A reader points out to me that . . . .
(POTTY-MOUTH WARNING!)
Don’t know whether this is true or not, but it might be.
I also should point out something I forgot to mention the other day: The stories you read about Luther posting the 95 Theses on a church door may well be false.
A reader writes:
Can you give us some guidance on your blog regarding the new Compendium [of the Church’s social teachings] that came out this week?
How do we answer critics who say that it elevates lesser social issues to a position on par with pro-life issues?
I am very reluctant to comment on a text without having the chance to examine it firsthand. This is why I haven’t commented on the Comendium thus far. For an unknown reason, it doesn’t seem to have yet been posted online, and although I put in a request to have a hardcopy shipped to us extra-expedited, it hasn’t yet arrived (probably will arrive late this week or early next), and I’ll be in a better position to comment at that time.
Despite this, the question that you pose is one that I can comment on at least briefly, as follows:
It would be almost inconceivable, given the stress that the Holy See has placed on abortion and related pro-life questions (euthanasia, embryonic stem cells, etc.), that the text would elevate lesser social issues to the point that they are on the same level as these.
Basically, people who are saying that it does this (a) are commenting on the text without having read it themselves and (b) commenting on it in a particularly brain-dead way, as it would be completely contrary to the way that Rome has been speaking about the relative gravity of these issues.
There’s going to be a total eclipse of the moon tonight, and North America has the best seat in the house for it.
You may be able to catch the eclipse on FOX, as it will occur during the World Series game that FOX is broadcasting.
For full viewing instructions, including when totality will occur in your timezone, as well as background on what a lunar eclipse is, etc., GO HERE.
For those in the continental US, totality (which lasts less than 5 min.) will occur at 7:18 Pacific, 8:18 Mountain, 9:18 Central, and 10:18 Eastern.
Enjoy!
P.S. Unlike an eclipse of the sun, you can look directly at an eclipse of the moon!
Excerts from NYT editorial by the good Archbishop:
Words are cheap. Actions matter. If we believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, we need to prove that by our actions, including our political choices. Anything less leads to the corruption of our integrity. Patriotism, which is a virtue for people of all faiths, requires that we fight, ethically and nonviolently, for what we believe. Claiming that “we don’t want to impose our beliefs on society” is not merely politically convenient; it is morally incoherent and irresponsible.
As James 2:17 reminds us, in a passage quoted in the final presidential debate, “Faith without works is dead.” It is a valid point. People should act on what they claim to believe. Otherwise they are violating their own conscience, and lying to themselves and the rest of us.
Schwing!
READ THE EDITORIAL (Evil NYT-noid Registration Warning).
UPDATE: BTW, I should mention that Archbishop Chaput’s last name does not rhyme with “kaput.” The T on the end of his name is silent and the U is long.
Concerning my recent post on Thinking Without Words, a reader writes:
What about people who are deaf from birth? How do they think? Do they make up their own words? Or do they think without words, in a form of mentalese?
Good question!
This is something I was thinking about a while back (actually, about twenty years ago), so I asked one of my cousins, who was born deaf.
He responded that he sees people signing in his head reflecting his internal monologue.
Deaf folks have the same translation reflex that we do, they just translate their mentalese into a gestural language (typically ASL or American Sign Language here in America) rather than into a spoken language (like English).
In a related question that occurred to me, I wondered what people blind from birth associate with colors. It occurred to me that they would likely associate colors with tactile sensations–their minds filling in something they are familiar with (tactile sensations) for something they aren’t familiar with (colors).
So I asked a blind friend and he told me that it was indeed true: He associated the color red with the tactile sensation of heat, the color green with the tactile sensation of handling a dollar bill, and the color yellow with the feeling of touching a little yellow wooden bench he sat on when he was a small child. He hadn’t ever seen these colors, but he formed the tactile substitute impressions for the colors based on what others told him about things having these colors (i.e., things that are “red hot,” “greenbacks,” and in his own case, a yellow child’s bench).
Amazing how the human mind works, isn’t it!
Today I’m going to be on Family News In Focus, a production of Focus on the Family that is heard on many/most Protestant radio stations. I’m giving reaction to Sen. Kerry’s recent speech involving his Catholic faith and the role it does/doesn’t play in his political views. Check your local Protestant radio station’s listings for times if you’d like to catch it. Gave them the soundbites today. Don’t know how it’ll sound once they do the editing, but you might tune in.
On Wednesday I’m going to be on a state-wide PBS radio broadcast in California debating stem cells. It’s scheduled to run from 10 a.m.-11 a.m. on all the public radio stations in California. My opponent will be a researcher who I’ve debated a number of times before on this subject. Despite his views of stem cells, he’s a nice guy. He also works with mouse embryos, not human ones, which is a good thing (or I’d have to deck him). Given the liberal NPR audience, any pro-life Californians who read this and would like to call in on the show would be welcome!
Down yonder a reader asks concerning robotic lawnmowers that automatically cut people’s grass:
“Isn’t that dangerous? What if there are kids in the neighbourhood?”
It might well be. I don’t know what kind of safety precautions these things have or what laws there may be concerning where they can be used.
However, here’s an even more amazing lawnmower engineering thingie (cowboy hat tip: Southern Appeal).
It’s called the Sky Cutter, and you can order your own kit to make one remarkably inexpensively.
For the record, this isn’t a lawnmower that has been rejiggered to fly. It’s a model airplane that has been rejiggered to look like a lawnmower, one of a number of novelty model aircraft produced by FlyingThingZ.Com.
Most amazing is a film of the Sky Cutter in action–set to the tune of Cotton-Eyed Joe. As they put it at Southern Appeal: “Pure (Redneck) Genius”!
YEE-HAW!!!
WATCH THE MOVIE (Windows Media Player)
There’s a scene in Bablyon 5 where Capt. Sheridan has just met Lorien–who is the first intelligent being to arise in the history of the universe and who is still alive after all these years.
At the moment, Sheridan is quite distracted by recent events and is unable to appreciate a question Lorien is mulling over. Lorien points out to Sheridan that the Universe began with a Word, but which came first? The Word or the Thought behind it? You can’t have words without thoughts or thoughts without words, so there’s a kind of chicken-vs.-egg situation here.
There are several remarkable things about this scene. One is that it was written by Joe Straczynski, who is an atheist but was nevertheless willing to put on the lips of Lorien (a kind of cosmic Adam) a statement about Creation taken from the Gospel of John. As always, kudos to Joe for being willing to treat religion thoughtfully and respectfully in his fiction.
Another remarkable thing about the scene is that Lorien is wrong.
Oh, sure. You hear his view about the interdependence of thoughts and words articulated a lot, and it can seem prima facie justified: We have an awful hard time thinking without an internal monologue going in our heads. Yet it is still untrue that we can’t think without using words.
There are a variety of ways to show this, though I won’t go through them all here. I will mention two, however.
One is the ability of individuals to clearly think and understand complex realities without the ability to articulate them in words. I recently was reading a book by a cognitive scientist who cited the case of a man who had a stroke while he was sleeping and woke up unable to use language, even in his mind. He later regained his language ability and described his experience vividly. As soon as he woke up, he realized something was wrong. He couldn’t use certain parts of his body, and he quickly deduced that he must have had a stroke during the night. He tried to call out to his wife (who had already gotten out of bed) for help, but couldn’t remember how to use words.
He thus understood the concepts I have had a stroke and I can use words to get help without having the ability to cash out these thoughts in linguistic form.
He was (temporarily) reduced to a state of functioning only in what cognitive scientists call “mentalese”–the “language of the mind,” which we frequently experience with an almost-simultaneous accompanying internal gloss in English (or whatever the language is that we’re thinking in at the moment).
Yet it is possible to think without the gloss. Situations in which we have to think very fast are good for bringing this out, as we may be having to think so fast that we don’t have time to do the gloss that we normally reflexively provide.
Lately I’ve been trying to cultivate an awareness of my own thinking in mentalese, and I’ve found that driving offers a lot of opportunities.
For example, this Saturday I was driving up a particularly narrow, twisty road on a mountainside. The road had lots of intersections, and if a car came whizzing through one of these intersections under the control of a careless drive, it could smack into you in no time flat.
Thus as I drove up the hill, I was very sensitive to the cars that might pop in from the right or the left.
Sure enough, as I was rounding one turn that had an intersection, my peripheral vision caught a car coming right up to the intersection at a high rate of speed. Only having a second to decide whether to slam on the breaks or not, I quickly looked down at the roadsurface of the intersection to see if there was a white line at the intersection, blocking the car’s path and signalling it to stop. I realized that if there was a white line that the driver of the other car would be legally required to stop and, unless he was extraordinarily careless, he would stop, meaning that the risk of a collision was low enough that I shouldn’t swerve dramatically or slam on the breaks (which are themselves risky moves in such an environment). I saw that there was such a white line, kept driving, and the other car stopped.
I thought all of this–the need for the white line, its legal implications, its probable implications for the other car stopping, and the ensuing implications for what I needed to do as a driver–in under a second and didn’t have time to cash it out in words.
It was a moment of pure mentalese.
It took me a lot longer just now to articulate in words what happend than it took me to think it all as it happened when unencumbered by words.
And that’s the way it tends to work: We first reason through a situation very fast in mentalese and, upon having a particular insight, we start reflexively cashing it out in words in our internal monologues–unless events (like driving in a complex environment) force us to think about other things. This reflexive translation of mentalese into a verbal language is what generates the illusion that words and thoughts are mutually dependent on each other.
They aren’t.
Not. Making. This. Up.
No. Comment. What. So. Ever.
(WARNING: A little potty-mouth language.)
Undoubtedly they’re doing the same thing here, just as some Mormons are.