Those who know my father and I, know that we have had a few blowouts over whether there is objective moral truth or not.
Well, my new pal Steven Colbert has done a done a segment on the subject of objective truth. And while it doesn’t specifically reference morals, I think the same principles apply to morals. Plus, it’s a good primer on the risks of using wikipedia.
After the big showdown in Boston over Catholic Charities and gay adoption, the SF arch-diocese has decided to pre-emptively address the problem before the pressure grew to unsustainable levels. However their solution is completely unacceptable. As much as the article tries to put the solution in a good light, it’s nothing more than the arch-diocese “washing their hands” of their moral responsibility. Let me give you some other “headlines” that illustrate the point:
If that wasn’t bad enough, not only are they “washing their hands” they’re doing so to an organization that is in business SPECIFICALLY for the purpose of helping with gay adoptions. Just go look at their website.
To me that’s a case not only of “washing their hands” of the matter but also pro-actively subverting the Church.
May God have mercy on us all.
I don’t often watch Comedy Central, but I guess Steven Colbert has a regular show there. In a recent episode he recited the Nicene Creed as his way of issuing “full disclosure” as a reporter.
Pretty funny skit overall, but definitely worth the post because of the Creed.
For those not in the know, the Nicene Creed is a profession of faith that Catholics say weekly as part of Sunday Mass. Other Christians do it as well. Not only is it a part of Mass, it is an important metric used by the Catholic Church to determine if a person/group is Christian. Basically, if you can submit to the Creed, then you are a Christian. If not, then you’re not a Christian according to the Catholic Church. Most Protestants do agree with the Creed. Notable exceptions are the Mormons and the Jehovahs Witnesses. And if you watched the Steven Colbert skit… the Unitarians don’t submit to the Creed either.
I’ve got a BIG list of personal accomplishments that I want to do before… well… I die. I’m sure a lot of them I’ll never do, but I want to keep these goals in front of me so that when all is said and done I can look back and be proud of what I accomplished. Many of those accomplishments are sailing related.
Yesterday I managed to check one of those off the list: Go 20 knots (that’s about 23 mph for you landlubbers) in my Laser sailboat. To give the landlubbers out there some perspective on what it is like to go 20 knots in a small sailboat (13 feet long), the spray from the boat was so intense it was nearly impossible to see where I was going. I was sailing by “feel” because visually it was a complete white-out half the time. Normally Lasers go about 5 mph… sometimes 10 when the wind is moderate. One has to be sailing in 25-30 knot winds with the right wave conditions on a tight broad-reach to hit these kinds of speeds. It’s like finding that perfect hill to bike down that you could go 40 mph cruising, but instead choose to pedal as fast as you can and hit 65 mph. The whole time I was thinking to myself: man this is fun… but I’d better not wipe out because it’ll be PAINFUL.
So, for those skeptical types out there, I made sure to take a picture of my GPS “trip computer” screen (click image to get enlarged image):
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So stick that in your pipe and smoke it! Me, flying through the water at 20.1 knots. One item checked off the list. Just in case you’re interested, here are some of the other sailing accomplishments I’m goaling for:
Well, the blog spammers are back. I’ve gotten 40 comment spams overnight. Of course, all they’re interested in is getting their google ranking raised by having lots of links and http references to their sites. So, the easiest way to slow them down is to moderate any comments with a link or the word ‘http’ in it.
So if you comment on a post and it gets moderated, don’t take offense, I’ll make sure it gets posted the next time I get to my inbox.
I may look into the whole “verification field” deal so that I don’t have to moderate in the near future. If I do that, you’ll have to type a different and funky piece of text in with each comment to ensure you’re actually a real poster as opposed to an automated blog-spammer bot.
The joys of the Internet…
I just saw an ad that used this technique so I thought it was appropriate to rant about it:
One of my biggest pet peeves is the use of “matching donations” in fundraising drives. You know the whole “We have a generous donor who will donate $1000 if we can raise $1000 from our viewers in the next hour!” Or the standard “we have a donor who will match your pledge dollar for dollar up to $5000″. I hear it all the time on Catholic radio and it drives me bonkers.
Listen, either an organization is worth donating to or it isn’t. Whether it is worth donating to has NOTHING to do with whether others are donating. Is this rich dude really holding his donation hostage until others donate? And why should those of us with less money feel obligated to come up with cash to make the rich dude feel better about his donation? As my Dad would say: Shit or get off the pot.
Yeah, I know, it is used as a “technique” for getting more people to donate money and in the end more money is raised. But you know what? The ends do not always justify the means. Emotionally extorting people is not the right way to raise money. I’m all for the “your ‘free’ gift with your donation will be…” and numerous other techniques that are used, but the matching donation technique crosses the line from acceptable to emotional extortion.
The fundraisers always present this as an opportunity for us regular folks to “double the value of our dollar” but the way I see it, it is a way for the rich dude to double the value of HIS dollar by extorting the less fortunate.
How very generous of him.
It continues to amaze me how many sound bites that are used routinely and considered to be compelling arguments are complete bunk. Case in point, this statement by a Florida politician regarding Terri Schiavo:
“There are some decisions that ought to be left to God and family,” Crist said. “Had I have been governor, I would have not done the same thing” as Bush.
(That’s governor Jeb Bush for those forgetting)
OK, how many times have I heard “life decisions should be made by the family” touted in cases like this? The problem frequently is that the family is not in agreement. Specifically, Terri’s biological family (parents and siblings) ALL wanted to keep Terri alive while her husband wanted to see her life ended. So it’s not just about “the family should decide”. What do you do when they can’t decide amongst themselves?
Furthermore in this case, the case came down NOT to what the family wanted but what Terri wanted. That was what was in dispute. So really, the family’s interests were technically irrelevant. If Terri’s husband had said in court “Terri told me that she would want to stay on life-support if she were in this state but I think it’s time for her to die anyway” (not saying that it is what was indeed the case, I’m just speaking theoretically) then the case would have turned out completely differently. What was in dispute was that the husband thought she would want to die and her parents thought the opposite and there was nothing but hearsay for either side to present in court.
Finally (and back to the original sound bite), what does “left to God” mean? Is he arguing that we should never do any medical treatment and let God either heal or not heal everyone? The question is not whether we have faith in God, it’s whether we choose to follow God by doing His will. We have to decide whether it is God’s will that a feeding tube be left in or removed. We can’t just “leave it to God” and turn our backs. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Obviously everyone who knows me, knows my opinion on the case and I’m sure that opinion colors this post. However, I tried to be careful in this post NOT to make a specific judgement as to which side was right. My point is not who is right, but just that the arguments used are completely irrelevant to the case.
Why do we as a public put up with this kind of crud?
Well, Lent is over. For those who didn’t know or have forgotten, I was on an Lent-long fast (meaning one meal a day).
Fasting is a very difficult thing for me. You only have to take one look at me and you know that I’m a man who loves his food. It’s also difficult over sustained periods for me not so much because of the volume of food but because of the daily inconsistency.  I spent 20+ hours each day starving, a 1/2 hour eating 1000+ calories, and an hour or two satisfied. Without a polite way to say it explicitely, let’s just say that’s a recipe to catch up on my magazine reading.
So here are the final stats of the fast:
Some have asked me why I did this or why I’ve done it in the past. What do I gain?
The answer is difficult to put to words, but I’ll try. First of all, I’d say that the aspect of my human nature that I least have control of is Gluttony (note definition #2 because this is the full sense of the word and what I am referring to). I love to over-indulge and don’t have much will-power to stop myself.
One of the best ways to grow closer to God is to force yourself to rely on Him. One of the best ways to do that is to put yourself in situations where you have no choice but to rely on Him. For me, since Gluttony is so tempting, forcing myself to fast forces me to rely on God. I’m completely incapable of fasting on my own. It’s only by growing closer to God and putting my fate in His hands that I have an outside shot of fasting for sustained periods. I spent a lot of time praying for strength and God always delivered… in God’s time. And the “in God’s time” bit is important. It’s not like I’d pray and the next instant I wasn’t hungry. No, the hunger would pass when God thought it was time. So the prayers were often sustained and repetitive. It not only forced me into deep long prayers, it taught me to have patience.
Finally, I’m a sinful man, just like any man. I feel the need for a great deal of penance for those sins. As such, I’m constantly looking for good forms of penance. Of all the forms of penance, fasting is the best for me because of how it draws me close to God. I not only have the spiritual benefits of penance in its own right, but also the spiritual benefits that fasting gives me in its own right. And for me particularly, fasting has many benefits.
I hope that explains it well.
In the end, this Lent was a successful one because I feel closer to God again.  Of the other things I had hoped to do or did as part of Lent, none of them helped as much as the fasting did.  It truly brought me into the Lord’s presence and that is always the most important goal of any spiritual practice.
I’m a pretty big sports fan. I have football season tickets for the Cal Bears. I try to make it to more than a handful of Oakland A’s games a year. I sail much more than I can afford and which I could make myself even broke-er.
One of the things I love about sports the the purity of it. At one end, the rules are simple and the winner is clear. But at the other, we get to see our human nature played out in a very visual form. Today I got another example of that while doing my morning blog reading at The Seventh Inning Stretch. Here’s the quote:
“Today was no different, it was raining hard before one of the Easter masses I had to sing in. I joked and said that the rain was God’s punishment for those in line for Huston Street bobbleheads. Instead of celebrating Christ’s ressurection they were committing the sin of idolatry by waiting in line for a bobblehead. Of course, if I wasn’t obligated to be at church I’d be in line with all of those idolators commiting idolatry.”
And that’s our human nature in a nutshell. We strive to be good and with the right re-enforcement, we are. But that nagging desire calling us to sin is a powerful one, one that we have to admit we are powerless to overcome by ourselves. But God has not abandoned us and is always available to strengthen us. He gives us the strength to overcome our sinful desires. All we must do is ask.
Well, Easter is upon us! I hope that everyone had a repentant Lent and was able to joyously celebrate the start of Easter yesterday with friends and family. I also pray that we’ll all be able to celebrate the entire Easter season, the 40 days in which Christ was on earth in His risen form.
May God’s blessings be upon all of us!