When this English prof grows up and turns 72, he wants to be every bit the danger to humanity that this desperado clearly must be:

“I’ve never been handcuffed in my life — or arrested, even,” Van Gilder explains. “I was embarrassed and ashamed. The only prisoner there was myself: a 72-year-old English teacher. I was really ashamed.”

Before long, Van Gilder had been charged and the gun had been taken away for “ballistics testing,” almost certainly never to be returned. (That the department believes that a ballistics test on a flintlock pistol can be useful should give you some indication of who we’re dealing with here.)

(source: New Jersey Man Faces Jail Time for Transporting an Antique Pistol | National Review Online)

What can you say?  People sometimes have no skill in recognizing what they see, what common language and horse sense tell them is real.  They judge based on the will of the powerful and the uninformed, rather than using their discretion with wisdom, justice, and at least a modicum of basic good judgment and human decency.

To handcuff a 72-year old teacher to a bench is simply indecent.  Good people don’t do things like that without good reasons.  No, saying it’s “policy” or “procedure” does not change this equation:  an indecent policy is worse than an indecent happenstance, not an excuse for one! Continue reading →

So tell me a story about how an individual denied the right to braid hair without an expensive and time consuming cosmetology licence can get her right vindicated in “the legislative process.” Tell me how some monks can get their right to sell a wooden box in which to bury the dead without being licensed funeral home directors can get their rights decided by “the rest of us.”

[…] What does this African American woman do who wants to braid hair for money? How does her right become part of the agenda of the state Republican and Democratic parties and their candidates for the state representatives or senators? How does she make “the rest of us” aware of her liberty being violated so they can vote Republican or Democrat accordingly? How does she get the public to place a greater weight on her lone right to pursue a harmless occupation than they do on the other policies advocated by Republicans or Democrats? When will “deliberate majorities” ever even hear her claim?

“The rest of us” were never asked our opinion about hair braiding or casket sales. Majorities in the state legislature never voted on the regulation beyond delegating their lawmaking power to administrative agencies or professional boards.

(source: The majoritarian fable – The Washington Post)

It is vital to remember that the more we solve problems at a level and in a manner where no one has to look his neighbors in the eye after speaking his piece, where responsibility is concealed and diffused in a way that hides the immorality of indifference, the more we have no credible answer to this except endless warfare.

At first, of course, it will be litigation.

A little reading fit for the day, from T. S. Eliot:

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

(source: “Ash Wednesday” | On Being) Continue reading →

Might be a good idea to brush up a bit on Christianity there.

(source: ‘I don’t think [that word] means what you think it means’ – The Washington Post)

I don’t always agree with him, but when Volokh is good, he’s very good.

…we can understand ourselves like this:

…precisely insofar as we live like this:

Few specific elements of social teaching are more basic:

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. ⁴⁶ For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷ And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸ You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

(source: Matthew 5-7 RSVCE – The Beatitudes – Seeing the crowds, he – Bible Gateway)

Everybody wants to know what Scott Walker and Sarah Palin think about evolution, but almost nobody is asking what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama think about homeopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and the like.

(source: Stuff and Nonsense, Gammon and Trotters! | Hang Together)

Not to re-enact Pascal’s Wager, but the more I think about this well-made point, the more I think someone should point out that–whatever their errors, and the consequences of those errors, are–people who think like this or even like this simply do not rise to the levels of repellent, foolish, monstrous lunacy we regularly find among people who think like this or this or this or this.

Among the pagans, attitudes like this were matter-of-fact for millennia:

Hilarion to Alis his sister, heartiest greetings, and to my dear Berous and Apollonarion. Know that we are still even now in Alexandria. Do not worry if when all the others return I remain in Alexandria. I beg and beseech of you to take care of the little child, and as soon as we receive wages I will send them to you. If-good luck to you!-you bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it. You told Aphrodisias, ‘Do not forget me.’ How can I forget you? I beg you therefore not to worry. The 29th year of Caesar, Pauni 23.

(source: WLGR)

While at least some Christians, and all authoritative Christian teaching, have long maintained the contrary.  

Faced with a choice of mountains to climb (make no mistake you are faced with such a choice), you really must not fail to understand the religious and philosophical and historical dimensions of your choice of companions, methods, and reference points: 

Father McClorey [who wrote the opposing view in the magazine] may think it better to abandon the garden to the weeds, naively confident that geniuses will make their appearances regardless of heredity and environment. But no student of genetics, no one who has even superficially observed the achievements of scientific horticulture and animal breeding, can consider seriously that the road to human perfection can ever be attained by abandoning scientific control and reverting to a childish reliance upon the blind forces of uncontrolled procreative instincts.

(source: Pelosi Getting Award Named for Woman Who Called Children ‘Human Weeds’ | CNS News)

Calling a pagan disregard for humanity “science” cannot make it so; and calling one’s religious commitment to a materialist definition of “human perfection” by “scientific control” secular does not make it rational.

And those whose religious commitment is to a self-disclosing Creator of an intelligible universe, of all people, ought to be capable of understanding what God hath wrought.