Sense a pattern here?

Pope Benedict has called on priests to use the new Media to spread the Gospel. So I have started a blog for my weekly homilies. Please visit it at

http://romancatholichomilies.blogspot.com/

Long Live Pope Benedict XVI

Liberals are as bad as you are? That's the way you justify your faith?

Good job.

They're just as bad, but won't man up to it, that's the difference.

Reminds me of a guy I used to know. He would've suffered a concusion if you'd hit him below the belt.

In a word: tribalism. Without a transcendent point of reference - i.e., the Magisterium of the Catholic Church - we fall into blatant relativism.

Funny thing is, those who have abandoned or rejected Catholic truth (a) think they've never been so lucid in their lives, and (b) inevitably fall into predictable patterns of neo-paganism, complete with human sacrifice: the correct understanding of abortion and infanticide.

Then again, it's not so funny.

Jeff H., I've made that same parellel of paganism of the past and neo-paganism's human sacrifice via abortion and infanticide, except I see a possible flaw. Did not pagans historically sacrifice what they valued? Children & virgins were highly valued and therefore given over to appease the gods. Today's pagans do not value human life, except their own. Am I wrong? Is there an anthropologist in the house?

Teresa,

In idolotry one sacrifices not so much what one values highly as what most readily appeases the gods. Ultimately, idolotry is the worship of oneself, and what ultimately most appeases the modern idolator is the sacrifice of others, in the service of that abyssal autonomous self.

Regards

Teresa,

In idolotry one sacrifices not so much what one values highly as what most readily appeases the gods. Ultimately, idolotry is the worship of oneself, and what ultimately most appeases the modern idolator is the sacrifice of others, in the service of that abyssal autonomous self.

Regards

Reminds of the adage: "Evil is as evil does."

I would say that Roman Polanski may need drug rehab if he thinks that drugging and sexing up an underage girl, even if it happened 30+ years ago, is okay.

The modern left is heir to the philosophies and movements which spawned it. To a large extent that means the Communist Party of the United States, the New Left, etc.
Marxism/liberalism/progressivism are secular religions. However, these religions are allowed in government schools. That's no accident.
Earlier generations justified, even to themselves, Stalin's extermination of millions of political opponents, real and imagined. Today, liberals regularly smear their political opponents as racists. Then they accuse conservatives of lowering the level of political debate! That's what I call chutzpah! The sad part is many liberals don't even see their own contradiction.
They will destroy anyone who opposes them and excuse anyone who sides with them. That's because politics is about more than politics to the left. They don't merely hold political views; they have an ideology which defines them and gives their lives meaning. Their ideology fills the void which religion fills for others. They are zealots, and they have their own infidels and heretics, of whom they are absolutely intolerant.
This is why liberals can talk of free speech one day, and shout down, or even assault, a conservative speaker on a college campus the next. In their mind, there isn't even a contradiction between the two.
It has been said, "Conservatives think liberals are wrong. Liberals think conservatives are evil." Fanatical zeal can do strange things.

Please take note of this RED HERRING PATTERN: not excommunicating "Catholic" lawmakers.... funding abortions under so called health care provisions:

Read my comment in The American Papist today:
Many of those abortion promoters, call themselves "Catholic".

Arch. Burke, has the authority, Vatican Prefect (Cabinet Minister of the Pope), to summon in Rome HUNDREDS of USA bishops who do not take the CANON LAW step of giving PUBLIC notice to... those HORRENDOUSLY SCANDALOUS lawmakers FOR urgent excommunication.

THIS S-C-A-N-D-A-L LEADS MILLIONS INTO THINKING THAT GENOCIDE IS OK. More to the point: a modest electrician helping a surgical abortion is AUTOMATICALLY excommunicated.

With all due respect Arch. Burke: TAKE RESPONSIBILITY!, N-O-T announcing: Hey Hiroshima exploded! (the massive sacrilege of those lawmakers receiving the Eucharist in DC on the Papal Mass 2008), or: Hey Nagasaki exploded! (two cardinals PRASING THE LEGACY of pro-abortion leader Ted Kennedy in his burial).

Both happenings were LONG ADVANCED IN THE MEDIA horrifying one billion Catholics in TV world-wide. And you? Proclaiming this WAS wrong? PLEAAAASE!!!

Just two examples, of talking and not walking the culprits to some cells in the Vatican to refresh their meditations.

I would add a fourth example: David Letterman's obscene and disgusting "joke" about Sarah Palin's daughter 14-year-old daughter and the baseball player.

I just finished reading Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome. Your post and his novel dovetail quite nicely. I think you're both dead-on.

Our culture has set up sexual freedom as a false god. As believers in the ideology that says sexual freedom is the highest good, people will sacrifice anything in order to have this pleasure and prevent or dispose of the act's natural consequences. We scoff at the Romans who would gorge at banquets and then vomit so they could eat again, and we recognize bulemia as a disease, but we don't acknowledge that birth control and abortion are just like bulemia. People who abort sacrifice their children, and in so doing, they also do violence to their own human emotions. I have known women who grieved greatly after they aborted a child, just as they would after any other death. Their breasts were full of milk, and they ached for their child physically and emotionally, although not intellectually. Sometimes the abortive father was there to comfort them for their "hard choice," which is a ludicrous picture to my mind's eye. It seemed to me that those who aborted didn't realize that their pain was evidence of their own bodies' acknowledgement of the reality of their having killed their own child. Believing that the abortion was the right thing to do, they steeled themselves to endure the painful consequences. The pity was all for themselves, not for the child. At least not consciously. It's all very sad.

Did not pagans historically sacrifice what they valued? Children & virgins were highly valued and therefore given over to appease the gods. Today's pagans do not value human life, except their own. Am I wrong?

Like the time-honored killing of the first-born son to insure fertility, one just had to buck up and do it. René Girard (Catholic, recent inductee to the L'Académie française) in his mimetic theory anthropology factors in the cathartic effect: usually done on the 8th day so as to insure that "value" - the relationship to the living, beautiful baby is shattered by the infanticide. This is truly a valuable sacrifice to the god(s).

Sure; abortion today doesn't allow for this same cathartic effect. It may be one reason why we keep doing it; because it doesn't work. It isn't cathartic enough, so we also try sacrificing many other things: marriages, friendships, scapegoating colleagues at work.

It is all easier than doing the hard work of the gospel: forgiving and being forgiven, loving and being loved unconditionally as God loves (αγάπη agápē).

Yes. I do sense a pattern here, which is why I posted "The Three Deadly Sins" on October 6th.