"Baby Grace" and Other Musings on Life, Death, and Abortion

Some of you may have heard of "Baby Grace," the two year-old named Riley Anne Sawyers who was brutally killed by her own mother, not long ago. Even before that, I learned that the girl had before been ordered by her father to call him "sir" and use other sorts of deferential expression that no two year-old could ever be expected to understand. Her murder and maltreatment were an appalling example of human depravity, and something that nearly every person, barring the mentally ill, would decry as a travesty and a horror. Most would consider the mother worthy of death or at least, for those who do not support the death penalty, long imprisonment.

In fact, although nobody likes to hear about a murder, we are especially horrified and angry when a small child is intentionally and cruelly killed by an adult. The helplessness and vulnerability of young children aggravates the heinousness of the act. Even a hunter lawfully hunting game, something which I believe is quite morally acceptable, will, if he is a sporting man, not shoot a very young animal. We feel an innate responsibility, a protectiveness, for the young. I believe, as likely most of my readers do, that this is a God-given impulse. Men and women alike, unless they bury or deny their natural feelings, want to nurture and protect young children. They are small, physically weak, untutored, and (bless their hearts) blissfully naive.

That I am even writing a post such as this, though, proves that there are those who deny or ignore these impulses and maltreat or even kill young children. There are parents who truly abuse their children, sometimes in terrible ways. Such is the condition of our fallen race.

This opposite and destructive impulse has extended for many thousands of years to life in the womb. If we have traced the beginning of abortion practices, I do not know it, but the ancient Greeks certainly practiced it, and it would be excessively trusting to assume that prior cultures did not do similar things. Like homosexuality, rape, and the like, abortion has been with us since Adam and Eve fell.

But many people, of course, tell us that abortion is very different from something like rape. They say, in fact, that it is quite the opposite. Rape is the violation of a woman's right to her body, whereas the act of abortion asserts that right. Abortion is absolutely not murder, but rather the extinction of tissue that would turn into a baby if allowed to develop. It is a perfectly acceptable choice to make, and cannot be compared with something like the murder of Riley Sawyers.

People say that they have debated and discussed abortion so often as to be tired of it, but Americans will continue to lock horns over this issue until it has been decided one way or another. The stakes are high, after all. If the pro-abortion camp is right, then we who are pro-life have tried to deny a basic right to suffering women, forcing a lot of hardship on them by burdening them with responsibilities for which they are not ready or which they do not want. We have also done no less than accuse them, the participating doctors, and the politicians and Supreme Court justices who support the practice, of murder--mass murder, in fact. No one, obviously, likes to hear such a charge, and most anyone is going to defend himself against it.

But if the anti-abortion camp is right, then the pro-abortionists have, I believe, a much heavier reckoning to make. Rather than making some women miserable, they have destroyed millions of little babies who would have grown to be both men and women. They have ruthlessly campaigned against life itself. Some of them have confused or indoctrinated women into ignorantly murdering their children, and many of them have done it blithely and of their own free will.

What have I to add to the debate? Besides another simple vote on the pro-life side, I have this. It has to do with Riley Sawyers and others like her. Why is that we execrate even desperate prostitutes who leave their children in garbage cans or strangle them, hours after their birth, while many of us vociferously campaign for the right to kill a child (just as brutally and painfully) mere hours earlier? The prostitute even has desperation and the pressures of her job on her side, but any sensible person, as far as I know, would advocate adoption over murder. Most mothers who abort their children do not have a similar kind of desperation on their side. Some of them choose to abort because their lives are directly threatened, or the baby is likely to grow up severely impaired or deformed, or on account of an abusive boyfriend, but I'm not talking about that here. I'm talking about the sort of women who simply don't want a child, not on account of desperation or mortal peril, but on account of convenience.

Isn't there a double standard here? Honestly, even other prisoners are a terror to the man who is in prison for murdering and abusing a child. Naturally, reflexively, and powerfully, we move to the defense of the young. In films (or in real life, though it likely happens less often), if a madman enters a house, brandishes a gun, and gives a terrified mother the option between dying herself or watching her daughter die, for what do we consider the mother more noble? Of course, for selflessly putting her life on the line. And we're not even talking about the mother's life in this case.

The truth is, most people on the pro-abortion side, if many of them have thought things through this far (and I honestly haven't talked to many supporters of abortion, or known them personally), seem to have convinced themselves that this very helpless life we are so zealous to protect becomes fair game when ensconced in a woman's womb. Instead of viewing it as more helpless, they actually view it rather like a tumor. Certainly it is considered part of the mother's body, and not a separate life form. (One is tempted to inject here that, although the woman bears the burden and pain of pregnancy, it does require a man to make it happen.)

The tumor argument breaks down rather quickly, as one might expect. If we compare an infant in utero to your typical tumor, the differences are numerous. We'll even posit that this everyday tumor resides in the mother's womb. One will find that this tumor does not move, kick, breath, or depend on a supply of placental material to survive. Even if the tumor could be induced to exit the birth canal after nine months--I'm sure many people afflicted with tumors would like that--we would find it to be what anyone expects a tumor to be: a blob of tissue. It does not emerge into the light of this world screaming and bawling, or kicking its feet into the air and waving its fists. It is inert matter. It never has been or can be made into something remotely alive.

A proponent of abortion will likely admit that there is indeed a difference between a tumor and a baby after birth, but before, she might argue, the differences are not so readily apparent. I roundly deny this for two reasons: one, there is absolutely no foundation to the argument that a tumor and a human infant act or even look the same way in the womb, as any ultrasound will make apparent; two, the extrapolated argument is logically weak and ought to be labeled absurd by any sensible person. Usually the argument by extrapolation works the other way. The baby is very much alive when born, so by rights it should still be alive in the womb. I could not go out into the Mt. Hood National Forest and smash up some eagle's eggs because eagles are endangered, and the embryos in their eggs are little eagles. Are we, simply because humans are not endangered, to skim off forty million of our progeny because we don't want them around?

Proponents of abortion have, whether they are willing to admit it or not, aggressively penetrated and casually besmirched with blood the awful and noble mystery of life. It is either unparalleled arrogance or unparalleled folly (and those may easily go together) that could induce anyone to violate such an unknown and sacred territory and pass it off as a brave thing to do. Perhaps they have, like devious pagans at the threshold of a temple, forgotten that the womb protects the embryo much as temple guards, rites, religious authority and a due sense of awe preserve the sanctity of temples. The Supreme Court justices who agreed on Roe v. Wade themselves admitted that it was unclear to them where life began. If you don't know, then never, like an impious coward, assume that you have carte blanche to carve up fetuses for your own convenience. We speak of the rape of the environment, but should we not rather be rethinking the rape of the womb? Far worse, I think, will be the retribution on their heads for the death of tens of millions of children than the felling of however many acres of rainforest.

People will try to tell us to shut up about abortion, whether because they are adamantly for it (and afraid of opposition) or simply tired of talking about it. But we cannot be silent. Anyone searching for some crisis in America, some blatant iniquity that must be redressed, can start right at the beginning--where life ends before it has a chance to even see the light of the sun. Not every Christian will feel a particular burden to fight actively against abortion, and I would never expect that. If you wish to further arm yourself to speak about it, however, even in day-to-day conversation, I have so far found abort73.com to be a valuable resource, although much of it is designed to inform the skeptic (but some of the information, and particularly the images, which I warn you are gruesome, may be new to you as they were to me).

We would fight to protect Riley Sawyers. Let us fight, whether in involved campaigning or simply wearing a T-shirt and being willing to argue, for those even younger and more vulnerable than she.

Hmm...I must be doing something right

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Expelled

This looks like a delightful, honest, well-crafted documentary on Intelligent Design! Watch the super trailer here. It looks fascinating.

Psalm 145

I will extol thee, my God, O king; and I will bless thy name for ever and ever.
Every day will I bless thee; and I will praise thy name for ever and ever.
Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable.
One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.
I will speak of the glorious honour of thy majesty, and of thy wondrous works.
And men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts: and I will declare thy greatness.
They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness, and shall sing of thy

righteousness.
The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy.
The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works.
All thy works shall praise thee, O LORD; and thy saints shall bless thee.
They shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom, and talk of thy power;
To make known to the sons of men his mighty acts, and the glorious majesty of his kingdom.
Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations.
The LORD upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.
The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season.
Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.
The LORD is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works.
The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth.
He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him: he also will hear their cry, and will save them.
The LORD preserveth all them that love him: but all the wicked will he destroy.
My mouth shall speak the praise of the LORD: and let all flesh bless his holy name for ever and

ever.

The first thirteen verses of this psalm were the Scripture reading in today's sermon. Praise God this Advent season, and not just in private. The world loves to demean Christmas to a period of mere "joy," "neighborly spirit," and a sort of intimate, friendly coziness brought on by the cold snow outside and the warm fires and cheery candles inside. All wonderful things, but why are they wonderful? Why have we set this season aside as one of celebration? Maybe someone you know needs to learn the real meaning of Christmas. Let's all strive to make sure the world sees and hears that our joy this holiday season does not rest on material things or good feelings, but on the actuality of Christ's birth and the reality of redemption.

That Religion of Peace, Conciliating Again

http://breakingnews.nypost.com/dynamic/stories/S/SUDAN_BRITISH_TEACHER?SITE=NYNYP&SECTION=HOME

So, I wonder how many people would be jailed for fifteen days for naming a teddy bear John the Baptist, or Isaiah? And who would be calling for their execution?

Bella

Bella is a fantastic movie about the importance of human life (most particularly the life of the as yet unborn)--and therefore a movie that Hollywood has refused to touch. I urge you to go out and see this movie and support the people who made it. It's not a perfect film, but the heart of its message is sound and uplifting. It is beautifully filmed and has very good actors. An e-mail I received said that watching this movie is one of the simple ways possible to support the pro-life movement. I certainly agree.

You can also take most of your children along to see it--it's rated PG-13, and contains some violence and a few scenes of intense emotion, but there is no objectionable content for someone mature enough to handle the thematic material.

Please, go out and see Bella! The makers should be rewarded for bringing a message like this to the screen.

Things to be Thankful For

Happy Thanksgiving! May God bless your celebrations, your thoughts as they pass over what we have to be thankful for, and your minds and tongues as they give expressions of praise.

Here are a few things for which I'm thankful, not in alphabetical order or in exact order of importance:

Salvation
My family, particulary my family all in one place for the first time since August
Cold, clear, sunny days
Piano music
Writing
Wonderful friends
My education
Internet access
Life in one of the safest nations on earth
The words of Jesus, both the compassionate and the scathing
Good health
Excellent books

Always thank the Lord for His marvelous provisions!

Islamo-Fascism

I guess I always thought of Saudi Arabia as a more lenient sort of Islamic nation; I suppose that was naive of me. We consider our modern age to be civilized, but this smacks of the medieval era. Read this article. It's about a gang-rape, but there is no graphic description. I am glad to hear that the Saudi government is trying to take steps to improve the situation, but the punishment of the victims themselves is alarming.

Ew.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/10/20/harry.potter.ap/index.html

The World's Ways Don't Work in the Real World

What happens when the pleasures of married life are separated from their effects? Things like Conception Day, a bid by a Russian province to produce some semblance of a next generation. It's the old irony: the secular couples, who often roll their eyes at the size of Christian families, watch their numbers dwindle while the Christians are fruitful and multiply.

God is Sovereign

And Hannah prayed, and said, "My heart rejoiceth in the Lord, mine horn is exalted in the Lord: my mouth is enlarged over mine enemies; because I rejoice in Thy salvation. There is none holy as the Lord: for there is none beside Thee: neither is there any rock like our God.

Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogancy come out of your mouth: for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength. They that were full have hired out themselves for bread, and they that were hungry ceased: so that the barren hath born seven; and she that hath many children is waxed feeble. The Lord killeth, and maketh alive; He bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up. The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: He bringeth low, and lifteth up. He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and He hath set the world upon them.

He will keep the feet of His saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness, for by strength shall no man prevail. The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall he thunder upon them: the Lord shall judge the ends of the earth; and He shall give strength unto His king, and exalt the horn of His anointed."

I've always loved those verses. How can we read them and not be confident in God's power?

~1 Samuel 2:1-10.

Yes, I do realize that I was two weeks in posting this, and not one as I said. I was gone last Monday and have either been busy or procrastinated since then. :-)

My next post may be something about John Locke and his views on government, but that is not fixed in stone.

~Connor

Making a Monster: The Trouble with Adolescents

The teenage years are an artificial creation. The word teenage was coined in the 20th century to denote a somewhat undefined period in a person’s life between childhood and adulthood (typically heralded by the onset of puberty). No one in the western world would now be unfamiliar with the concept of “teenager.” Likely enough they would consider the teenage years and all its connotations something as common and natural as the bodily changes that go along with adolescence. But the concept of the teenage years did not exist in the minds of the ancients—nor even among the somewhat liberated generation of the 1920s.

Let us first consider what the connotations of the teenage years are today. The typical teen is expected, first and foremost, to be in a class unto himself. Too old to associate with younger children, and too independent and unsettled to associate with adults, he (or she, just as often) is expected to co-exist with his peers in all of his scholastic and most of his free-time pursuits. He is expected to follow their manners, their morals, and their styles of dress and speech. Parents expect their teenage children to be neutral toward them at best, and more likely hostile. Behavior that fathers and mothers would have called rebellious fifty years ago is now considered simply teenage. “Oh, well, she’s a teenager,” parents will say as they roll their eyes. “Can’t wait to push her off to college.”

This combination of cultural pressures, low expectations, and consequently abysmal parenting has produced a teenage culture that is unique from either young children or adults. Childhood is the innocent phase, when the child is trusting and copies his parents’ behavior, and tags along behind older children to be “with the big boys.” Adulthood is the steady phase, when the person has “settled down” and has acquired the judgment, circumspection, and wisdom that mark maturity. Adolescence is the rebellious phase, the questioning phase, a time for a young person to “spread her wings” and try out new things and new behaviors. Sexual promiscuity is expected. One also notices an extreme sameness in the teenage culture, a product of the overwhelming pressure to conform that exists there. For all of its talk about uniqueness, the teenage culture is internally as regular as a uniformed army. Hence the surprise of adults at home schooled children in ordinary clothes. Whether the fad be ripped jeans, studded belts, pocket chains, backwards hats, two shirts (women only), baggy pants (men only), pant-skirts, nose rings, colored hair, or what have you, chances are that 95% of the teenage culture will adopt it. The uniformity is not confined to clothing alone. Speech patterns, musical taste, and even expressions and styles of walking seem to be heavily influenced by the actions of one’s teenage peers.

The point is that, on a whole, with many notable exceptions, the vast majority of western teenagers live in a world whose structure and ethics are guided almost wholly by other teenagers. They are a class, a subculture, a world unto themselves, generally without reference and in opposition to mature and adult culture.

This state of affairs is obviously not, over all, a healthy one. But beyond the mere fact that it generally creates teenagers who are selfish, materialistic, insensitive, egotistical, foolish, and imprudent, it has other problems too. All talk of an “adult culture” will become comparatively meaningless if the vast majority of these socially inept teenagers grow up into adults themselves. And they will. I have noticed far less alarm in most circles than is due this problem. When our high school students come of age, we cannot expect them to automatically drop the habits they have formed and the style of life they have grown up leading. Denied or rejecting the guidance of previous adults, the new generation will simply pass on their adolescent values to their descendants and perpetuate a new kind of immature maturity.

Having considered the connotations of the teenage years and the effect this mindset may have on the next adult generation as these teenagers grow up, I’ll turn to what adolescents used to be. The terms “young man” and “young woman”—still used by some today—are not accidents. The period of adolescence was considered the training ground for adulthood. Young men learned a trade early, usually apprenticing themselves to a craftsman or working in the home and learning from their fathers. Sparta, though no role-model for how to treat children, certainly understood that to make a formidable warrior class they needed to train their citizens for combat and toughness from the time they were young boys. In the medieval era, boys of noble descent became pages to adult noblemen, and then—in their adolescent years—became squires, apprentice knights who learned the arts of war and chivalry so that they could mature easily into actual knighthood. Thomas Jefferson entered William and Mary college at 16, graduating with highest honors a mere two years later—the age most people begin college. Girls learned from their mothers, and older sisters if they had them, how to become a wife and mother, in some cultures at an age one would almost consider child abuse in this day. The point is that the sooner maturity was reached, the sooner a young man became a man and a young woman became a woman, the better. These formative years of life were a transitional period, like a butterfly pupa developing its wings, not a semi-permanent age group with its own market and an attitude generally antagonistic to the adult world. If butterfly pupae all got together, exerting influence on each other and refusing to associate with mature butterflies (the simile can only be extended so far, I confess), they would probably stunt their growth if they were able to. This might make them happy pupae, but once their cocoons broke open, they might not have any wings to keep them aloft.

The ancients understood that one must exercise his wings to fly well. That is why one of the key concepts of adolescence in earlier years was the child learning from his or her parents. It was the parents’ role to impart knowledge and wisdom to the young men and women they were raising, and they taught those children to listen. They taught their children to restrain their impulses, to work hard, to make sacrifices, to spend money wisely, to make judgments, to understand the world and culture—whatever they needed to become responsible adults. The immigrants who came to America and made tremendous sacrifices to allow their children to realize a dream they, the parents, might never live to see could not have made America what it is if they had been raised on the rotten fabrication of adolescence. Now their legacy is in danger of vanishing as a new generation, coasting on the affluent tide of their forefathers’ labor, forms new habits and attitudes that could never produce the kind of shrewdness, self-sacrifice, and unshakable work ethic that produced the rich, sprawling, free society they love to take advantage of.

Teenagers today need to realize that the awful and noble responsibility of carrying values and habits to the next generation rests on their shoulders. The students in high school and college today will tomorrow enter the myriad professions and vocations that form human culture. They will build our buildings, heal our sick, make our laws, write our books, shoot our guns, and teach our students. You and I, all we who are students and adolescents now, will make this country into something monstrous or something beautiful, a city of darkness or a city of light. And whatever legacy we forge with our own generation is what we will pass on to the next. We cannot hope that what so many parents lost through negligence we can gain through negligence again. Weak parenting can never produce an accidentally brilliant generation. Left to their own devices, adolescents will at best flounder, and at worst will cease to care about living mature lives. Many have already done so.

There is nothing wrong with associating with one’s own age group. Making friends around one’s age has been going on for millennia. But we must not think that we can learn everything from our friends. We learn most things with them. That is an exciting prospect: sharing what our parents have imparted, studying men older and wiser than we, following examples and learning from our mistakes. Our peers can be good influences on us—indeed, they should be—but only when they themselves manifest mature characteristics. Fear the advice of a friend who has no ambitions for maturity, and no concept of trans-generational teaching. Men are like those whose company they seek.

Scripture makes no room for the teenage years as many people understand them today. God says to train up a child in the way he should go, and commands parents to teach their children God’s truth at all times and in all situations. He also commands children to obey and honor their parents. Parents have the responsibility of passing on faithfulness and maturity to the next generation, and we who are the next generation must be diligent and eager to learn all that we can. The shape of the future is our hands’ responsibility to form. What shape will you help it take?

~Connor

A New Feature

I don't much like the long silences between posts on this site, and it is also always a good thing to read and ponder Scripture, so I have decided on something that may lessen the silences while helping to fulfill the latter requirement. I intend, God willing, to post here every week something from the Bible that caught my attention while reading, or that my pastor preached on, or that for whatever reason comes to my mind to share. Sometimes I may also write some of my thoughts on the passage, if I have anything interesting to say. Here is a passage that struck me in my reading today (all postings will be in the KJV unless otherwise noted):

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the field, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hinds' feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.

~Habakkuk 3:17-19a

For those who have not encountered it, hind means "a female red deer" according to thefreedictionary.com.

Coming soon: The Trouble with Adolescence.

~Connor

Never Be Ashamed

"Well, it really all comes down to changing men's hearts."

I find myself saying that, either out loud or to myself, very often. Our family loves to discuss politics, social issues, the history and present results of ideas and events, and many other things. We often try to hammer out some kind of Biblical solution to these problems, and that is often extremely difficult, because both sides (or each side, since there are usually more than two) seem to suffer from insurmountable difficulties or to both be laden with moral problems. Take, for example, the relative insipidity of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Over all, I agree with more views held by the Republican party, but its often lukewarm platform hardly appeals to me on all levels. A typical solution might be to vote for a different party more in line with one's views, but the problem is that all such parties are comparatively tiny, and at present have little hope of ever winning a major election. Voters, therefore, seem to be in a no-win situation, where increasingly centrist politicians try to appeal to the most people with the most all-inclusive campaign platform. The platform of one of the smaller parties may be more in line with the voter's beliefs, but, he reasons, "they'll just take away votes from the 'lesser of two evils' candidate."

I am always consoled by the thought that, although this situation seems insoluble at the moment, through the changing of men's hearts by the power of the Gospel, it will one day no longer be a problem. I was nevertheless tempted a few days ago to think of this as a somewhat unrealistic solution. Let us take AIDS, for example. In Africa and elsewhere, millions of people are being infected with a very serious disease, either because of promiscuity or because others infect needles and other things that come in close contact with them. To some, the notion of changing men's hearts might seem like a half-hearted and merely theoretical solution to the problem, whereas finding a cure for AIDS is the apparently concrete and decisive course.

Now, it is true that merely sighing, "ah, some day this will all change" and then sitting back and doing nothing is ineffective at best, and quite possibly much worse. It seems a sensible course to search for a cure for AIDS, both for the hapless people infected without bringing it upon themselves, and for those engaged in promiscuity as well. Although they deserve to die for what they are doing, so did we, before our salvation, and we can certainly never tell which of them will repent and which will not.

However, it should be fairly obvious that a "cure" for AIDS would be a temporary solution. Drug-resistant strains of the virus have already formed in response to various treatments, and if a cure were found that no virus could resist, the amount of promiscuity would likely rise to alarming heights, since those engaging in it would view the new cure as a license for their sin. Ignoring the saving power of the gospel in the lives of men and paying sole attention to merely temporal solutions is like treating the emergency shut-off switch as the end of the matter, instead of actually working to fix the problem that forced him to take emergency measures. A man would be a fool not to use the switch, but he would be a worse fool if he did not try to avert the danger to a point that the switch was no longer needed.

Christians must not be ashamed of the power of the Gospel, or the promises of Christ, or of their own calling in the world, which is among other things to preach the Gospel. Men may point and laugh, and claim that we have our heads in the clouds, but while we may work on temporal solutions to try to contain evil in the here and now, we should never lose sight of the ultimate goal and the ultimate solution. It really does all come down, in the end, to changing men's hearts.

Buy It, Just Don't Ask Why

In the old days, people advertised their business based on what it could do for the customer. A blacksmith advertised his shop based on the fact that he could do a blacksmith's work for people. This "marketing campaign" was usually limited to a sign above his door with an anvil on it, and the word-of-mouth testimonies of his customers.

There was dishonest advertising back then, of course; there always has been. A man in the marketplace might shout out that he had the best fish in the world, when in fact they were a three day-old catch that was getting a bit spoiled. Typically, though, the majority of advertising was limited, not very gaudy, and focused on the benefits of the product itself.

Modern advertising is wholly different. Like the picture at above left, which is a very mild example, our marketers make very little connection between the product at hand and the words and images that try to make people buy it. After all, what does "Coke adds life" mean? We can be sure it doesn't add a half-second to the life of anyone who drinks it, and whether it makes your life more interesting is entirely up to you.

There are two reasons, I think, for why advertising has come to this state. The first reason is the general demise of logic over the past few decades. The roots of this demise are deep, but most notably since the 1960s a great many people have come to value emotional and physical "highs" and mental bedazzlement over any deep, intrinsic meaning or logical cohesion. That's why big-budget movies with multiple explosions do better at the theatres than films that focus more on ideas and characters than high-speed chases. That is also one of the greatest reasons why advertisements can get away with having nothing at all to do with the product at hand. Let's take a beer commercial for another example. One of the slogans for Busch Beer is "Busch Beer. Head for the mountains." If anyone can find the intrinsic logical connection between the statement Busch Beer and the command "head for the mountains," I challenge him to show it to me. In all honesty, drinking beer has nothing to do with hitting the trail, and I highly doubt that many people who drink that brand ever do go to the mountains, or even take that injunction seriously. It just doesn't relate to Busch Beer in any sense. The chain of logic is broken at the most fundamental level, and few people seem to care, or even really notice.

The second reason is somewhat related. A host of the products produced today are not really that useful, and certainly not very necessary. Our blacksmithing friend was an essential member of his community, since he could make horseshoes, crowbars, knives, axes, and all kinds of other useful tools. Beer as a general commodity is not really necessary at all, and the world could easily say farewell to the Busch company without quivering to its foundations. Not that there's anything wrong with beer (taken in moderation). The problem arises when marketers feel that they must not allow the public to just choose for itself--in the which case Busch might just get shoved aside. The public has products waved in its face in a variety of clever ways, but because many of these products are just amenities, there is no real concrete logical principle to which their makers can appeal to attract public attention. What they have to do is select something they think will capture many people's attention, and then toss it in with the same pot as the product in the hopes that, while ogling at the Interesting Thing, the public catch sight of the product and, when browsing through the store, remember the product's picture and buy it instead of a competitor. And because of the logical disconnect problem in today's society, that isn't a big deal.

Neil Postman, a social commentator of great perception, compared advertisements in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death to myths. Advertisers don't create reasons for buying products; they create myths around them that make them look like answers to life's problems. This observation seems to be quite true. Here are a couple of the "myths" of advertising that I have observed. I'm sure there are many more, since I have watched no TV in my home for many years.

• Look at that babe!--Popular with shower products, men's cologne, beer, automobiles, and most everything else, this is the advertising ploy that using sensuality to catch the public eye. The camera will give us plenty of barely-restrained shots of a woman washing her hair in the shower, or a lady in a bikini on the beach, without really saying whether Dove soap actually keeps your hair cleaner or whether Coors Light has really been confirmed by popular opinion to have the best taste, or some freak health benefit, or what have you.
• A movie star's doing it, so I should too--Also popular with just about anything, this will have, say, Adrian Brody walking cheerfully down a road and infecting everyone with his energy...all due, we are supposed to believe, to Pepsi. Apparently the fact that he steps in front of a camera and speaks pre-written lines while dodging a gigantic ape (or pretending to stab Joaquin Phoenix) makes him a leading authority on soft drinks.
• Vicarious coolness--Popular with cars, beer, camping gear, and much more, this is usually marketed to male teenagers and young men, and usually features, say, Mazda cars being driven in a flashy and noisy manner through desert landscapes or some urban bridge, or a muscular man in a nightclub with some adoring girlfriend holding one hand, and a Budweiser in the other. In this way the young men get a vicarious thrill from fast car-races or a successful date without having to take the trouble to seek one or the other, and associate the same "coolness" with the product at hand. That way, even though one may never have the skill to spin out his Mazda in the Alpine snows and come out not only unscratched, but with no snow on the tires, he still associates owning a Mazda with being respected.
• Haha! That was funny, I guess I'll go buy something--Perhaps advertising's biggest trump card along with pretty women, this acts on the assumption that eliciting a laugh from the customer will make the featured product memorable, and so encourage him to buy it. That is why Budweiser had a commercial during (I think) the Olympic games. It ran something like this. A man sits on a couch with a blond-haired girl kissing him (and, I think, with a beer on the table by him). The girl excuses herself, probably to go to the restroom or something, and the man calls his friend. Asked what the girl is like, he says something to the effect of, "she's pretty weird, but I'm desperate." The girl returns, and her pet parrot suddenly starts squawking, "she's pretty weird, but I'm desperate," over and over again. The last shot is the man getting kicked out of her house, and then the camera shows a bottle of beer with the Budweiser name. This doesn't even try to say, "getting this product will put you in the way of pretty women" or "buying this will make you cool." All it does is set up a situation of domestic strife that some people, I suppose, find amusing. I am actually not certain whether the marketers care that the customer even remembers the gag--only that the image of the beer stays in his mind so Budweiser makes more money.

It would be quite possible to go on with these examples, but the point has, I think, been made. Advertisements are a multi-billion dollar industry of logical disconnects, feel-good stories that build of a false mythos around products that, in the main, don't mean much at all. They are strong-arm tactics to try to make gullible people buy things they do not need and, unless prodded, would probably never even think to buy. Only a society like those of our modern age that are so full of extra cash, unprecedented leisure time, and populations filled with softies out for a good time at any price (except strenuous exertion) could produce such an industry.

As long as it continues to turn a profit, this industry won't go away. But we can contribute to its demise by not giving in to its ploys. After buying necessities, choose your amenities wisely and with any eye to God's glory and your pocket book. Drink the beer you like the taste of most, not the one Lindsay Lohan drinks on TV. Buy the car that gets you where you want to go, not the one that couple drove at 115 through the Arizona wilderness.

Let us try to infuse a little logic into our consumerist society.

~Connor

Abortion: The Ugly Face of Solipsism

For years, "pro-life" and "pro-choice" advocates have been accusing each other of being in the wrong on the abortion issue. Pro-lifers say abortion advocates are legalizing murder. Pro-choicers say abortion detractors are attempting to restrict a woman's fundamental "right to choose," a.k.a. her "reproductive rights," or "right to prevent the birth of her child by violent means." For those of you who like plain English, her license to kill. It is probably quite clear from those words that I firmly believe the assessment of the pro-lifers is correct, and the presence of abortion one of the most devilish monstrosities ever to slip into American society wearing a "society-accepted" stamp.

However, I do not intend to retrace here the arguments made that abortion is simply one form--and a particularly heinous form since it cuts off little humans almost at the very starting-place of their lives--of murder. Anyone can at least agree that abortion prevents the birth of a very live human being, a being that according to pro-abortion advocates somehow miraculously comes alive the moment it passes completely out of the birth canal (and is apparently not sufficiently alive to qualify as human until it's all the way out--sticking a needle through its skull and injecting it with poison as it is still coming out is apparently fine and dandy according to those who advocate partial-birth abortion).

What I do intend to do is talk a little about what kind of attitude one needs to have to support such a practice. One needs an attitude that is so crushingly selfish as to almost qualify as solipsism. These advocates of abortion, primarily feminist activists (see my previous post), but also a good deal of others, are so obsessed with the idea of sex without consequences that nothing, in their view, can or should stand in its way. But, of course, the issues runs deeper than sex--it really centers on self-determination, pleasure, and the Cult of Me.

The central tenet of selfishness is this: I am more important than everyone else simply because I happen to be me. That is, I want to enjoy everything there is to enjoy in life, and since I cannot vicariously enjoy it through the enjoyment of others, I want it for myself. Selfishness of the Cult of Me, where the particular individual matters most. Selfishness is a religion where the individual is God. Sinful man is always striving toward this goal in some way, and even Christians still have to contend, perhaps more than with any other particular sin, with selfishness and its Siamese twin, pride. After all, a person who wants everything for himself must think he is the most important person on the planet, consciously or unconsciously, and that, if you ask me, is rather prideful.

In short, and to put things in plainer light, selfishness is the core of rebellion against God. We are created to serve God, and the human rebellion is to serve ourselves, to be our own masters.

To bring things back to the topic at hand, selfishness is a powerful force in modern American society. Teenage culture is rank with it. Consumerism in many cases depends on it. And it has wreaked havoc with our marriages and our birth-rates. Pro-abortion logic states that sex is pleasurable. They use this as license for promiscuity, their first turn from the teaching of the Bible, and a big cave in to selfishness. (After all, if it pleases the individual, why wait until marriage? Maybe you the individual don't want to be tied down to one person your whole life.) With this kind of promiscuity comes the inevitable consequences one gets when violating the laws of God: disease, though not the subject under consideration, is one; more to the point is frequent and often teenage pregnancy. Teenagers, at least the kind we have around today, are too young to care for children, and most welfare mothers and posh yuppie women are "too busy" for more than, say, two kids. Either Uncle Sam hasn't given them enough money, or they just want to "live their own life" and not be "bothered" by children.

For the most part, in the majority of societies, mothers either put up with these unwanted children or, in an age where an illicit pregnancy actually brought social ostracization, simply abandoned, which is bad enough. In the 19th, and increasingly in the 20th century, our obliging scientific minds came up with relatively reliable methods of birth control. This, at least, just prevents conception; it doesn't kill anything. Whether it is acceptable for the Christian or not I am not absolutely sure, and not having studied the issue much, and being unmarried, it is probably not a province in which I can speak with much confidence.

But, birth control doesn't always work. That's a problem for our solipsists. Here they've been having so much fun, and then a child comes along. A child means responsibility, sacrificial love, time, patience, perhaps a few amenities given up to feed the extra mouth: all things many (though, in all fairness, fortunately by no means all) of our solipsists recoil from like death. In fact, they recoil from it in such horror that they are willing to kill to keep their precious status quo. And they are willing to scream, browbeat, lobby, protest, and cover all their actions under such dubious and opaque terms as "reproductive rights," "the right to choose," "the right of a woman over her body," and such like--all to keep the butcher's bill rising higher and higher.

I don't know about you, but I find it pretty darn interesting that activists in America spit in rage at George W. Bush for "killing" 3,387 soldiers in Iraq since 2003, when they and those like them have been responsible for the murder of about 1,287,000 babies in 2003 alone.

I think that was the first time I really made myself angry over the process of writing a post. I may have even lost track of my ultimate point. And I am angry, full of wrath that so many smiling, adorable little babies like the one in the picture above have been snuffed out, not only before they had a chance to live out their lives, but before they even had a chance to see the light of day. America is guilty of more murders than Hitler ever committed. May God have mercy on her.

~Connor

Feminists: Some Real Problems, a Fecundity of Unrealistic Solutions

I was reading in one of my textbooks today, Western Civilization by Jackson J. Spielvogel, about the rise of the women's movement in the 1970s-1990s, and an interesting thought struck me. It was occasioned, I think, mainly by this passage: "Women got together to share their personal experiences and become aware of the many ways that male dominance affected their lives. This consciousness-raising helped many women become activists" (853).

One question that can be immediately raised, of course, is how pervasive and marked a problem this can be if groups had to be started in order to convince women just how repressed they were, or are. Nevertheless, that was not the subject of my thought.

What I did think was how curious the goals of the feminist movement are. They identified some real abuses, past and present, of the Biblical notion of male headship (which they would also vehemently deny, but they will have to argue that point with God if they get the chance). Yet their reaction, in the midst of this discovery, seems odd. To me, it appears evident that the best solution to any problems in the familial and societal structures would be an attempt to achieve some level of cooperation between male and female. The feminist is not going to look to the real answer to this, the Bible, but even so, any sensible person should notice that men and women are built, physically, mentally, and emotionally, to match and augment one another. This holds true in spite of all tantrums, arguments, break-ups, and the like.

And yet, what the feminists seem to be doing, in this passage and today, is fighting for a complete separation and autonomy between the sexes. Take another passage, for instance. "Women sought and gained a measure of control over their own bodies by insisting that they had a right to both contraception and abortion" (Spielvogel, 853). Although it is undoubtedly the woman who carries the child, this hardly seems to take into consideration the flip-side of the matter. A man's body is also necessary for children, and the children are as much his own as the mother's. It is probably true that in olden times (and in many cultures today, most notably Islamic and African ones) that men could demand to sleep with their wives whenever they wanted, and simultaneously refuse any kind of contraception, thus, in a sense, forcing the woman to bear more children than the family could realistically care for. There are multiple problems with such an attitude, and the blame in that case would be entirely on the man.

Yet here again feminism has jumped over to quite the opposite side of the issue, in which the woman is the sole arbiter of her sex life, number of children, etc. The man is a kind of unwanted guest, tolerated because he is necessary, and perhaps the more disliked because he is. If anything, this seems to be denying the man any control over his body (quite aside from the issue of the baby's body, which I may raise in another post later) as much as any previous state of affairs denied the woman that control. Again, there are many other issues that could be raised here, and which I probably will raise when I think them through, including the selfishness that seems to be inherent in thinking first of "controlling one's own body" in a marital relationship, as if one of the deepest things about that relationship is not giving oneself selflessly to one's spouse. But my main point here is that, in most respects, feminism seems to emphasize, not any kind of mutual solution to the problems they perceive, nor even, really, any association with men on any level but the most necessary. They do not seem to want to be respected by men, honored by men, or even loved by men: they want to be men. And that kind of autonomous, separate, independent attitude can only be dangerous for human beings no more designed to be men than men are to be women.

~Connor

Lingua Latina II: Participles and Dactylic Hexameter

The first part of this post may be attributed to the Latin language itself. The second is in large part due to the genius of Vergil and his genius with verse You may make of both of them what you will. :-)

The Latin participle is, in general, more compact than its English equivalent. There are four kinds of participles in Latin: the present active, future active, perfect passive, and future passive. Latin is somewhat unique in possessing no perfect active participle (except for deponent verbs--if you don't know what those are, don't panic). The perfect passive participle generally filled the breach on this point, and the student is usually expected to supply an active translation while implicitly understanding that, technically, the grammatical sense is passive.

Generally, except for the ability to place it far and away from the noun it modifies as discussed in my first post, the present active participle does not differ much from English (except that it is declined like an adjective). In English we use a verb ending in -ing, for example, running; in Latin one would stick an -ns suffix to the verb currere, to run, to obtain the present active participle currens.

Moving into the future active participle, the compactness begins to reveal itself. The closest English approximation we have to the future active participle is something like about to (verb). Latin takes care of it by simply attaching urus, -a, -um to the 4th principle part of a verb. So when we would say, "Aeneas, about to run to Italy, was very happy," the Romans would say "Aeneas, ad Italiam cursurus, erat laetior." Latin can shave three words off English and, I daresay, sound rather more polished than the former. But that is for the second part.

The perfect passive participle is probably the participial form one will encounter the most often, at least in the Aeneid. As far as I have encountered, the most literal English translation of this participle (I'll use a different verb for convenience, say, to kill) would be having been killed--rather clunky in some circumstances. In English we might say "the man, having been killed, fell to the ground." In Latin one would say "vir, necatus, ad solum occidit." Nine versus five!

As to the future passive participle, more commonly known as the gerundive, I confess that that is one grammatical area in which scraping off a little rust would do me good. I shall have to consult my faithful Alan and Greenough's on the subject. My main haziness, I think, is on the distinction between the gerundive and gerund (the former an adjective and the latter a verbal noun) and on the situations in which one or the other is used. The general sense of the gerundive is something like about to be killed (sorry, that's just a common word in Latin!). So, "the bull, about to be killed at the altar, bellowed" is roughly equivalent to, "taurus, necaturus ad altam, fremit."

Before we leave the subject of participles, which I hope was not boring (it may indeed be informative to any students trying to master participles, I suppose, and I hope it is), I ought to consider a few of the other applications of participles. One of the funnest is known as the ablative absolute, which can (but does not always) use a participle. This nifty little construction consists of two words, either a noun and a verb, or a noun and another noun or adjective, with an implied to-be verb in the mix. Both of the words are in the ablative case, which is a little hard to explain to those who have never learned Latin. It's kind of a grab-bag noun case that many prepositions take and which often expresses other concepts of direction, characteristics, means, and so on. A good example of the ablative absolute would be urbe capto. This versatile phrase can mean several things, depending on the context. It could mean "since the city was captured," "when the city was captured," "the city being captured," and other things as well.

Vergil's verse is considered by many scholars to be one of the most masterful examples of dactylic hexameter in Latin. Dactylic hexameter is a verse form consisting of six feet, or sections of syllables. These may comprise either dactyls or spondees. Dactyls are one long syllable followed by two short ones, and spondees are two long syllables. Since I do not have the know-how to create any fancy symbols, I will represent long syllables by putting them in all capital letters. Note first that these do not necessarily represent the stress on a particular syllable, i.e., how loud one pronounces it, but just how long the vowel-sound is held.

The rules of scanning dactylic hexameter appear complex on the surface, but, once mastered, are not very difficult to remember or employ. Essentially, as a starting-point, one would cram all the lines of a hexameter line together (as, one might add, the Aeneid was originally written, as were all works of ancient times). Let's take the first line:

arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris

Now let's scrunch it together:

armavirumquecanotroiaequiprimusaboris

Now. The first rule of scanning hexameter is to divide the line by syllables. One always breaks off after the vowel and before the consonant, unless there are two consonants together, in the which case one retains one consonant and starts with the next. Like so:

ar ma vi rum que ca no troi ae qui pri mu sa bo ris

Now what? Well, we know there have to be six feet in this line; that's what "hexameter" means. We know that each of these feet can be either a dactyl or a spondee. There's a nifty thing we can use, too, to get us started: the last two feet of every line, called the Adonic Section, always takes a specific form--one dactyl plus two feet that are either a spondee, or one long and one short syllable (kind of a truncated dactyl). As for the rest of the line, any vowel that has a consonant at the end is long "by position." Some other vowels are long "by nature," and one just has to feel those. Unless proven otherwise, vowels with no consonant after them are short.

Yes, you may be staring around bewildered now. I was too when I first learned this. I'll give you an example of the first line, scanned:

AR ma vi RUM que ca NO TROI AE QUI PRI mu sa BO RIS

See how that works? For starters, "ar," "rum," "troi," "ae," "qui," and "ris" are all long by position (diphthongs count too). Remember, they all have consonants at the end or are diphthongs. The reason I knew that "no" and "pri" were long by nature is because of how the line was going. One can have no more than two long or two short syllables in a row. Once "que ca" had been proven short, "no" couldn't be anything other than long.

There are a few other rules, but I think I have said quite enough now. I hope anyone who reads these posts can take something from them. It is good to be able to write out some of what I've learned here, and communicate the excellent qualities of the Latin language. My next post, and probably my last on this subject for now, will be on the beauty of Vergil's Latin, and how he positions words and uses multiple figures of speech to achieve some pretty amazing effects.

Virginia Tech and the New Isolationism

In the wake of the killing-spree at the Virginia Tech campus (which I must say, though a horrible tragedy just as any murder of innocent people is, is not particularly unusual), we must ask ourselves what kind of culture could produce the kind of reaction many people in this country have had.

We are living in what, if it is not the most violent century our world has known, is certainly no less bloody than the preceding eras. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suicide bombings, Israeli and Palestinian tensions, student riots in Paris, Mexican immigrants, Sudanese starvation, Kim-Jong Ill's regime in North Korea (notice how no one hears about that unless he does something to make interesting news?)...the list could go on. Although we are generally more comfortable and generally more protected from diseases and unsanitary conditions on most levels (though only in some parts of the world), the world is still a dangerous place, and fixes to remain so for a long while, barring a miracle.

Throughout history, that the world is a dangerous place has been recognized, whether explicitly or implicitly, by nearly every nation and culture that I can think of. The Romans carved out their empire by force of arms. Men in medieval times kept armed retainers in their castles, and peasants no doubt knew how to use their tools for more than just farming when the neighboring lord took a fancy to their land. Young boys began learning the arts of war and knighthood at about seven, if I recall aright. One of the central ideas of being a man meant being prepared to fight. Even women in medieval times could often take over the command of a castle if the menfolk were away.

In the nineteenth century, although pacifism was on the rise in some groups, it seems at least from my research that murderous criminals and other domestic dangers were endured as the unfortunate trappings of any society in this fallen world, not some surprise boulder out of the sky that shatters our carefully constructed, but very thin, ice. Perhaps I am wrong, and the roots of this problem were plainly evident further back than I imagine. Be that as it may, however, I think it is safe to guess that the reaction we have seen from many of the most vocal and influential people in this country, not to mention, I am sure, a great number of the equally important but less noticed people who are the 'ordinary citizens,' is a fairly unique phenomenon in the history of the world.

A man walks into a college campus and shoots 32 people dead. What is our reaction? Rome would have beheaded him. Ancient Israel would have stoned him (and in modern Israel he would have been shot dead almost before he aimed at his first victim). Communist Russia, depending on which side he was on, might arguably have condoned him. But America is probably the first nation to pretend that others like him can be stopped by simply ignoring the things that drive them to do what they do, and the means to stop them from doing it when they take that deadly step.

Others have belabored the issue of gun control, but I shall a little nonetheless. It is certainly obvious to me, and should be to everyone else, that even five or six students with semi-automatic pistols or revolvers with even a rudimentary knowledge of their use could have downed Cho Seung-Hui in seconds. He might have shot a few people first, but perhaps only eight or ten students would have died rather than 32. Arguably Seung-Hui could have gone on killing had he not committed suicide, at least until the police arrived. That is a sickening thought--the police are not omnipotent, and to think that so many of our citizens not only depend solely on them for armed protection (which usually means they die waiting for it), but they also frequently complain that the police are over reactive or, when they do shoot, shoot excessively, is fairly frightening. There is a book out called More Guns, Less Crime: the title speaks for itself. I have not personally read the book (I should soon), but my mother has and would definitely recommend it. The book provides, I believe, some hard statistics about how concealed carry reduces crime.

Now, moving on from gun control, I come to the main point of my post, which was mainly inspired by an April 22 post by Mark Steyn called Let's be Realistic About Reality (linked here). Steyn's basic point is that Americans have isolated themselves from reality. I will quote him: "To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you're not in the real world." This, I think, is a very compelling case for what is wrong with the general liberal worldview. It is well-meaning and often, no doubt, arises from principles with which I would not disagree (for instance, that violence against the innocent is wrong, that we should strive for peace, that the earth is precious, etc.) The problem is that many of them believe we live in a world where these things are possible by just talking it out. That is why we have bumper stickers like "give peace a chance." I seriously doubt that those who use those bumper stickers realize what it means to give peace a chance. "Giving something a chance" means cultivating conditions in which something can take place or exist. To give dodos a chance we would have had to not hunt them or take steps to protect their habitat.

But giving peace a chance is a rather different matter, because dodos, as well as I can guess, probably did not actively fight against being saved from extinction. Peace, however, is a very different thing from the existence of dodos, because the maintenance of peace depends on both parties in whatever interaction may be taking place. It demands the mutual consent of both people or groups of people. Here's the problem: people like the Palestinian government and the Iraqi and Afghani suicide bombers--and Cho Seung-Hui--don't want to make peace. Their ideologies, or their mental problems, demand total war and destruction. It's like trying to add two negatives and always getting a positive number. One part peace plus one part aggression equals two parts war. The only difference is that one side doesn't fight back. Do you know what happens then? Of course you do. The aggressive guy wins because he has the guns, the guts, the reason for fighting, and the knowledge that the other chap won't shoot back.

There is only one way to make peace in this situation (unless God should intervene in a special way): defend yourself. It is a sad but basically irrefutable truth that the best way to peace with a determined, fanatical enemy is to make war with him.

Now, I will admit that that way of handling things isn't fun, and we Americans are pretty fond of fun things. What is the end result? Well, many people have noted how childhood seems to be encroaching more and more on our culture as the attitudes and learning-levels associated with adolescence never seem to disappear. In this case many of us have acted just like the child who hears the scary noises outside and buries his head under the covers. In the child's case, we know his fears are unfounded, and tell him so: they are just monsters in his head. His fear is genuine but needless. He does not need to bury his head under the covers, but neither does he need to sleep with a gun under his covers. In our case, the scary noises outside are not crickets or tree branches rubbing against the window. They are real monsters, and we still have our heads under the covers. Of course we know why: it's dark and comfortable in there, and it sure seems like nothing can get past that blanket. One can simply imagine the monster was part of his imagination, or will grow bored and leave. But if one knew the first thing about monsters, he'll know they aren't fooled by blankets.

Americans need to take the covers off their heads and starting thinking realistically. Our problems will not go away by ignoring them, and recognizing their existence is the first step. We need to stop pretending that violent crime or suicidal attacks are so "shocking," which is the media's favorite term for events like the shootings at Virginia Tech. Terrible, yes; sinful, yes; heartrending, yes. But shocking? Apparently we have forgotten 9/11, Columbine, and the murder of the Amish girls last year. Not only that, but people had plenty of advanced notice that Seung-Hui was mentally disturbed and had a dangerous attraction for brutal and grotesque violence. Why was Virginia Tech "shocked"? Because they preferred to hide under the blankets and pretend that such a thing could never happen. Imagine what a child would feel like if a green, clawed hand actually poked a hole in his blanket! No doubt he would be shocked. But if he were tagging along behind his father, hunting the monsters outside, the interposition of a clawed and green hand might be frightening and might not be pretty, but it would never be unexpected.

Every creature, whether animal or man, naturally seeks the weakest things as prey. Lions, hyenas, carjackers, and disturbed college students alike know that the old, the sickly, and the unprepared are prime targets. I doubt that lions hesitate for a second to hunt gazelle, because gazelle have absolutely no natural defenses except speed that can arm them against a creature as strong and well-built for attack as a lion. But it would be a singular occurrence, possibly a non-existence occurrence, when you would see a lion taking on an adult bull elephant, except perhaps in times of literal starvation. Why? Bull elephants are big, tough, and armed with long tusks, and they charge when threatened. Maybe if we took our cue from the elephants, the lions at home and abroad might change their tune. And even if one of those times or starvation come around and the criminals and terrorists get desperate, remember: the elephant usually wins.

Lingua Latina, Part I: the Versatility of Inflection and Tense

Due primarily to the posts of David, I have decided to expand the scope of this blog a little to some other interests of mine, including writing and classical languages, specifically Latin. I will still post, of course, on theological, philosophical, and historical subjects (though David will probably be able to supply the history part much more ably) but I think that this is also the best public forum under my control for a more serious treatment of these subjects that greatly interest me.

I have been, as many of you know, in a class this school year called AP Latin IV: Vergil. This class is designed to prepare one to take the Advanced Placement exam on Vergil's Aeneid, and we are now almost through the approximately 1850 lines that the AP exam tests on. My understanding of the Latin language has grown enormously since studying this amazing poet, and I wanted to share some of the peculiarities and attributes of his language, which has many resources of power and description that English can only look at longingly (and, I confess, some areas in which English is probably superior).

The first and probably most obvious attribute of Latin, the one that most textbooks will hammer into students' brains from day one, is that it is an inflected language. The listener or reader can tell the purpose of a word in a sentence based on its ending letters, not necessarily by its position, as in English. A language based on this system, besides forcing students of it to learn multiple declensions and conjugations, has the ability to juggle words within a phrase or clause almost at will, depending on the purposes of the author. This provides the Latin author with the enviable ability to emphasize nearly any word he wants at any point in the sentence, a feat impossible, at least on such a scale, in English. I will take as a case a point a section early on in the epic where Juno, queen of the gods, is lamenting the fact that she, with all her power, has been unable to destroy the Trojan fleet, while Minerva, technically a lesser goddess, has been able to exact revenge on an enemy of hers, namely Ajax son of Oileus. Narrating what Minerva did to the unfortunate man, Juno says the following:

illum exspirantem transfixo pectore flammas/ turbine corripuit scopuloque infixit acuto...

A typical English translation of this passage might be "she seized with a whirlpool the man, breathing flames from his transfixed chest, and stuck him on a sharp rock." If one followed the actual word order of the Latin, however, it would read something like "the man breathing from his transfixed chest flames with a whirlpool she snatched and on a rock stuck sharp." The reaction of an English reader to such a hash of words would be to scratch his head. In Latin poetry, however, this is par for the course. With the position of his words, Vergil can, for instance, emphasize the man's "transfixed chest" by positioning it between exspirantem and flammas. Latin is capable of producing very physical effects with the positioning of words. Another example, perhaps even more startling, comes from book 4. Dido, queen of Carthage, has fallen in love with Aeneas, but after spending a whole winter with her he is abruptly commanded by the gods to leave. After wildly denouncing him as a traitor and calling down curses on his head, Dido runs inside. Vergil recounts her frenzied flight with these words:

His medium dictis sermonem abrumpit et auras/ aegra fugit...

"She breaks off (in) the middle of her conversation with these words and, wretched, flees the air."

But notice how Vergil has interposed the word "medium," middle, in the very middle of his dictis, these words. This kind of graphic interposition doesn't really work in English. We can't get away with "these in the middle of words her conversation she breaks off." Of course, good English poets can work around these limitations, but it is still a definite advantage of Latin.

Another advantage of Latin is a much more powerful use of tenses, in my experience particularly the perfect and pluperfect, although there may be many others I am not aware of. Two examples of that. The first, of the powerful use of the pluperfect, is not from the Aeneid, and comes (I think) from Cicero talking about the execution of the famous Roman traitor Catiline, or some of his followers. Cicero said to the Senate one word: vixerat. In English that would literally translate "they had lived," but the basic sense is they are dead, i.e., they did live up to a certain time in the past, but do no longer.

The other one, from the Aeneid itself, shows out the juxtaposition of the present and perfect tenses can make an interesting effect. I do not remember the precise section, but Vergil is describing Mercury flying to Carthage with a message for Aeneas. The present tense, I believe, is used to the describe Mercury's flight, and the perfect tense to describe his landing in Carthage--the implication being that the god is outside time, since he landed at the place, at least grammatically, before he even started flying!

Time constrains me from going on, so I shall leave this discussion for now, and hope that I have made this subject at least somewhat interesting to others, and would not be better off addressing the empty air. :-)

Technology: We Still Have to be Stewards

When I was a little younger, I was a devoted fan of the movie Jurassic Park. I still like it, although I do not petition my family to watch it nearly so often as I once did. Although neither the movie nor the book on which it was based are exceptionally good art, the story's creator, Michael Crichton, spoke and still speaks on subjects like global warming, genetic research, and other aspects of technology with sanity and intelligence. In the movie version of Jurassic Park, the character Ian Malcolm says a line something like (I paraphrase): "Your scientists were so taken with pursuing what they could do that never stopped to wonder if they should." He is speaking to the creator of a biological park that has learned how to genetically create dinosaurs from DNA left over in the blood of prehistoric mosquitos. The result, as many who read this may know, is disaster: human corruption and ignorance of the real magnitude of the undertaking (not to mention of the behavioral patterns of the dinosaurs themselves) take several lives and lead to the destruction of the park.

I have found Ian Malcolm's statement a peculiarly succinct expression of my concerns over modern technology and economics, concerns that I know many share. Those who invent and use modern technology have the ability, divine Providence allowing, to push the levels of innovation, production, and consumption to the limit. In the foreseeable future, our economies will simply continue to grow. The question is, do we want this?

I am the first to admit that technology has done many wonders for the world. I was born just on the cusp of the cellular phone technology, and have been able to access the internet since I was probably 6 or 7. Doubtless it was around earlier than that, since Al Gore is sufficiently older than I am to have invented it before my birth. ;-) And, although I often envision and write about societies in which none of these technologies exist, I am sure that it would be a strange, inconvenient, sometimes difficult adjustment to be suddenly deprived of them. They have enabled earth's largest populations to enjoy the largest over-all wealth and prosperity, and given us unprecedented means to save time and exploit the world's resources.

Despite this, however, many men and women seem to have failed to realize an important truth: every coin has two sides. Every human advancement is laden with consequences, usually unintended, that can mitigate some (or all) of its benefits. Although I am no extremist when it comes to global warming, it is certainly true that technological advancements like cars, airplanes, and trains have the consequence of consuming fossil fuels and emitting carbon monoxide. I don't think that this will lead to Armageddon in the next four minutes, or kill all the polar bears, but I am sure that it has some kind of harmful impact. It's certainly made us tied to the apron-strings (or AK-47 barrels) of the Middle East.

It isn't only cars and trucks and things that go, either: the use of chemicals on crops have prevented some harmful diseases and the ravages of insects, but I think (I have no solid proof on hand to back this up, so correct me if I am wrong) that there are mitigating circumstances attendant on this practice as well. We have also poured billions of dollars into satellites searching for extra-terrestrial signals, manned missions to the moon, and probes sent to photograph stars and planets. Although these are interesting exhibitions of economic and technological power, and perhaps fascinate some people, I at least find them ultimately useless, particularly when 1) I doubt we will find little green men or cures of cancer one some distant planet--the Bible tells us to consider the heavens, but not that God has peopled (martianed?) them--and 2) there are so many more important things on our own planet that NASA's prodigious talent and budget could probably better serve.

How do we reconcile these two sides of the coin? In the same way, I think, that we ought to reconcile anything else: by following God's will and changing the hearts of men. We are still supposed to be good stewards of the earth, whether we are using plows or combines, chariots or Mercedes, and the very fact that our capacity for destruction has increased many times ought to increase our caution and our respect for what we are tinkering with even more. Dangerous tools require careful handling. We can fly probes to Mars, invent birth control pills, build 4,000 Wal-Marts, and probe and poke about the limits of human capacity in a myriad of different ways.

But should we?

Why I Do Not Believe in Free Will

Romans 9

I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen. Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect. For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel: Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed be called. That is, They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed. For this is the word of promise, At this time will I come, and Sarah shall have a son. And not only this; but when Rebecca also had conceived by one, even by our father Isaac; (For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth;) It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.

Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory, Even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles? As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God. Esaias also crieth concerning Israel, Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved: For he will finish the work, and cut it short in righteousness: because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth. And as Esaias said before, Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we had been as Sodoma, and been made like unto Gomorrha.

What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, which followed not after righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness which is of faith. But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness, hath not attained to the law of righteousness. Wherefore? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumblingstone; As it is written, Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.

Still Racist

The Hamilton family of two generations back is quite bigoted. I have a great-uncle who is unconcerned to say that he "hates d---ned Mexicans" to the face of a man whose Mexican wife is sitting right next to him. In their anecdotes, my grandparents and most of their siblings are quick to point out if someone is Asian or 'colored.' The truth is, racism isn't dead: anywhere. White supremacists still exist, men who predate the civil rights movement and lived in a day when buses were still segregated, and I doubt that many of them even condescend to think about the "white man's burden."

The problem, however, is not limited to Caucasians. Taking advantage of the mind-boggling contortions that politically-conscious whites perform to ensure that no prejudice is ever even hinted at, other races (proving that they are, in fact, human beings just the same), have begun to turn they tables. They prey on the new white man's burden: the burden of guilt that has grown beyond all due proportion.

What is racism, after all? It is the assumption that a class of people with common ancestry are fundamentally inferior to another. The truth is, however, that no race can be lumped under one umbrella of definition. Even in my short life, I have had ample proof that there are incalculable gulfs between William Jefferson Clinton and Mark Steyn, between Mel Gibson and King Arthur, between Jacques Chirac and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Just so there are wide differences between Thomas Sowell and the common street rapper, between Michael Jackson (does he count as black anymore?) and Jesse Jackson, between Morgan Freeman and Harriet Tubman. Or between Pancho Villa and Vincente Fox, or between Mao Tse-Tung and the Emperor Meiji.

All this is to say that racism is not a new phenomenon. Nor should Caucasians take the burden of all its evils upon themselves, as though the slave trade and 18th century imperialism were the only manifestations of racism since the days of the Spartans and the Helots. Certainly the antebellum South never had tests of manhood where a Southern boy hunted down and killed a slave. This is not to excuse American slavery or any form of white racism. It is to say, however, that treating Western civilization as the grandfather of bigotry is a gross misconception. Have we forgotten that even from the dawn of Greek civilization until now is less than half the world's history? Have we forgotten the Egyptians, the Persians, the Amorites, or the Indian Untouchables?

The problem that needs to be addressed is not so shallow as the American slave trade and Depression-era segregation and prejudice. Ours is but one chapter in a long history of human depravity. For racism really centers around pride and the desire to have someone to look down on, and contrast yourself favorably with, and this has been with us since Eve bit the forbidden fruit. We did it once, and now African-Americans are beginning to do much the same thing. Perhaps we ought to be widening our perspective just a little, and stop acting as though it all began with those few slaves sold in Jamestown back in the seventeenth century. But then, to attain such an historical perspective would entail a radical change in the way history is taught...and that might take a few more posts of its own.

~Connor