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Over the weekend if have been getting a
lot of hits from P.Z. Myers’
blog since someone linked to my desecration post in the comment
section.  The replies I have found to b rather funny in their
missing the point.  The commenter said to check out this guy
who wanted to get even by desecrating a microscope.  I guess
he and others totally missed that this is a parody site and that I
don’t think that P.Z. Myers hold’s microscopes sacred and of course it
was only a photoshop thing anyway.  Many seemed to have
totally missed this and the point I was actually making is that science
can only go so far.

It kind of reminds me  of the Richard
Dawkin’s rap video where later Dawkins’ didn’t get the video
and asked his readers whose side the video was on.

A commenter at Vox Popoli blog had a
great bit of satire on this.

1. Video posted around 11:00
 
2. 1 hour and 44 minutes later, Dawkins implores his more intelligent
readers to help inform him as to whose side the video is on (his side,
or not his side). He then pokes fun at people that think things are
funny that he doesn’t understand just in case it turns out to be ‘not
on his side.’ Comment #151544
 
3. Dawkins now presumably goes to sleep.

4. Nearly nine hours later, he wakes up and checks the post again. He
sees that his fellow scientific elites like the video, but also don’t
understand it. Dawkins tries to get in a little dig on postmodernism,
but just ends up making fun of his posters. Comment #151685
 
5. Nine and a half hours after posting, Dawkins wonders how his fellow
comrades could laugh at something they don’t understand. He then lauds
The Life of Brian as the pinnacle of comedic evolution. Comment #151704

6. A couple minutes after the last post, he gets in another jab at
Postmodernism. Comment #151713

7. Under chastisement for his humbuggery, Dawkins admits that Daniel
Dennett popping his head up from out of nowhere is, in fact, funny.
Comment #151715

8. Nearly ten hours after posting the video, someone postulates that
the humor is derived from the silly dancing bodies (not the satire).
Dawkins seems to accept this theory and thanks the poster for his
intellect. Comment #151723

9. Sixteen hours after first watching the video, Dawkins finally
realizes that it is, in fact, making fun of ‘his side.’ Dawkins defends
himself again by saying that he didn’t understand it. Comment #151849.

10. Seventeen hours after posting, Dawkins attempts to comprehend the
humor by equating similar scenes of incongruousness that Monty Python
has also done. Dawkins has apparently not yet pondered why, if this
were the only thing funny about the video, he did not catch on before
this. Dawkins chalks this up to the video not being funny, and
dismisses the obvious conclusion that his head is too big to see the
satire behind it. Comment #151889
 
11. The next day, Dawkins chimes in again to defend his Ph.D. status to
a poster who dared question it. Comment #152142
 
12. Nearly 36 hours after posting, Dawkins discovers what a ‘grill’ is
and waxes philosophic as to why Sam Harris would have one in the video.
The conclusion he comes up with is that it adds no humor to the video
and should not have been put in. Comment #152168
 
13. After a full three and a half days after first watching the video,
Dawkins (obviously perturbed at the fact he didn’t get that he was the
butt of the joke, when every other non-elite who saw it could tell in
an instant) attempts to equate the video with ‘The worst poem ever
written.’ He then satisfies himself by settling on the conclusion that
this is the only reason why people might like it. The final analysis is
that it’s not only ‘not good,’ and not even ‘pretty bad,’ but so
incredibly bad, that it is in fact, good. He gets in a snobbish comment
about the Bible for good measure. Comment #153061

This is not to say that atheist don’t
get parody since a lot of religious people also can be rather dense
when it comes to parody and totally missing the point.  Though
it is
rather ironic for people who describe themselves as brights somehow can
totally miss the point and take something much to seriously.

What I do really appreciate after looking
at some of the comments made over at P.Z. Myers blog is that I am
really happy that blogging didn’t exist when I was still an atheist.
 The advent of blogging developed during the time that I was
not yet in the Church, though moving towards it.  I am quite
glad that all the dumb things I likely would have said and my zero
understanding of philosophy is not recorded on a hard drive somewhere for
all eternity. I would no doubt have been a troll on religious blogs
mocking them for following their hunter-gatherer base religion and
flouting my own superiority.  As someone who is a hard SF geek
and who has followed science from a young age and has always been
fascinated by the sciences I can quite understand the attitude of the new
atheists and their followers.  “There but by the grace of God
go I” – yes I am pulling the grace card.  I still love the
sciences, the only difference is that I have gotten to know their
author.

MANASSAS, VA, July 31, 2008 (CNSweb) –
Articles about end-of-life ethics by two college professors, including
a bioethics professor at Loyola University of Chicago, have prompted a
rare public correction by the leading American bishops responsible for
pro-life activities and Catholic doctrine.

Cardinal Justin Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia and chairman of the
Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops (USCCB), and Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn.,
chairman of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, raise their concerns in
the August 4 issue of the Jesuits’ America magazine.

The bishops write that two previous America articles by John Hardt,
assistant professor of bioethics at Loyola University of Chicago’s
Stritch School of Medicine, and Thomas Shannon, emeritus professor of
religion and social ethics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, “appear
to misunderstand and subsequently misrepresent the substance of Church
teaching on these difficult but important ethical questions” about “our
moral obligations to patients who exist in what has come to be called a
‘persistent vegetative state.'”

Both professors argue for exceptions to Church teaching, thereby
allowing the removal of a feeding tube and hydration from such patients.

In his January article, Hardt cites a 2007 statement by the Vatican
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which teaches that
artificial nutrition and hydration may be withheld from a patient when
“in some rare cases” the treatment “may become excessively
burdensome.”  Using the example of his father, who has asked
not to receive artificial hydration and nutrition should he enter a
vegetative state, Hardt writes, “[M]y father has judged that the burden
of persisting in a vegetative state far outweighs the benefit of being
sustained that way.  This, in my view, is a very Catholic way
of thinking….”

Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori respond that Hardt wrongly defines
excessive burden as “a simple dislike for survival in a helpless
state.”  In fact, the bishops write, “that claim has no
foundation in the text [and] is actually contradicted” by the CDF.
…

Glad they reacted to this since these
type of article certainly must be addressed especially in a magazine
put out by a religious order whose founder’s Feast Day is today.

I have a new post up at Stuff Catholics Like.

A lot of WYD stories have concentrated on
it as a Catholic Woodstock, here is a different one.

Priests have set up emergency
confessionals as thousands of pilgrims surge on to Randwick Racecourse
– sleeping out in a vigil ahead of tomorrow’s final mass.

Priests have taken plastic chairs and are sitting on the ground to take
the “overwhelming” number of young people looking to confess their sins.

“There’s too much. I came at one o’clock and there were so many people
here I thought I had to help the other priests,” said Father Bernard
Speringer, a priest from Austria.

“The sisters had planned (for confession) but they were overwhelmed by
so many.

Also not covered are the catechetical session that go on during the day.

Earlier this week I was sent a story about and Anglican priestess with gnostic tendencies and for homosexual acts who was giving a conference on “centering prayer” at St. Olaf’s in Minneapolis. I didn’t post on it since I figured Archbishop Niestedt would take care of the problem. Faithful Rebel reports that this is indeed what has now happened and the class is being moved to an Episcopal church.

At St. Louis Catholic.

While the media was all over Tim Russert’s Catholic faith it has become a media black hole concerning Catholic convert Tony Snow.

A reader sent me a link to an ESPN video
on the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne in Atlanta and like all in their
order do great work.  The Church of Saint Vincent Ferrer blog
provides the background and the video.

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne were
founded in 1900 by Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
the famed nineteenth-century American novelist.  After her
conversion to Catholicism, Rose dedicated herself to caring for
incurable cancer patients on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 
Upon establishing her Dominican congregation, Rose took the name Mother
Alphonsa, and for over two decades she worked tirelessly for her
sisters and her patients.  Rose’s remarkable life story bears
constant repetition.  Her cause for canonization has been
introduced and is moving forward.

Eighty years after her death, Rose’s spiritual daughters continue to
live her charism in convents and nursing homes around the
country.  As a sign of their vigor and zeal, they recently
opened a new home in Kenya. 

In my mail I got a “breaking news alert” from the
National Catholic Reporter.  You know it has to be pretty
silly when they get in high dudgeon on something
concerning the Church.  In covering The archdiocese of St.
Louis and the attempted ordination of women let us see what upsets them.

The archdiocese of St. Louis authorized
the video recording of a Catholic women’s ordination ceremony that took
place in a synagogue last November. It then used the video, along with
photographs apparently taken from the video, as evidence to punish a
Catholic nun who attended the liturgy, according to several people
familiar with the case.

Sister of Charity Louise Lears was forced out of all church ministerial
roles and banned from receiving sacraments within the archdiocese by an
edict of St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke announced June 26.
    

You mean the archdiocese actually
videotaped a “ordination” ceremony
proudly advertised and announced before hand?  A faux ceremony
that now entitles those who directly participate with auto
excommunication. An excommunication reserved to the Holy See to remit.
A ceremony where those in his diocese flagrantly disobeyed their
archbishop and the Church.  Yeah the archdiocese would have no
reason to want to know who was attending this.  Then they
dared to actually punish a nun who was causing scandal and was
disobedient by being there.  Imagine that.

I also have to laugh at the word “edict”
which is what liberals call any Church document they disagree with.
 It was actually a decree of extra-judicial adjudication.

However, several people familiar with the documents, prepared by the
archdiocese that made up the case against her, strongly criticized what
they called the “surveillance” video-taping.

One of the confidential archdiocesan documents, according to
knowledgeable sources, was an affidavit giving permission to an
individual to attend the ceremony in order to record it. The record of
the ceremony is contained on two electronic discs in Lears’ file.

So surveillance is now videotaping a
ceremony open to the public.

“It was a surveillance video. That’s
exactly what it was,” said Sean Collins, a co-pastoral associate of
Lears at St. Cronan Parish until he resigned July 2nd, in part, he
said, to speak about what he says has been a grave injustice taken
against Lears.

“What disturbs me even more is that the video taping was premeditated,”
he said, referring to the affidavit authorizing it by the archdiocese.
 Collins did not see the document firsthand, but referred to
others who
had seen it.

Premeditated?  Well I guess in
that context everything we do is premeditated.  I guess also
that it wouldn’t be “disturbing” if the archdiocese had someone tape it
at the very last minute to avoid premeditation.  Sadly
progressives crack me up when they see the grave injustice of punishing
someone who is not faithful and is totally disobedient to her bishop.
 For them the problem is not that they do not at least give
religious submission of intellect and will as per Vatican II to what
has been infallibly defined by the ordinary Magisterium.  Oh
no it is the archdiocese’s fault for videotaping them in their extreme
disobedience.

The article also wonders why Sr. Lears was
“singled” out when the reality is that he bishop had previously issued
a summons and canonical admonition and she failed to appear to defend
herself.  She was also part of a pastoral team of a St. Cronan
parish whereas the other religious that attended were part of religious
orders directly and not working for the archdiocese.

Videotaping will send women back to the bad old days of secret ordinations on riverboats. Oh the shame.

Travis Boddreaux has developed an examination
of conscience for the iPhone. If you have one check it out
here and leave any comments here.