Sometimes it is so annoying so much of the symbols and ideas relating to Advent and Christmas are taken and bent to secular aims.  No this is not just another rant against the materialism of the season leading up to Christmas.  One of the things that has been adopted to secular purposes is the Advent Calendar.  It is very common now that such calendars leading up to Christmas are used to promote just about anything and usually with a materialist purpose.  They seem to be popping up everywhere with each day in the calendar promoting something else.

The latest example of this is:

For those not in the know this is from the latest version of the game Angry Birds which just released a new version.  Oh well I can pull the Catholic both/and and both prepare for Christmas on each day of Advent and play Angry Birds.

Originally an Angry Birds Halloween app was released and now it has been updated for Christmas.  This is a very popular game first introduced on the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch iOS platform and the original game was also later released on Android.  Angry Birds is very addictive as I well know and it took me a while to get three stars on all levels and versions of this game.

One nice thing about the new version is that the new levels only become available as the calendar date arrives.  This is quite good news for me that I am limited to only trying to get three stars on one level per day which gives me time to play Cut the Rope pray.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend an app on the Apple iTunes App Store was pulled. This was the app for the Manhattan Declaration. The Manhattan Declaration is a document in support of human life and marriage signed by close to half million Christians across the spectrum from Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, etc. The app had the text of the declaration along with a short survey section.

A petition was created by Michael Rogers on the liberal activist site change.org. Michael Rogers joined Change.org on November 11, and has created 3 petitions relating to “gay rights” including one against Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Whether Michael Rogers is the same homosexual activist named Michael Rogers best know for outing closeted homosexual politicians. The petition received a total of 7,727 signatures.

Please remove anti-LGBT, anti-women application from iTunes Store

Mr. Jobs:

I am joining with thousands of others in signing this letter to ask you to remove the Marriage Declaration application from the iTunes Store.

…

“Marriage Declaration” application? So Apple removed an app from a group that wasn’t smart enough to get the name of the Manhattan Declaration right?

This is of course the typical tactic to label opposition to same-sex marriage as “hateful and divisive language.” Any opposition however mild is hateful. But I guess they want to have apps that disagree with their worldview to be closeted, just as they want to closet any opinions contrary to to their worldview. Plus the whole idea of wanting to remove something because it was divisive is beyond silly. What subject is not divisive. The things everyone agree on is pretty limited. The problem is that truth is divisive and it will always be so.

Apple’s policy regarding the App store has always been rather nebulous and many apps have been pulled for reasons hard to discern with little or no explanation forthcoming. I certainly applaud Steve Jobs decision to not allow pornography in the app store and there are certainly apps that should not be approved. If someone really did write an app that encouraged violence against homosexuals or any other group, then such an app should never get approved. Previously Mark Fiore a political cartoonist had his app rejected, though later Apple relented. The removal of the Manhattan Declaration app for political reasons if some squeaky wheel activist group complains is a serious problem. Certainly Apple is a left leaning company from the top down, but do they really want to go down the road of censoring Christians?

Turnabout is fair play and there is a petition on the Manhattan Declaration site which already has 27166 signatures – 4 times as many as the change.org one. You can sign it here.

You can also email Steve Jobs directly at stevejobs@apple.com, which I did.

Reasonable since 1963? Yeah you didn’t want to deal with American Atheists before that date when they were unreasonable.

Now I like the Catholic Leagues response billboard, but it could have been better.  I would have addressed the topic of reason.

Jesus is the Reason for the Season and you can KNOW him via REASON.

The atheist’s thrust of celebrating reason and almost making an idol of it is that the atheistic worldview can not even account for reason or knowledge. To reduce the world to only the material and our actions to material processes and our thoughts the result of electrochemical processes utterly fails in relating to reality. Many atheists even deny free will and then will argue with you to change your mind in a failure to see the irony. The world is intelligible because there was an intelligence behind it. Reason if anything is evidence for the existence of God.

This atheistic worldview which denies the possibility that believers are using reason to come to their view is what causes them to create sneering billboards with the smarmy attitude “We use reason!!!” Theology as “faith seeking understanding” does not fit their universe of believers and stereotype of “blind faith.”

I found this question on Slashdot to be sad commentary on the acceptance of porn.

“I have a nephew who is very young, but who has the techie gene — he found the Gruffalo on youtube before anyone knew he could spell. Now he’s almost 4, and I was thinking of giving him my netbook (Acer running XP), which i hardly use any more. So of course I will be deleting all the porn, but what should I load up on it? Are there tools/apps that I can load up on it to protect it and him from things he shouldn’t see until college? Also, what apps or games could I load on it that a 4 year old will get some use out of?”

First there is the nonchalant “get my porn off” and then the concern to keep his Nephew from porn, at least until college. Reading some tech blogs and listening to some tech podcasts there seems to be a great openness to porn even among techie women where the subject is always seen as something almost humorous. Or that porn is just something age appropriate and that viewing it before a certain age should be stopped, but that after that age it is something just fine. I was introduced to forms of porn and dirty jokes at a young age by my father and it was quite damaging to me and certainly not something that became acceptable when I became an adult. The damage by porn is something that is becoming quite well researched in its effects, yet it is now something that our society just accepts or jokes about.

One of the the things about the whole Pope condom coverage is that almost always it tells you more about the person/group reporting the story than what the Pope actually said. People read into the Pope’s comment what they want to see, they read into their own thoughts.

One of the reasons I so respect apologist Jimmy Akin is that he is extremely careful to not give his own opinion on a subject, but what the Church has taught or a very close reading of the extent of what the Church has taught and how fare the application is. When he gives you his opinion he tells you it is his opinion. This was especially true with his coverage of what the Pope actually wrote and the extent of what the Church has taught.

Unfortunately such a treatment is very rare. The careless headlines which so dominated the coverage implied something else entirely and took no care at all in the reporting. The World Health Organization saying they “agreed totally” with the Pope’s comment did not mean that they are giving up passing out condoms as a way to help. They issued a statement when they had no idea what they were talking about. Gives you a lot of confidence in WHO. Other organizations did similar things.

But the press and secular organizations getting things wrong is nothing new and a stereotype that rings constantly true. My annoyance is with Catholics who did the same.

“It’s a step forward, because it is at the highest level the recognition that a pastoral approach in certain some particular cases is necessary where as before the use of a condom was always seen as intrinsically wrong,” he said.

“We should praise him for this. It shows that the Pope is a nuanced thinker. It also shows his awesome intellect.”…

“It’s the first admission from a pope that a condom can be used for a good intention,” said Father James Martin from New York. “Just a few years ago, the Vatican would have rejected these ideas outright, even though they had great currency among theologians. Clearly, something has changed.”

Ack! Yes because the normal ways the Papacy and the magisterium handles theological shifts is via interview books. Exactly what part of “But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection.” and “She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution” does Fr. Martin not understand! If it is not a moral solution it can not be advocated.

Plus as I saw from my comment boxes and other places Catholics applauding this phony shift and happy about promotion of condoms to fight HIV.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

There seems to be an almost Gnostic disconnect in this view. To encourage so-called safer sex when people are committing objectively grave sins. No mention of any effort to discourage such behavior. While your health is of supreme importance, the health of your soul is even more so. If you do commit a grave sin and fulfill the three-fold conditions of mortal sin the Devil is not going to give you time off for good behavior for using a condom. Plus adding the intrinsic evil of contraception is not going to help you either. The gospel of “They are going to do it anyway” is the preaching of Hell. We are all called to holiness and with God’s grace and our conformance to his grace we can answer that call. This false gospel so often preached ignores the fact that Jesus will always give his aid to not be tempted beyond our limits. When Christians are the enablers of “They are going to do it anyway”-ism they deny both the Gospel and grace.

The Pope repeatedly talked of “first steps” towards moralization. First steps are not the arrival towards living that morality. Making the first step is not the end of the journey. On a level of conversion we can see grace move in what might seem to be small steps, but the ends of conversion is growing in holiness – not just limiting the evil you are doing.

Shocked by attempted Christmas Tree lighting ceremony bombing. Growing up in Portland shocked they still call it a Christmas Tree

That is what I quipped yesterday on announcement of the foiled plot to use a car bomb to kill people at a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in Pioneer Square in Portland, Or. Having grown up in Portland I was rather surprised that they were referring it as a Christmas Tree. Well actually it was a Holiday Tree Lighting Ceremony though interestingly the press it not referring to it that way. I guess attempted Holiday Tree Lighting Bombing has an odd ring to it and kind of shows the shallowness of the PC attitude.

No doubt, Portland will learn nothing from this episode and if anything to try to be more inclusive will either cancel the event in the future or call it “A Random Lighting of a Tree for no particular reason and not associated with any religious event Ceremony.” Or maybe to be inclusive to a certain breed of Muslims they can have the Annual Car Bombing along kind of like an extreme bonfire with the Holiday Tree Lighting. In fact maybe the 19 year old Muslim thought to get into the spirit of the event by not only lighting up the tree but all the people at the event.

Though it really shows how silly the idea of a Holiday Tree being inclusive is. Everybody knows the Holy Day being celebrated even if it is in a secular fashion. Calling it a Holiday Tree fools nobody, not even militant Muslims. It is only a bit of secular cowardice by trying not to be offensive offends. They made up Kwanzaa as a phony holiday so I guess they need to create another phony holiday for Muslims that just happens to occur at this time of year. But then again there would be the complaining atheists that in the survival of the fittest are offended by others signs of religion. I guess being offended so easy is now a survival method.

It is a good thing that the FBI was on to this guy and of course great that the bombing would not occur. If it had happened though you can be sure that Janet Napolitano would have issued a All Points Bulletin looking for a group of rigorist interpreters of Advent upset that a Christmas Tree was being put up at the start of Advent.