At this festive time of year, when the Generic Winter Holiday spirit is swelling, and non-cisgendered, positive body image Parent/Guardian of the Season brings carbon-neutral gifts to all the children of the world without judging them, we are proud to offer a new re-educational product from Leftist Banana Republic Games: Coup!
This new game joyfully celebrates the sad, somber and wholly constitutional attempt to overthrow an elected but deplorable president by a body of non-partisan Democrat heroes, fully supported by an objective, unbiased media. We are fortunate to live in these historic times when those who are critical of the antiquated, racist, living document known as the Constitution, are keen to appeal to it as the motivation behind their noble and completely legal obligation to subvert the Constitution.
So be sure to get a copy of Coup!, one of a series of Partisan Witchhunt Games sponsored by Leftist Banana Republic. It will help bring a solemn, reflective sense of savage political euphoria to the season, whether you be celebrating Festivus, Saturnalia or the Winter Solstice.
In 1953, during an episode of his nationally broadcast television program, Life is Worth Living entitled: "Character Building," Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen said the following:
"The real seat of character is in the will and we must not surrender that responsibility either to the masses as Marx would have it, or to any kind of biological determinism. Because if our will is determined by forces outside of ourselves, we no longer will make amendment for our misdeeds."
Did you get that? To repeat, if you accept "biological determinism" then you will no longer feel contrition for your sins. Here again, nearly 70 years after he uttered these words, Sheen has been shown to be a prophet.
What is "biological determinism" you ask? Simply put, it is the belief that human behavior is controlled by an individual's genetic code or some component of his physiological make-up. While such theories date back to the dawn of genetics in the 19th century, they really came into their own in the 20th century along with destructive philosophies such as eugenics and social Darwinism.
However, while the two latter theories have largely gone underground in our own times, biological determinism and its child, sociobiology, continue to flourish into the 21st century. As it applies to human morality, those who embrace biological determinism will claim that certain behaviors are biologically pre-programmed into an individual, largely on the subconscious level, and are therefore predominant over the human will. An extension of this argument into the metaphysical realm asks questions like: "If our actions are pre-determined by our genetics, how can human beings be said to possess free will?" and "Can certain acts truly be sinful if they are part of our genetic make-up?"
Here in the early 21st century, these types of arguments are so prevalent that we don't even realize it anymore. All kinds of bad behaviors are excused or explained away as irresistible because they are part of our genetic or psychological make-up. A child who treats his mother disrespectfully in public is excused because he has "oppositional defiant disorder." A lighter sentence is requested for a man who commits murder because he's got a "warrior gene." A scientific study suggests that that marital infidelity may be caused by the same gene that causes people to become addicted to drugs, alcohol or gambling. I was once in a conversation with a man who began speaking to an older woman in horribly sexual terms that made her deeply uncomfortable. When I called him on it, he responded by saying, "Sorry, that's just my Asperger's syndrome" — as if he had zero control over his behavior. Indeed, we hear claims with increasing prevalence that an individual has no free will at all when it comes to the commission of certain acts of grave depravity that would have been condemned in Sheen's day as "sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance."
Archbishop Sheen was savvy enough to foresee the ramifications of such a gross error even sixty plus years ago. Men of today are not making amends for their misdeeds. What's worse, they are attempting to transform their misdeeds into good deeds, going beyond mere biological determinism to divine determinism. One American politician, citing the influence of a certain celebrity priest, had the audacity to explain away his deeply depraved relationship with another man by saying, "God made me this way."
The implication here is staggering in its satanic audacity. If Almighty God created an individual genetically pre-programmed to commit acts that the Church has considered sinful from the very beginning then, the argument goes, those acts must be divinely approved. The Apostles, the Church Fathers, and every moral theologian for the past 2,000 years was therefore wrong about Jesus's intentions with regard to morality. Rather than condemning such activities and behaviors, the argument concludes, the Church should be celebrating them.
Such an argument is outrageous on its face and, in a saner time, would have been immediately rejected by all people as fallacious and heretical. In our own time, the argument is accepted by many because, in large part, they've used biological determinism to rationalize their own sins away. They are more than happy to dispense with free will, so long as they may practice their vices without shame or consequence.
So to sum up: Is it possible that genetics and physiology influence behavior? Certainly. Does such influence exculpate men when they commit certain acts that the Church defines as sinful? No. It may lessen the severity of that sin somewhat for the individual so affected. It also may make the resistance of the individual's will to the besetting sin more heroic. But the influence of biological factors does not nullify the sin.
And the existence of such biological factors can certainly never make a sinful act into a virtuous one.
As Venerable Pope Pius XII said in 1952 when condemning so-called "situation ethics" and enumerating a list of moral absolutes that apply to all men and women: "No matter what the situation of the individual may be, there is no other course open to him but to obey."
Watch Archbishop Sheen's talk on Character Building here:
I recently came across an article from the Associated Press written by Peter James Spielman that is fascinating for one reason. Please read the first few paragraphs which I am pasting here so that it's not lost in case the AP pulls the original down at some point:
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed [deleted text].
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees," threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
The article is intriguing because of the [deleted text] above. Can you guess what goes there?
Here it is: "by the year 2000." This article was written in 1989.
It seems to me that articles exactly like this have been written hundreds if not thousands of times in the thirty years since this story first appeared. Now ask yourself—how many entire nations have been wiped off the face of the earth? How many of these predictions of three foot sea level rises, new dust-bowls in the Midwest, the Maldives underwater, etc. have come to pass? Answer? None.
It seems to me that one of the basic tenets of science is that when you are habitually wrong when posing outlandish hypotheses, you lose credibility as a scientist. And yet, the climate change catastrophists have continued to push this same theory that was first trotted out in the 1970s and 80s, the only difference being the terminology (climate change vs. global warming) and the volume level which is now amplified about 1000%.
Honestly, I can't take them seriously anymore. They've been singing the same tune for going on 40 years now and with the same, unsurprising solution -- transfer of wealth from ordinary people to national and supra-national organizations who are the only ones who can "save us."
It's long past time for people of good sense to stop listening to them.
Just when you thought the anti-war, anti-American left couldn't sink any lower, they plummet to Marianas Trench level. Below is a photo I snapped today of three absolute tools displaying their ignorance on Independence Mall in Philadelphia:
These morons have no idea how much harm they do their cause with stunts like this. A woman colleague of mine who is generally a liberal commented after seeing this display that these cretins ought to meet the business end of a blunt object.
For the record, I have no problem with legitimate expressions of dissent from President Bush's Iraq policy. Heaven knows, I've voiced it on occasion myself. But this approaches John Kerry-like status in terms of slandering our military.
