they were girls.  They may in turn blame prudes for their unhappiness.

                 Boys of course suffer from the introduction of sexual stimulus in different ways; I haven’t seen boys in short shorts for instance.  Boys have to be taught to defend and protect because that same energy is capable of destruction.  If boys aren’t taught to treat women with respect they will use them.  Many will use their drive to compete in inappropriate ways; it is no wonder to me that one in four teenage girls has an STD. 

                Boys’ story, just like girls’, is individual and varied but all are touched in a negative way.  Since this essay is entitled “Why am I such an insufferable prude?” I feel I should tell you a little about myself.  I was a very, very shy boy who was both infatuated with and with only very few exceptions scared to death of girls.  In fact I wasn’t totally comfortable with the few exceptions.  I have always been one who will withdraw into myself and try not to deal with the world around me.  Finding pornography to me only further insolated my world and caused me to be more antisocial.  Whereas this may not impact women as much in the broad world it has impacted my wife every day.  She has been the light of Christ drawing me out of myself, my beacon of hope, that I can be fully healed. I pray I am and each day I have to get ready; because that’s what is prudent in this climate.  It would be like wearing shorts in a blizzard to think one can simply leave the house without having prayed for the grace to focus not on the world but on servicing others today, a service which must reach from my eyes to my heart.

                I read a good article by a retired Marine which said if you are taking fire what one wishes to do is the very thing which will get you killed; which is duck and hide and try to hug the earth until it’s over.  What we must do is mount a counter attack as quickly as one can and throw everything we have into it.  We may be wounded we may be almost dead but to stop and coward is to accept that death.  As Catholics we can literally start lobbing “Hail Mary’s”!  Our mother wears combat boots and she would never leave you alone to perish, after all she fights with the tenacity of a mother for her children.

                So what is prudent?  We must fight until there are no words on the bottom of our girl’s sweatpants!  We must fight until all underwear is worn under some other wear.  We must fight like the souls of countless children depend upon what we do!  We must pray my friends, we must pray, because as we pray we fight selfishness with love.  May God bless you in your fight.  Please pray for me.

Kickin' the Old Can

                I like science.  One of the great lessons I have been taught since my conversion is how to have a relationship with science.  There are many Evangelicals that have an enmity towards science.  Anglicans used the 150^th anniversary of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” to hand science a blank check, expressing an embarrassment for having too Biblical of an interpretation of the origins of our species and thus acquiescing in all things species origin oriented. 

                Blessed Pope John Paul the Great describes faith and reason as two wings of a single bird which climbs towards the truth in his encyclical “Fides et Ratio”, September 14, 1998.  Without reason God is deprived of His dignity as the source and summit of all that is reasonable, faith creates order and meaning, and answers questions science cannot answer alone.

                “With the rise of rationalism, faith and reason became separated with disastrous consequences.  The end result is the nihilism that we are now experiencing. Nihilism contains no hope of meaning and admits of no objective truth.  It recognizes only the utilitarian ends of power and pleasure.  Men and women are treated as objects to be manipulated rather than persons to be honored.”  (47, The Teachings of Pope John Paul II)

                The rational science camp looks at the creationist camp with disgust, but refuses to see its own short comings.  I call it “kickin’ the can”.  I saw an example of this last night, on a channel rife with examples, “The Science Channel” had a show on which posited that an asteroid seeded the bacterial life which started every other life form on our planet. 

                Ok fine, I find it fascinating that microbial life could adapt so incredibly that it would be fine in the freezing temperatures of space and then survive first the crucible heat of entry into our atmosphere and then the destructive energy of impacting with our planet.  Those are examples off the top of my head they may be totally practically explained so I concede them.  What I find incredible and “can kickable” is that the life on the asteroid then should become the new target of inquiry.  It does not however it is simply the starting point of life on Earth. 

                The attempt is to slide a hypothesis in as fact because it is introduced as such for the sake of the story which the producers are trying to tell.  The sleight of hand is ironic because it is the charge leveled against Evangelicals by militant science.  The sleight of hand I speak of is the ability to try to kick the can so far down the road that no one can see it, but the can is still there.

                The “can” is the point of life’s origin, not just on Earth but the actual origin of life and it would not be an acceptable answer to say another asteroid seeded life on the asteroid which then seeded life on Earth. 

                A similar Science Channel statement I remember stated, “Religion says, ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’, but physicists say supernova dust to supernova dust.”  See again the source of all life rendering materials is the supernova and a supernova will eventually remove or at least redistribute the particles of that life, but the origin of the star going supernova is not discussed.  The can can only be kicked so far.  The questions are shuffled not answered. 

                Why is it important to have the initial question answered?  Why does it matter if God created us or if any number of theories could be correct?  The answer is the conclusions drawn from the initial assumption.  In Christianity human beings have and deserve dignity, but in any other postulated theory humans are a matter of the most improbable chances, but so is everything else so we are not at all special but just something else.  Since we know we exist we can draw any number of wild hypotheses and say we are the final proof of that hypothesis.  We say the probability for the ratio is not ten to the 500th power but one to one.

                We may be annihilated by an asteroid, which may seed new life on our planet at the same time!  We may be annihilated by a supernova reclaiming what it has given like Shiva!  We will definitely be bodily annihilated by time.  My sincere suggestion is that we not let the nihilism of materialist rationality destroy our knowledge that human beings must do the most good for one another in our time on this amazing planet.  Otherwise it doesn’t matter where we came from anyway.

"Women in Cages"

                When one thinks of the title “Women in Cages,” which is not recommended in the first place, does one’s mind immediately comprehend that this is obviously a protest/photo exhibit to illustrate the treatment of animals?  Should it? According to The Polaris Project, there are hundreds of thousands of women and children in bondage to the sex trade each year in the US alone, who are repeatedly raped, beaten, and otherwise coerced in the most dehumanizing ways.  How sensitive is it to have women, like Brooke Hogan, strip down and pose inside of a cage?  It’s a disgusting idea anyway because by placing a woman nude in the offending situation it affords her less dignity than those animals, but especially considering the real lives of so many women and children in human bondage who actually need our help.

                The fact that the models are nude sexualizes the pictures, thus adding fuel to a kind of social situation in which a sex trade flourishes.  So there really can be no socially redeeming value for the pictures.  They are crass and demeaning of a particularly vulnerable segment of society, women.  One would hope that this were not so in our American society, but news we hear leak out of the sex trade as a handful of women escape it tell of how women are lured into situations in which they are abducted, beaten, and continually raped to make money for their captors.

                Women in other countries are made vulnerable as they attempt to move out of economic calamity.  Women in America, especially young women are also vulnerable, girls run away from home to meet a man who’s been wooing them on the internet, only to have her rush to freedom turned into a “women in cages” situation.

                It’s heartbreaking what our society is teaching girls. It’s putting a growing percentage of them at greater risk and it must stop with us.  We can make our country safer for girls, but will we?  Is the only foreseeable reality for my little girl either to be exploited in a picture or in a world of sexual bondage?

                I will die first, but the sad thing is every little girl has a father who needs them to die before exploiting anyone’s daughter.  I call all men to stop the exploitation of women, even if it is for the sake of animals.

It’s like living with a gun to your head! Oh wait, well I guess you are.

I was on my way to work last Thursday and was listening to “Morning Edition” on NPR.  Terry Pratchett, an author, was being interviewed about his desire to kill himself as his Alzheimer’s disease became too much to bear and the investigation he had done on the practice in the Netherlands.

What struck me as I listened to him was he explained he did not want to kill himself too early, yet he knew that if he waited too long, he might lose the mental capability to accomplish his desired outcome, his own death.

He concluded the interview stating he was not going to kill himself soon as he had many “productive” years in him, and he wanted the story of his life to have a proper ending.

Forgive me for saying, but this is nowhere near a defensible position.

Talk about taking the joy out of mornings as one debates between sticking a toothbrush in your mouth or a nine mm.  Ok, I’ll choose the toothbrush, but I’m watching you brain!

On the other hand, if one was able to make it to breakfast, I bet the bacon tastes even more amazing having cheated death one more day.  Which is how we should live every day anyway as no day is a given.  Each day is a gift, except of course when we are under pressure to produce.

After how many days of idleness can one continue to choose the toothbrush?  You want to trust your gut, but your gut’s crazy!

Do you want to taste the bacon?  Well, the bacon was almost burnt yesterday.

Do you want to feel the sun on your skin?  Well, it’s raining.

Do you pull the trigger?

Are you producing great works of devastating beauty?  Well, the last novel was received coolly which you thought was so mean because these critics should know that they could kill you!

They thought they were just being helpful. It’s time to go, they all but write in their pithy critiques, “This could be the last novel, but what an off note to end on.  Too bad because it’s not like they’re going to get better.  He has a degenerative disease after all.”

He stated in the interview that “world weariness” was not an acceptable reason to want to commit suicide, but he’d be lying if he said he felt good now!  He wanted to go out on top, but it’s like they say, “People make plans and God laughs.”

It is so unfair to treat the end of our life as though it is the very same as the middle.  Maybe instead of plotting our own deaths, we should spend that mental and emotional energy adapting to our lives.  Taking it as it comes and finding the joy in the life we have.

“If this is what you want, Jesus, so do I.”  Blessed Ciara Luce Badano said this as she lay dying of bone cancer and in intense pain.  She rejected morphine, wanting no pain relief, but only to join her pain to the redemptive suffering of our Lord and thus do incredible and miraculous good with it.  Blessed Ciara was only 18 years old and yet her grasp of the eternal was ageless.  It gave her a heroic capacity to love deeply in spite of her pain and in fact turn her extreme pain into a tool to love infinitely deeper than most are willing to.

Reflecting on her pending death, Chiara said: “Previously I felt … the most I could do was to let go.  Instead, now I feel enfolded in a marvelous plan of God, which is slowly being unveiled to me.”  The story of our lives with all its riveting twists and painful turns is written by an author who loves us very much, and for him, even death is only a comma, not a period.  The greatest protagonists in life’s story are the saints.  They shared the eternal perspective of the Author.  That’s why not even the most profound pain could take away their hope. By Christopher Stefanick for the Denver Catholic Register

Blessed Chiara Luce Badano, pray for us!

Amen.

Bert and Ernie Shall Never Marry

                When the Children’s Television Workshop tells you to step off, that should cause a left of center person to stop and take inventory.  Just such a teachable moment has occurred in regards to a facebook petition which insists that Bert & Ernie should get married.  Sesame Street has responded that Bert and Ernie are puppets and thus void of sexual orientation. 

                Thank God the innocence of youth may be preserved for a time, if only during a couple hours in the morning on one or two PBS stations. 

                Bert and Ernie share what is known as Storge in Greek; it is an affection or fondness through familiarity.  Storge would exist between family members or people who are sort of thrust together due to circumstances of fate.  I believe they express this type of love more than a Philial love, which is a friendship based upon common interests.  Storge can be seen as a more impressive and enduring love than Philia due to Philia’s reliance on likeness.

                Bert and Ernie’s great teaching ability comes in an expression of Storge, because they are friends in spite of their differences.  This is a valuable lesson to children especially as they interact with other children who are thrown together in play areas, preschools, and every other societal interaction they inevitably encounter in a healthy upbringing.

                To turn the expression of their friendship into Eros, or romantic love, is totally dependent upon the caricatured innuendo which the pro Bert and Ernie marriage side would decry from persons such as me.  It’s ironic no?  Some feel that everything can and should be sexualized beginning at the time of birth.  This thrust would liberate children from the mental anguish and shame of a fully realized sexuality.

                The antithesis of that POV would be that a disinhibited sexuality is in fact the source of the mental anguish, and the more one focuses on sexuality as a defining personality trait, one inevitably runs into its limitations as the source of self.  To save children and adults from the many worrying aspects of sex, these include but are not limited to: fear of unwanted children, fear of being discarded after being used like a box of Kleenex, fear of STDs, fear of becoming undesirable to your mate, and so on, it should be couched within the protection of Agape.  Agape is a charitable love, a love of self-sacrifice, the love inherent to a healthy marriage.

                Some see Eros eventually evolving into Agape as it is seasoned and see no benefit in being careful with their approach to Eros.  Agape is something which becomes deep through charitable action towards the target of our affection.  Agape is what takes marriage and relationship through the many storms of human coupling.  It’s because humans need to grow into an adequate partner that Agape is so important.  Couples tend to highlight each other’s weaknesses and those differences become exacerbated through proximity and over time.  Agape calls us to ask ourselves not what is in this for me, but how can I assist my spouse.  This assistance is always at the cost of our perceived and superficial self interests.  Agape readies a relationship for the onslaught of children.

                Children cannot be discarded and so neither can be the expression of love which creates them.  This is the function of marriage.  Not health insurance and hospital visitation, which one may find a legal way of bequeathing outside of marriage; but the creation of devotion to a family which is the correct place to teach children the nuances of love and relationship, not by making propaganda out of a children’s program.  So I applaud Sesame Street on their willingness to stand up again a perverse tide and tendency to sexualize our children.

Does Hell Exist?

                Does Hell exist?  It’s fascinating we have to keep having the same discussions over such heresies, but this is the nature of the human heart; so be it.  To begin with we can make some generally held assumptions about Christianity: one, God created human beings from nothing; two, God created human beings with a body and a soul; three, the soul of a human being cannot be destroyed unless it’s creator allows it to slip back into its original state of nothingness; four, love exists and is perfectly exemplified by the Holy Trinity; five, Heaven exists.

                Heaven and Hell can be visualized as molecules in various states of entropy.  Heaven is a place of infinitely low entropy and Hell is a place of infinitely high entropy organizationally speaking.  What causes the souls to be in the various entropic states is not gravity or heat but rather love.

                Love is an action; love is a verb, not just a buzz in the frontal lobe of the brain but something which restructures our neurological make up.  It does this as one moves from being self absorbed and childish to being self sacrificing for others; as we mature emotionally we do so because of an increased capacity to love. 

                Because we have free will we can stunt this growth.  Should we choose not to shift the focus of our life away from ourselves, we become more incapable of loving others.  We may first experience vanity, then make more sociopathic choices, and finally one might reach the extreme of psychopathic tendencies.  The other divergent path of being emotional self absorbed would be depression which progressed in severity until it culminates in suicide.  Not that a psychopath wouldn’t kill his or her self, especially at the conclusion of a bloody rampage, but the reasoning for doing so is different.

                Love on the other hand requires a human being not to become their own focus, their own God, but to cultivate a life and mind of service.  To serve others is to serve God and this service echoes the nature of the Holy Trinity making the individual more like the creator creating lower entropy towards that true universal center and bringing it closer to that center.  In Heaven there will be no distance between the soul and God.

                The more a soul refuses to join voluntarily into this union of souls the further that soul flees, increasing its state of entropy until it is infinitely singular and totally alone.  This is Hell.  We know this place exists and most of us have an idea of what it’s like as we have more than likely experienced such emotional distress that we felt as though we were on fire inside or we were being torn apart piece by piece.  Such emotional stress is almost always caused by being totally self absorbed.  We tend not to feel such great empathy that we feel as though our soul is being dismembered over many hours.  We can tire of empathy and we can withdraw; but that bad teenage break up will have one in the fetal position for years.  It felt like Hell for a reason.

                It has been stated that Hell has been conjured up to scare us straight.  Hell is a boogieman to hold over our naïve heads to keep us in our beds at night.  To paraphrase St Augustine, Hell has an open door souls can leave if they wish, they just don’t wish to. 

                God’s love can do anything but it can’t make you respond to it.  Humans cannot be saved by making them automatons in the nth hour.  Humans cannot be loved by catering to them though they may hate you, God can never be a doormat.  Heaven will not be populated with these souls because they will not serve a God they hate.  Self love won’t let them.  They will be invited for all eternity for God will not allow their souls to slip back into that nothingness from which they were made.  True love waits.

                               

Do Not Let Birds Nest In Your Hair

Do not let birds nest in your hair.

                This is the major piece of advice I took out of the 2011 Rocky Mountain Catholic Men’s Conference.  Father Larry Richards mentioned it in passing during his talk.  It’s not a new idea.  Thomas A. Kempis wrote of it in “The Imitation of Christ.”  Did you miss that part of the book?  It’s in regard to allowing thoughts, “birds”, unfettered access to enter and stay, “nest”, in our minds, “our hair”.  Learning this discipline is the key to fighting temptations, learning behavior modifications, and allowing yourself the interior space to grow in your relationship with God.

                Call this Spiritual Growth 101; the key to mastering oneself is being aware of one’s thoughts.  The seed of all mortally sinful action is a thought one accepts and which is allowed the time and space to ruminate and grow.

                I go for walks during my lunch break at work.  While on these walks, I used to get ravens dive bombing me.  At first I just thought, “I wish this would stop.”  Then I had a bit of an epiphany.  I am a supposedly intelligent human being allowing a bunch of birds to harass me.  So I picked up a handful of pebbles on the path and chucked them up at the birds.  They dispersed and haven’t bothered me since.

                These are the birds I visualize as I wave away unwanted thoughts.  Often I have replayed the memory of dispersing those birds in order to chase thoughts away.  Sometimes I actually shake my head and on occasion I have waived my hands over my head. It may look silly, but I don’t mind looking silly for God.  It has worked.

                Once it has worked, something else needs to happen.  You need to fill the void with God.  If you choose not to do this, you are asking for a flock of trouble, so do it please.  The pressure of conjuring Holy thoughts could be enough to cause you to say “Forget it!”  So what I have found is you should just say a prayer you know really well.  Say an “Our Father”, a “Hail Mary”, or a “Glory Be”, but as you say them, concentrate for a change.  You have to go slow and engage your mind.  Think about what every line means and soon your own stream of consciousness will kick in and that’s it. You have shifted your thought from something dangerous to your soul to the creator of your soul and your only help.

                Discipline takes time, so stay close to the sacraments and pray.  If you let a bird dig in, you dig in too, and tell yourself, “This will not kill me!”  Remember that you may be crawling in your skin, but it’s only mental or physical discomfort. You will not die if you bear down and just tell yourself it’s not going to happen.  It will pass, unless you give in, then you are in real trouble.  So do yourself a favor.  Trust God and dig in.  Tie yourself to the mast.  Do you see how important it is to simply follow that initial advice, “Do not let the birds nest in your hair!” and do check out Father Larry Richards.

The Church and the State

                I live in Douglas County in the great state of Colorado.  Quite recently the ACLU and others have sued my county in regards to the Choice Scholarship Program.  This program would provide parents a voucher which would allow them to pay for private schooling if they so desired.  One of the major issues which has caused the influx of interest in my county is the separation of church and state debate and that too will be my focus here.

                John Locke’s work laid the inspirational groundwork for Thomas Jefferson who agreed that religion should not and could not be impinged upon by the state as it was an exercise of the interior life of men and women.  Government could not govern the individual’s conscience; that governance was between the individual and his or her God. 

                In Jefferson’s letter to the Baptists of Danbury, who were concerned that their expression of religion was not an exercise of religious freedom but rather given at the discretion of the majority, he stated that they should not fear because there should be “a wall of separation between church and state.”  He affirmed that government should not attempt to interfere in the individual’s ability to express themselves to their God.

                Honestly though citing this letter is no slam dunk and should not be seen as extended to all expressions of an individual’s religion.  If this were the case people would try to prove religious expression in court rather than disprove their sanity.  The one obvious example of a religion which has tried to sight religious expression and tested the limitations thus far has been the Mormons.   In 1879 in Reynolds v. United States of America the Supreme Court upheld the Morrill Act, which outlawed Polygamy; the courts claim being that a government cannot interfere in religious beliefs but can interfere in its actions.  In 1890 a decree by church president Willford Woodriff suggested that Mormons not enter into marriages which were illegal and that was that.

                I believe that this was prudent action by the government, and I also believe that it’s a stretch to compare polygamy to vouchers for private schools.  I believe that “separation of church and state” has become a sound bite which implies so much more to a secular culture than it is willing to examine justly.  They wish to portray the church and state as competitors vying for influence.  The church has every right to be as suspicious now as the Baptists who wrote to Thomas Jefferson, as separation of church and state has been used to attack every expression of faith aired in the public sphere from nativities to the Pledge of Allegiance. 

                The position which has emerged, not in small part to these litigations, is not a neutral position but depending on the school distinct or the state could be very anti-religion.  I am looking at you California.   It seems the more pluralism is espoused the more the church’s position is washed out of consideration; creating not a true pluralism but a very distinct point of view.

                The point of view pushed is not only secular, meaning void of God, but void of positive moral direction or “worldly.”  An obvious example one could point to is teaching only the mechanics of sex to grade school students and then providing condoms to further their education which is not a good idea in the eyes of many parents.  Teaching contraception may seem like a good idea if one does not teach that the logical expectation of sexual intercourse is child bearing and that the only emotionally safe place to have sex is in the most secure of relationships, a healthy marriage.  Sex with idiots will make you feel used and anyone who pursues sex outside of marriage is that idiot and he is an idiot because he is using you; these are not in the lesson plans of teachers but they must be to properly teach sex.  What’s taught in school is not neutral, not complete, and harmful to the souls of the impressionable.  It undermines the practice of faith in the family by promoting mortal sin as the prescribed rational action in today’s world.

                The schooling of a young mind helps form them.  If the secular school becomes more than secular but worldly, if not overtly but practically, then the environment is not conducive to the perpetuation of religious freedom in the individual.

Because Public Schools are funded through taxes, anyone who wishes to send their child to a private school gets to pay twice for a single education.  This places an undue burden on those who are least able to pay for a private education for religious reasons or any other reason since the vouchers are not limited to religious schools.   These parents may also be the least able to get elected to school boards, due to time and monetary considerations.

Though the school may feel sorry for the children of the crazy religious parents; what they really are going to miss is the money the voucher spent elsewhere would entail.  Though they would have to teach the body attached to the check, overhead is such that if you are paying for one, it pays to do ten.  Nobody wants to run a half-batch, even if it’s more like a batch and a half.  So test scores may slip, it’s all about the Benjamins.    

                It’s not all about the Benjamins for the many families who have good reasons not to send their children to public schools but will be forced to.  It’s about their children.

It's like forget you and forget you too

 
               I have issues with anger.  Recently God has given me the grace to deal with things differently and it seems to me I should pass on what I am finding.  Anger isn’t usually its own entity; it coats sadness, disappointment, fear, and other vulnerabilities in an attempt to never have to deal with them.

                Anger is our intended answer to vulnerability.  We will make people pay for trying to take us to places in ourselves we do not want to go.  Places we ourselves are afraid of.  We are the guard dogs of our worst fears and anxieties.  So anger is a disordered way to signal others of our need for healing and help.  We need to look at the core inside the ball of anger.

                The answer then becomes having the courage to be vulnerable emotionally.  To realize that what my anger turns me into is far, far worse than anything that could happen to me by being vulnerable.  When we lower our guard we can see that the person we are being defensive with may need us too.  We are both in the same boat and it is easy to capsize.  To keep it right side up one must become interested in the other person.

                Vulnerability leads to empathy.  We realize that instead of trying to assault our vulnerabilities the other person is concerned with their own.  We are able to respond to their fears, sadness, and disappointments.  We help ourselves by getting out of ourselves.  We help ourselves by focusing on others.

                Empathy becomes the rescue line for those trapped behind the walls of anger.  A rescue line we accept in our vulnerability.    So look inside that ball of anger.  See what it’s protecting and address it, don’t protect it inside anger.

A Prayer for Marriage

                The other day as we left Mass my wife Melissa said, “I’ve been thinking about something lately, your parents loved you when you were a newborn just like we love our newborn.  They wanted love for you in your life just like we want love to fill our little girl’s life.  I’ve been thinking about newborn baby Aaron and I want to love you with the love they wanted for you.”

                I that this task would be difficult for anyone, but Melissa’s husband may have a tendency towards self righteous and overly analytical indignation, hard to believe with a blog titled Roman Missiles.  So I humbly offer this prayer,

                Heavenly Father, your paternal love has authored all love.  Thank you for the opportunity to participate in that love especially in the sacramental love of marriage and the fruit of that sacramental love, the love of our children.  As we look with love on our newborn children and pray for love in their lives may we be the fulfillment of those parental prayers for our spouses. We ask this in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, whose perfect love allows us to speak to you as your children.

                Amen.

Born this way?

                I was watching Charlie Rose and he had a panel of guests on to talk about the brain.  This subject  is fascinating to me as I have given lots of thought to neurology and personality development over the years, especially when I worked on a Neurobehavioral unit.   Kerry Ressler, Joseph Ledoux, Antonio Damasio, David Anderson, and Eric Kandel were the panelists on Charlie Rose: The Brain Series, which originally aired on May 26, 2010.  They made mention of something which caught my attention, people who had a genetic predisposition towards addictive behavior were only “about 10%” more likely to develop that addictive behavior.  Genetics is only a small piece in the larger puzzle of personality; it is never the whole story on its own.  Therefore, my friend, for anyone to claim they were simply “born this way” is not at all useful as an explanation of any lifestyle.

  Environmental factors mold predisposition and both strengthen and reinforce the behaviors in question.  One can see an example of changing environmental factors illustrated by the difference between providing ashtrays on every table and having “Lucky Strike” ads in “Life” magazine and putting intentionally grotesque warning labels on 25% of the front of a pack of smokes and making smokers stand 100 yards from any shelter.  If I were born to smoke then no amount of deterring factors could cause me to stop smoking.

                One could say that race is a closer example of what one means in determining lifestyle.  This assertion, however, is obviously racist.  I would say that race is a very, very poor way to predict behavior.  In fact skin pigmentation itself can vary widely within families.  Race, color, and creed are very often so superficial that one cannot know any one of them without first asking, regardless of careful behavioral study, for example Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda or Jews and Arians in Germany.

                I have been drawing inspiration for my examples from the song “Born this Way” by Lady Gaga.  She asserts one just has to be oneself regardless of Religious views of morality.  Some of us have expressed their truth by murdering and eating people however and I’m sure she is not justifying that.  She is however justifying that.  She claims God made her perfect and further reading shows that nothing she does will put that perfection in danger, “I’m beautiful in my way God makes no mistakes.”

                The trouble is that my expression of freedom impacts others and their expression of freedom.  She asserts, “Different lover is no sin.”  This is an easy statement to make, but risk associated with this behavior tends to make individuals nervous and sad, not to mention the stat 1 in 5 people has an STD and about 20% of pregnancies end in abortion, unless you live in New York City were the rate is 41%.  Studies show that depression rates rise as the number of sexual partners rise and there is also a correlation between depression, binge drinking, drug abuse, and sexual promiscuity, which is not a stroke inducing shock.  If a person were to use all of their dopamine through artificial hyper-stimulation the result is a dopamine deprived brain.  Stability creates mental health and instability destroys that health.  We may wish humans experienced life differently, but our fairy-godmothers have not been returning calls of late.

What one finds is that when one lives a life with Christian virtue in mind, instead of ignoring other people’s reality so one can attempt to live one’s own, there is more freedom, more stability, and more mental health.  The closer our life reflects Christ’s the more we truly have the where-with-all of self expression. 

If we are addicted to drugs our life becomes rather predictable.  If we are addicted to sex the same thing occurs; we lose our ability to be truly individual and we become that creepy, shallow shell of a human being. The kind that leers at young women and makes them quicken their step.  God did not make us for addiction and addicts are not perfect, unless they are perfectly bound.    

Lady Gaga states that she loves her life, she loves her record, and love needs faith.  Why would love need faith?  The “love” described simply requires a warm and willing body at least for this moment anyway.

“Love” doesn’t it always come down to love?  Yeah pretty much.  If you haven’t heard, I’m sure you have heard, love is an action, no not that action.  If you wonder if you are a loving person try to insert your name in place of love in the following passage:

                1 Corinthians 13:4-8

New American Standard Bible (NASB)

 ⁴ Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, ⁵ does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, ⁶ does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; ^{7 [a]}bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
 ⁸ Love never fails.
            That’s a tall order but you can handle it and when we come through the trials of fighting the promise of easy happiness we will arrive at true happiness.

PETA vs. Dignity

                I was a vegetarian because I wanted to feel humane.  PETA made me reexamine what I was doing and how much humanitarian worth it possessed.  PETA shook my conscience awake about an issue I had not fully seen until they laid it out grotesque and obscene; women should be used, sex and women should be degraded and thus human beings, and especially women, do not matter as much as animals.

                PETA- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals- let us first start by examining the name itself.  People, we must be unique enough from animals to require some distinction.  This fact is actually promising for animals though; if we were merely animals there would be no talk of ethical treatment.  PETA has made films of slaughterhouses but there are also films made by documentary film crews on every continent of the world showing people how animals tear each other apart in nature.  I don’t believe that lions, tigers, and bears will ever eat tofu, oh my!  If we believe that we should treat our livestock differently that’s one thing, but to see a world in which animals die of old age or from being smothered with hugs is something else entirely, a Disney delusion.

                Animals will never plot in an Orwellian animal farm and there will never be a “Planet of the Apes”.  In fact if apes wish to survive on this planet as a species we must conserve them.  They will not conserve themselves or us for that matter.  We must bear the responsibility for them because we actually can.  They are innocent and thus bear no sin; we, however, do.

                We are different.  We can speak of ethics and actually have a need to.  We do fall and must actually work to be good, but we can and dare I say most of us do.  I may just be optimistic though, a trait that should be chalked up to my humanity, and then there’s PETA.

                PETA offers as commercials, or public service announcements, grotesque portrayals of human sexuality, with particular disregard for women.  Women are most often not afforded the benefit of clothing while they deliver their objections regarding our treatment of animals. Though this may be the only true way to actually dress vegan due to the nature of producing crops, even dare say cotton, in lands which are cultivated from the wild, this is not the reason behind their nudity.

                The reason these women are nude is specifically so they can be exploited for the betterment of animals, though I would posit that the exploitation is not likely to achieve its aim, so in reality it serves no real reason at all. 

                Causing men to lust only makes them less likely to think.  They will only begin to use PETA ads as far as they go without being unsettled. They will feel nothing for the animals because one cannot feel lust and disgust side by side, and guess which one of those emotions will be jettisoned?  As an added bonus to feeling nothing for the animals they will also feel less for women too due to desensitization.

                The ads also try to encourage women to believe that veganism is the way to become sexy, so they too might one day be worthy of their own PETA advert.  Does the term sick emotional blackmail in place of a real argument mean anything to you or did I just make that up?  Oh well it is now a term.  Besides women need to be empowered in order to make a change rather than being pushed towards the emotional eating of delicious saturated animal fat. 

                PETA will not have succeeded in the marketing strategy of making veganism sexy but would have rather simply caused some lustful thoughts and the eating of some desert with no greater end than that.  Doesn’t everyone deserve something more than that?  How can one expect to be taken seriously as an ethicist if one uses such flawed ethics, and logic, for PR? 

                It is disordered to place the well being of animals above the well being of women.  It is further disordered to cheapen sex and thus disregard and disparage the well being of women in a second way.  My personal hope is that women in our culture learn to respect their own dignity and then the ads would just stop because no one would do them in the first place.  Godspeed women, Godspeed.