The Pill's fiftieth anniversary

I'd like to keep on with the argument of my previous post, and I invite the LD to join in.

An occasion is offered by an article in the last issue of Time, devoted to the 50^th anniversary of the introduction of the Pill, its discovery and its effects, especially on the "sexual revolution" of the following decades.

In 1968 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humanae vitae, which raised an uproar of protests among Catholics, in particular in America.

What did it say that was so offending? The right answer might sound more or less like this: it reminded men, male and female, that they are by nature bodily beings, with all that this implies.

I heard said that the Pill represented a liberation of women from the burden of unwanted pregnancy. Well, the same Time's article remarks, women have always known how to avoid pregnancy when they didn't want it. Yes, contraception might have been less secure, but was available. Then we could say that it liberated women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy. Even this, I think, is relative. A decade later a much more dreadful way to liberate themselves from unwanted pregnancy was allowed, by the Supreme Court in the States and by the legislature in Europe.

No. I think that the long term effect of the Pill, foreseen by Pope Paul, was another.

It contributed to change the imagery of men. So that being bodily didn't require anymore the acceptance of the limits involved in it. What else could it mean to say that women were liberated by the Pill from a burden? Which burden, if not that of being women? A similar liberation was there expecting men.

No need consequently to identify with our own body (if you know what I mean).

However, it wasn't the Pill to start this change. It actually started already four centuries ago, when Descartes drastically distinguished, nay, separated res cogitans and res extensa, mind
and body, and saw men not as a unity of both, but as made by a strange connection of them of which he didn't know how to account.

Corollary: if sex belongs to the body, this means then that mind is asexual and can dispose of the body the way it wants.

Call this Cartesian dualism, or, with a more sophisticated notion, gnosticism.

HP

The Greeks Called Him SPOUDAIOS

I saw this story this morning, and I thought I'd pass it along.

It's about a college football player who graduated in 2 1/2 years with a 3.75 GPA (for you European readers, that is a very, very, very rare achievement), and spent last year as a Rhodes Scholar.

Now, the Tn. Titans have drafted him.

Until very, very, very recently, scholastic excellence included athletic excellence. To excel at school meant to excel in the classroom, and on some playing field.

We yet took seriously the idea of mens sana in corpore sano.

It is good to know that some of us still do.

LD

George Weigel Replies to Fr. Hans Kung (quanno ce vo', ce vo')

George Weigel has written an open letter to Fr. Hans Kung, in reply to Fr. Kung's unfortunate piece in the Irish Times, itself an open letter to the world's bishops.

Weigel's letter contains at least one error of fact, i.e. an erroneous identification of then Proff. Ratzinger and de Lubac as Council Fathers (they were periti, "theological experts" who acted as consultors to the Council Fathers), which unfortunately requires us to withold absolute and unqualified praise of Weigel's effort as a paragon of polemical elegance.

Even so, Weigel's essay is more than an excellent polemical exercise - it merits consideration as one of the finest contributions to its literary genre in recent memory.

It also happens to hit the nail on the head.

Money quotes:

"[Y]ou have lost the argument over the meaning and the proper hermeneutics of Vatican II. That explains why you relentlessly pursue your fifty-year quest for a liberal Protestant Catholicism, at precisely the moment when the liberal Protestant project is collapsing from its inherent theological incoherence."

"I understand odium theologicum as well as anyone, but I must, in all candor, tell you that you crossed a line that should not have been crossed in your recent article, when you wrote the following:

'There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005).'

"That, sir, is not true. I refuse to believe that you knew this to be false and wrote it anyway, for that would mean you had willfully condemned yourself as a liar. But on the assumption that you did not know this sentence to be a tissue of falsehoods, then you are so manifestly ignorant of how competencies over abuse cases were assigned in the Roman Curia prior to Ratzinger’s seizing control of the process and bringing it under CDF’s competence in 2001, then you have forfeited any claim to be taken seriously on this, or indeed any other matter involving the Roman Curia and the central governance of the Catholic Church."

As enticing, as polemical engagement is, and indeed precisely because of its ability to inebriate - even intoxicate - I do not generally advocate it. The Romans have an expression, however, reported in the title of this post: quanno ce vo', ce vo', which roughly translates, "Sometimes, you've just got to have at it."

This was one of those times, and Weigel has acquitted himself admirably.

Read the rest here.

LD

Status Update - and a nod to Nietzche

After so much time out of circulation, I am finding it hard to get back into the swing of blogging.

I share some of the HP's embarrassment at beginning, crafting and finishing a piece - and I also find that the frenetic pace of commentary (leave aside the impossibly intense 24/7 "news" cycle) makes it extremely difficult to offer serious analysis that is also timely.

By the time I have thought through an issue - at least far enough through it to be able to say something moderately intelligent - the world around me has largely moved on.

I firmly believe that the sickness is with the world, not with my thinking of it (and here, I am reminded of Emerson's claim to the effect that he knows the world he converses with in the city and the farms is not the world he thinks - though I am not certain whether I am reminded after Plato or after Heraclitus. I mean to say that Aristotle's remonstration with his master is different in result (at least) from that, with which Cratylus engaged his own master, Heraclitus, over the matter of a river and our chances in it).

I stand for slow and perfect reading - for endless listening and endless response:

[W]e are friends of the lento, I and my book. I have not been a philologist in vain — perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste — a perverted taste, maybe — to write nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is ‘in a hurry.’ For philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all — to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow — the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language: an art which must carry out slow, fine work, and attains nothing if not lento. Thus philology is now more desirable than ever before; thus it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of ‘work’: that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-skurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’ at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not so hurriedly ‘get things done.’ It teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes. My patient friends, this book appeals only to perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!

Let me only say, "philosophy".

LD

The real ground of disagreement

To write a post is, at least for me, a demanding thing.

To write, period, is for me demanding.

Why? you might ask.

Simple, because of the creeping civil war.

The easiest thing is to take side, and to write for one's own side. But it is equally easy, by so doing, to fall into the traps laid by the other side, and accept its premises.

A widely accepted premise, is that sexual matters concern morality, and that morality is tied to religion, and that religion is out of discussion – meaning that it is something about which no discussion is possible, being a matter of personal opinion and not of truth.

Only remains to distinguish right and wrong, according to this premise, the law. It also follows that the only limit the law can put to people's right to do what they want, is there being consent among the parties involved. Which have to be, therefore, on an equal footing.

It is hard, when that basic premise is granted, to argue otherwise. If one tries to do it, claiming that there are not negotiable moral values, he can be easily silenced with the accusation of wanting to thwart people's rights. And he can be singled out for public disapproval if some of his associates have indulged in practices that violate the requirement of consent, as the only criterion for judging of right and wrong

Am I defending them? No way, I am only trying to understand why the present debate goes the way it does.

It goes in a way that the real premises on which agreement fails remain actually hidden.

Disagreement is not about morals – not at least if morality is understood as described above. It concerns our self-understanding as "men": let's say, bodily beings conscious of their being such.

There is then one side, that keeps on speaking of spiritual matters, where actually our bodily being is looked at as important for what we are and for how we should relate to each other. There is another side, agnostic in spiritual matters if not utterly negative toward them, that actually looks at our bodily being as irrelevant, just a sort of property of which we can dispose at our will.

Do you find this obscure?

If you do, I wouldn't be surprised, because it is so far from our contemporary culture, dominated as it is by a mind-body or spirit and matter dualism. That's why writing is, as I said, a hard and demanding thing.

HP

Homosexual character

Here there is one touching the forbidden topic: that priests' abuses so much motive of scandal in and out of the Church are largely of an homosexual character!

HP

The one and the other party of the creeping civil war

Democracy was newly born in the West a couple of centuries ago, from the understanding of the equal dignity of each person brought about by Christianity. But the freedom it grants to everybody to express and promote his way of thinking and living, allowed an anti-Christian understanding of the equality of all men largely to affirm itself as the true basis of democracy.

So democracy was turned into a creeping civil war, that, I fear, will endanger its survival.

In the world of ideas, thrown there to conquer consensus with the electoral body, the war is an open one. Both parties – let's call them, for what is worth, "liberal" and "conservative" – accuse the other of being the real threat to democracy. It doesn't matter how much we might hate being partisan, we are forced to take sides. The only thing we can do, not to be simply fan of one or the other side, is to try to understand the point of contention.

Of course I already know that only one is helpful in this regard: the one that states the other's point of view correctly.

They diverge, I'd say, in the understanding of justice. And I am not making offence to the party I am against, but just relate what they themselves say, if I maintain that for them justice coincides with equality.

The trouble is that people are different: men and women, children and grown ups of all ages, look and size, not to speak of social origin and tradition. And all this cannot be merely denied and considered indifferent, without risking of being unjust. Everybody expects in fact to be treated according to his worth. Classical ethics and politics offers a sound conceptualization of what makes for just intercourse among people, by questioning what makes the real worth of people, to specify the meaning of its definition of justice, still well summarized as "giving to everybody his due". To this Christianity added that his due also includes recognition of his dignity as human being made "in the image and similitude of God", with all that this requires.

Take away the classical tradition of ethics and politics kept up and enriched by Christianity, and equality becomes enforced uniformity.

Unfortunately things are not black and white. So it happens that even the Church, that best represents and defends the side on which I stand, is affected by the confusion concerning equality coming from the other side. And this becomes occasion of scandal, that makes her enemies hopefully to decry her in a moral wreckage.

Or is it their own wreckage they show?

HP

History is history

History is history, which means that it happened and nothing we can do about it, save try to understand it.

For centuries the Church acted in a secular context characterized by a monarchical and aristocratic articulation of society. There it became, in spite of the initial opposition, the main culture of the people, so it was in her that the princes searched for a justification of their representation, that made them other than tyrants. Of course, so the history goes, at the same time the princes tried over again to make of her just the spiritual side of their power: in a word, to subordinate her to themselves as to the true anointed by the Lord.

But there is a little particular: every Christian is, in the Church, anointed.

So for centuries the only one to remind the princes of this little particular was the Pope: the papacy was, over again, the only bulwark to the absolutism of secular monarchs, who in turn claimed exclusive holiness for their kingdoms.

By itself, I could say, the Church (the only one, holy catholic church) is a transcendent monarchical institution, established by God through Christ, leaving Peter and the other apostles with their successors, the Pope and the Bishops, to spread his Spirit through the people, so to have everybody share, once anointed, in his divine kingship.

Things have not changed even after that, also because of the long term effect of the Church's work in society, monarchy left the way to democracy in the secular constitution of states.

In Europe, this required in order to happen a series of revolutions, from Luther's protest to the juvenile movements of the late Sixties. It happened that people, moved by the sense of the equal personal dignity they owed to the Church, saw her on the side of the monarchical and aristocratic powers that be, and so turned also against her as an impediment to their divine freedom. But in this way, having deprived their dignity of its transcendent justification, they followed the way of the old princes, and tended to turn into tyrants.

This again is history, and I don't need to remind the ways this turn to tyranny took. But perhaps I do need to remark that this turn can take a soft as well as a hard face: a needed reminder now days, when the soft character of tyranny risks to make it invisible to us.

Different was the experiment in democracy made in America: not against the Church, but leaving the churches free to educate people to the required royal virtue. Of course, perfection is not of this world, and even the American experiment is subject to the temptation of soft tyranny.

That tyranny it is, is recognizable precisely by the attacks moved to the Church and the Pope.

There are derailing priests, betraying their order by indulging in "paiderastia" (today it is called "pedophilia")? So what is new: that men are sinners, and such unfortunately stay also within the Church, is again history. Nothing to marvel about.

I would marvel only if it were a phenomenon of such diffusion in the Church to exceed by a long stretch its presence in other sectors of human society. Which is in no way the case, quite the contrary.

This means therefore that the Church is attacked for the same old reasons, that she is there to remind people of belonging to a higher society than the one represented by any state of this world. Thus she reminds them of their freedom of children of God, being, because children, heirs, and sharing, because heirs, of his sovereignty.

Hence the royal liberty that makes democracy – the democracy we cherish – possible, keeping us from the otherwise inevitable servitude, to others as well as to ourselves.

HP

More about Christ’s kingship and us

A little political supplement to my last post, for whomever might be surprised by my reference to Christ sacrifice as "kingly" (with some implications for the question of bipartisanship raised in the one but last post).

I am used to say that there are two different ways to understand democracy: that in democracy there are no kings; that in democracy everybody is called to be king.

Another more provocative way of saying the same thing is that democracy either is Christian or it is nothing: meaning that, if it is not such it ceases to be what it claims to be.

To understand what I mean, one has to know the historic and ethnographic evidence concerning kingship, where someone is deemed worthy of being king by his capability of giving all: even life. His figure appear then as an eminently sacrificial one.

If I add that only in Christ the idea of king is fully realized, then my statement might look less provocative: because, by adhering to him, we come to share of his kingship.

Kingship becomes democratized.

The corollary is that those who are attacking the Church and the Pope are not only enemies of religion but also of democracy.

HP

A gift of life

It might be proper to put down something on Easter.

As if it were an easy thing to do!

First of all we should recollect what we are celebrating; or better, where our celebration stems from.

Why, you could say, it is clear: the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Yes, but wherefrom do we know about it? The answer is less obvious than it should be: the Church – i.e., the first witnesses, whose testimony was on one side written down in the New Testament, while on the other was kept alive in the community of their successors.

Let's recover the marvel of it: in the old times of Tiberius, second Roman emperor, a little bunch of Jews started going around preaching, by telling a strange story.

Everybody can read it in St. Peter's words at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. On my side I like to put it in this way:

Our teacher, who had done and said great things, and from whom we expected still greater ones, was taken prisoner and put to death. We were dumbfounded, utterly discouraged, thinking that was the end of all our hopes. And yet… three days later we saw him alive again, he stayed with us and ate with us.

Quite marvelous, isn't it? To see a man who had been dead, alive again.

Mind me well: they didn't say "we saw his ghost", but "we saw him in the flesh".

Today we might be prone to attribute it to their credulity. But no, for them it was as incredible as for us, men of a disenchanted world. Otherwise, if he had been just a ghost, there wouldn't have been much to marvel about, nothing to preach about.

Besides the marvel, what did that mean for them? That a priestly king had offered himself in sacrifice, once and for all.

Do you know what is a sacrifice, and how it pertains to a king? If you don't, try to think of the gift of life that men make for those whom they love; and, in Jesus' case, multiply by infinite.

HP

Democracy: a creeping civil war?

It pains me strongly the profound division that affects our western democracies.

Now Obama had his law on health reform passed. But at what price!

I do not enter in the merit of the thing. From what I read on the newspaper I trust, it isn't a radical thing, on the contrary, it is rather moderate, to the point, it suggests, that it could have won a bipartisan consensus. Instead, it was passed without a single republican vote. And it left the country more polarized than ever.

Why to do it this way?

All of Obama's talk in electoral campaign about wanting to reconcile the country revealed itself just hot air.

Is it possible, I ask, that our democracies have to be some sort of creeping civil war among at least two opposing factions?

HP

Abortive Attempt to Reform Health Care

I recently had an exchange with an old and dear friend, who, as a result of a comic case of mistaken identity, engaged me in a discussion of abortion, its legality, and the best way to help assure that abortions do not happen.

My friend encouraged me to support adoption, rather than decry abortion, saying that time and resources are better spent in positive rather than destructive work.

Below is an excerpt from my reply, revised and expanded for present purposes:

Dear ________,

I share in your dismay over many pro-lifers' incessant and often seemingly exclusive desire to condemn, decry and denounce.

I do believe that people who hold in the sanctity of life have a duty to allow their conviction to inform their action.

I often find myself saying to fellow pro-lifers: "Well, why would you expect the folks on the other side of the issue to listen to what you have to say, after treating them as you have? Are you generally well disposed to total strangers who accost you on the street and call you a murderous monster? Screaming and shouting invective may make you feel better for five minutes, but if what you want from your pro-life advocacy is a fleeting feeling of righteousness, or worse, a permanent sense of moral superiority, then I am afraid I cannot come with you."

The thing is, the vast majority of pro-life people see it as I do, and act accordingly. You and most folks hear only the loudest, and not the best or most representative voices in our chorus. This is very sad, for it leads many people, as it has apparently led you, to believe that people in the pro-life camp are angry, self-righteous prigs perpetually in peril of tumbling permanently into full-blown hypocrisy. When you have for your interlocutors such people as I have described, and only such as I have described, it is easy to avoid asking yourself whether the position they espouse may have some small grain of merit, their convictions a crumb of truth.

Too easy, if I may.

More important, however, and much more disappointing, is your apparent inability to distinguish the question of personal witness, which is essentially private, from the essentially public question of policy, and the debate of the relative merits of various public policy positions, and the more basic issues on the ground of which those questions of policy are debated.

Take Roe, for example: I think it is a bad opinion, and ought to be overturned. I think it ought to be overturned in a way that returns the question to the states, where the power to police the medical profession has traditionally been and generally is lodged in our system.

I think Roe is bad because it is based on the notion that the absolute liberty of opinion, which we have by nature and in which we are protected under fundamental law, circumscribes a whole area of conduct and segregates it from the oversight and regulation of legislatures - and so on grounds that the area is "private".

There are two problems with this:

1. Nothing involving more than one person is private: abortion involves at least the pregnant woman and a doctor. The claim to protection under privacy constructions, even granting these last, mus appear to you to be utterly absurd, when you consider that abortion clinics and providers are subject to all public health laws.

2. While it is true that no man-made law can compel a person’s assent to a given opinion, yet a government must be able to regulate conduct in order to fulfill its duty to protect life; in a regime such as the American one, where the power to make law rests with elected legislatures, such bodies must be assumed not only competent, but duty-bound to enact laws based upon the informed consensus their members reach regarding opinable questions such as the proper age to drink, the maximum permissible speed at which a motor vehicle may move, and when human life begins.

Now, you may not ever come to agree with my way of thinking. You may not dismiss it as religiously motivated, let alone as the raving of a religious fanatic.

Let me offer the following appeal to everyone involved in public policy debate, and especially to those in public intellectual life: as we engage each other, let us always remember to ask our interlocutors to share their their position(s), and let us never foist personal caricatures upon our interlocutors.

At Long Last: a reply to the HP in re Prophet

It has been too long, since I appeared in these pages, if I do say so myself.

A good deal of water has passed under the bridge in that time, and I have much to say about it all, especially about the health care reform legislation that just passed, about the debate over it, and the consequences of it.

Before I get to those things, however, I owe a reply to the HP, who has kept the hearth admirably in my absence.

The issue is one of closed versus open witness, articulated in two separate posts (part 1 & part 2).

Specifically, the question is whether the description of Mohammad as "the prophet" in journalistic pieces is a violation of the neutrality that ought to attend the practice of that profession.

I tend to think it is, generally.

Coupled with journalists' and editors' naked references to Jesus, i.e. to Jesus sic et simpliciter, rather than as, "Christ", the appellation, "the prophet", is definitely inappropriate when attached to the founder of Islam.

The reason for this is that the two claims are basically incompatible: if Jesus is the Anointed One of the Lord, in the sense His followers claim He is, then the founder of Islam is a false prophet. Conversely: if Mohammad is a prophet in even the loosest possible interpretation of the sense he claims to be, then the claim of Jesus' followers, i.e. their participation in the confessio petri, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God," is utterly vacant and completely false.

So, to call Mohammad a prophet is to violate the spirit of journalistic neutrality.

I would propose referring to Jesus as Jesus, and to Mohammad as either Mohammad, or as the founder of Islam.

As the HP points out, to call Him by name is not to deny His nature.

Best,
LD

An invitation

I am waiting for the Lazy Disciple's repartee on my recent comments on how to call the founder of Islam and why.

I know in fact that, while in agreement with the general intent of what I said, he doesn't agree with my granting Muhammad the title of "prophet".

I tried to explain in the last post the why of a possible granting of that title to that man: everybody is a "prophet" for that in whose name he is claiming to speak.

Probably, by saying so, I strand away from the current use of the word, to which we should after all stick, if we don't want to engender confusion.

The trouble is that confusion is already there in our current use of words. Taking words – like prophet – in their simple etymological meaning, is just a way to befuddle the reader, inviting, nay, provoking him to question the current use.

Who knows, it might help to make some clarity and dispel the present confusion!

HP

Notification:

Iàve been under a rock with work for a couple of weeks. I have lots to say to my stalwart fellow, the Humbly Presumptuous, and will be doing so starting tomorrow morning.

LD

Closed and open witness II

It's a week that I am brooding over the conclusions of the previous post, and consequently the title I gave to it, thinking they need some explanations, while, taken by other business, I didn't find the time to give them.

The other business is my teaching cultural anthropology. Now, we all know how close the question of culture is to that of religion, to the point that I dare say that religion is nothing else than culture, i.e. the understanding of the world out of which we live in its ultimate implications.

Multiculturalism is therefore nonsense. Even to declare all cultures equally legitimate, it's a way of affirming one's understanding of the world, and hence one's culture.

So, these days I was trying to introduce my students to cultural anthropology by explaining them this simple fact: simple, and though hard to accept in our liberal society, where what we call science is actually the culture by which we are taught to understand the world.

Thus, believe it or not, the problem we face with science is specular to the one raised by the religion of the book.

With the name of science it is brought forward a knowledge that is claimed to be based on evidence, and not on faith in someone, let's call him a prophet.

From Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century to Karl Popper in the Twentieth Century, the objection advanced to any talk of revelation is the same: you claim to have had an experience of God speaking to you; I don't say you didn't, but neither I can say you did, because I have no way to tell, being the evidence you appeal to foreclosed to me.

That's because you don't want to see the evidence available to you as proof of where my words come from – could the prophet retort, and throw the ball back to the scientist: your evidence is good enough to build atomic bombs, but not to prove that by so doing we achieve control of nature, because there is no such thing, but only God's will, to which we submit ourselves even when building such bombs.

Here it is the result of direct witness for alleged evidence: two kinds of "prophesy", speaking in the name of God or in the name of Nature, set the one against the other.

Reciprocally closed.

Cultural anthropology, instead, at least as I understand it, withdraws from such a confrontations of opposing prophetic claims. It's task is to take comparatively into exam men's witness. By way of this, the evidence it appeals to is neither immediately of God or of Nature, but of what human beings represent for each other.

Should we say their divine nature? God's potentia present in them and among them?

HP

Closed and open witness

How should the press refer to the son of Mary, in comparison, say, to the founder of Islam?

An article I run into sounded rather appalled by the familiar Jesus often used in recent articles instead of Jesus Christ; while the same newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) would preface the name of Muhammad with the title of Prophet.

Does this mean to recognize in Muhammad the "prophet of God", and make of Jesus a simple historical figure? And the same goes with Moses, equally mentioned without titles?

I don't think so.

Perhaps this use shows a concern to be over respectful of Muslim sensibility; but there is also something else.

I remember when I was in America, and I had at times occasion to deal with the kind of evangelicals who would ask, "Do you believe in Jesus?"

They didn't say: Jesus Christ, simply Jesus.

No way to be mistaken: nobody else bears his name.

Jesus is only him, that unique historical figure of whom it is witnessed that lived in Palestine about two thousand years ago, said and did formidable things, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died and was buried and… it is not the end of the story, because it is also witnessed to have been seen again alive.

On the contrary, Muhammad is a very common name among Muslims. By itself, this might not justify the adding of the prophet to the name, which, when used without specifications, shouldn't engender confusion. It would unequivocally refer to that historical figure who…

Who did what? Well, proclaimed himself "prophet", and, with those who believed him, waged war against those who didn't believe him.

Does this sound too reductive? It might be, but I don't think it is; if anything, it is just too short a summary of his life.

So, I willingly grant the title of "prophet" as part of the name. After all, that is the one Muhammad demanded for himself, and a detached observer can concede it. With the mental reserve of keeping the right of asking what it means: whom or what he speaks for.

The answer one gets, by reading the Quran, is quaint.

The book reports in writing Muhammad's words, uttered in trance as coming from out of him. What is quaint is the short circuiting of the witness so given. As prophet, Muhammad should bear witness to God; but, to the question how one knows to be so, he has no better answer than saying that it is so because God bears witness to him.

The detached observer, that I am, cannot help feeling a pang of dissatisfaction: he is left with the unavoidable doubt, whether Muhammad isn't actually bearing witness, through God's name, just to himself.

How much better, then, that simple familiar Jesus, naming someone who nothing wrote, and about whom we know that he bore witness to the Father because others bore witness to him. This way, doubts are open to reasoning on the nature of witness.

HP

To account for knowledge

You are always asking questions, and rarely give answers. It's right, how could I if there were no questions raised? After which anybody could see that at the heart of all political debates is the understanding of religion and science: what science is, and, correlatively, religion.

Let me give an answer: science is
a knowledge capable of accounting for itself.

Everyman, to whatever society he belongs, is convinced to have knowledge of the world he lives in, and accounts for it to the other members of his society. Are we able to do the same and to account for the knowledge of world in a society become planetary?

Well – so runs the average reply in liberal society – we have to distinguish: yes, for science, no, for culture and religion.

The trouble is that such an answer contains a petitio principii: it presupposes that there is a knowledge for which it is already reserved the name of science, while it is precisely the use of such a name that is in question.

We saw a couple of years ago, in occasion of the sentence of a tribunal in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, where this leads to: the demise of any rational discourse, by which knowledge could account for herself. As the sole justification for his sentence, stating that only the most accredited theory of evolution by chance is scientific, while any talk of intelligent design is a matter of religious faith, the judge gave the fact that such is the current use of the two words, science and religion.

It was like saying, on his part: I am competent to judge of a similar question because after all even the experts have no reasons to give, one way or the other.

Because there are no reasons to be given, not just for culture and religion but even for science, so called, all knowledge remains unaccounted for.

If the definition given above is correct, as I think it is, present day Western society appears, in spite of all the boasting for scientific achievements, very poor of real science.

To close, just a hint to further answers: only by turning to the Word made flesh, as the key to a comparative study of culture that includes together science and religion, so called, we can achieve a knowledge capable of accounting for itself.

HP

An European and an American question

The main difference between Europe and America…

Wait a minute, which Europe and which America do you mean here? Easy, America and Europe as they stand today, as political entities called EU and USA.

However, if you insist, I'll qualify them, from the cultural bias prevailing in one and the other, as new Europe and old America.

Funny thing, to qualify them in this way, one would rather think the reverse: Europe being old and America new!

It's not really so, because America appears to be closer to the overall European tradition than Europe, where the fashion of the day appears to be the detachment from her own tradition, often rejected with venomous hatred. It is there to prove it what I started saying:

the main difference between Europe and America is that in the USA nobody taking a radical anti-religious stance, say, with open declarations of atheism, would have any hope of being elected to high office. Not so in the EU, where it is quite the opposite, and declaring oneself a man of faith might even be politically an handicap.

Therefore the first, European question is: who, between an atheist and a theist, has a better claim to be a thinking man with the science necessary to govern?

The second, American question is: does any theism whatsoever enables to such a science?

HP

I love America

I live in Europe… and I love America.

What do you love in America? Europe, of course.

Then you love Europe, where you live. No way, I detest it.

And what do you detest in it? America, of course.

You are teasing us. Well, yes and no: I wanted to signal the ambiguity of the names by way of which we advance our claims.

The fact is that there are two Europes in America fighting each other:

an older one – made of Protestant Catholic and Jews – that found the way of flourishing in America, by an ongoing struggle to make her worth weigh more than her defects;

a newer one, that sprung from the older one with the claim to correct her defects once and for all, by exchanging reliance on faith with that on the rule of law: church with the state.

Over here, one of them Europes hates America; but was ready to love her again when Obama was elected, and showed her love by an unwarranted peace prize, declaring in this way: now you are like us.

Which is like which? One feeds on the other.

So, this America beloved by this Europe hates in herself the other Europe, hated in turn by this Europe as America, i.e. the other America.

It might be useful at this point to speak of Europe1 and Europe2, and in the same way of America1 and America2. This would clarify things. But things have to be kept muddy, because it is in the unspecified name of Europe and of America that claims are made to represent the overall thing.

Barak Obama, for instance, made some ambitious claims of wanting to rejuvenate America, in a way, he made it sound, to unify the two Europes in her.

The appearance, however, didn't last long.

Hey, with all this you haven't clearly come out in the open and declared which Europe or America you are for. And most of all you haven't told us yet why you started by saying that you love America.

It's clear, to make a claim. In Europe, for all the political squabbles, the fight is rather dormant. In America, it appears still quite lively. Here you have what I like in America, that makes America different from Europe. With this, if you don't see in favor of what or whom I am making the claim, there is nothing I can do about it.

HP

P.S. All this was prompted by the reading of Marc Steyn's article on which the LD called our attention. If you want, you can blame him.