Month: May 2005

Mothers Day, Flowers, and 1-800-FLOWERS

I’d just like to offer a thought for those to whom it may apply.

Mother’s Day is almost here, and it would be a nice thing for folks who are privileged enough to have their mothers still alive to do something for them for Mother’s Day, such as send them flowers. It’s a good way to honor the woman who brought you into this world.

I’d also like to recommend that, if you choose to send flowers, you do not patronize 1-800-FLOWERS.

1-800-FLOWERS is an entity that has a remarkably noxious marketing practice. Frankly, their marketers need to be fired.

If you sign up with 1-800-FLOWERS they will blast constant e-mail offers to you until you tell them to stop. You do not have the option (unless I missed it) of unchecking a "Please send me e-mail offers" box when you register. From what I can tell, they enjoy blasting e-mails indiscriminately to everyone who has ever used their service until such time as the put-upon customer tells them to knock it off.

Thus their "Remove Me" page (which requires you to send a separate e-mail to get removed) states: "You received this email because you are a 1-800-FLOWERS.COM customer." It does not say "You received this email because you signed up for it."

Their marketers are also appalling insensitive.

Given the reality of human life, many of their customers are unfortunate enough to have lost their mothers. Some have lost them at tragically young ages. Some even lost them immediately before, on, or after Mother’s Day, making it doubly painful for them.

It is therefore viciously heartless to send e-spams, such as the one I received this morning, with headlines like:

Stop dilly-dallying! Mother’s Day Weekend is here!

This was apparently sent to individuals who have not taken them up on their REPEATED previous Mothers Day spams and thus, in the judgment of 1-800-FLOWERS, are "dilly-dallying" and thus delinquent in respect of their duty to honor their mothers.

It gets worse.

If you read the text of the spam, it develops the theme that you have done something wrong, harkening back to when your mom scolded you for "dilly-dallying" and then promising "Shop now (yes, now) [sic] and we’ll keep all this last minute shopping stuff just between us."

This is signed by someone named "Jim McCann," who should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

1-800-FLOWERS thus has a marketing strategy of indiscriminately blasting out spam to their customers so that their customers can be insulted at what is for many a painful time of the year.

I therefore recommend that you give your business to someone other than 1-800-FLOWERS. For example, you might try

WWW.PROFLOWERS.COM

Also, if you are of a mind to, you might want to drop the folks at 1-800-FLOWERS a note concerning their marketing policy, particularly if you are a victim of it yourself.

HERE’S THE ADDRESS: custservice@reply.1800flowers.com

UPDATE: It appears that Jim McCann’s e-mail address is jmccann@1800flowers.com. You might want to carbon him, too.

Dead-Tree Blogs

Something Thomas Sowell said in a recently quoted piece came back to me:

Even those who write editorials about how we need Mexicans to do work that Americans will not do would not be willing to write editorials for a fraction of what they are being paid. If Mexican editorial writers were coming across the border illegally and taking their jobs, maybe the issue would become clearer.

And I thought: "Wait a minute. Something like this is happening right now."

The folks undercutting the editorial market aren’t Mexicans for the most part, but new technology (the blog) has made it possible for a large number of people to editorialize, and they are doing so, and doing so for free. In fact, most of the successful ones pay something to have customized, attractive blogs, and I don’t know if the revenues from all those political T-shirt ads actually subsidize the costs of doing the blog. In any event, they’re severely cutting into the market for editorials.

Not convinced?

Well, newspaper circulation has been dwindling for decades as more folks started getting their news from radio and then television. Back in the first half of the 20th century, for example, each city used to would have multiple newspapers of competing ideologies. Not any more. Most cities have only one major daily paper. The market won’t sustain more than that. That’s why so many cities and regions have newspapers with hyphenated names like "Union-Tribune" or "Democrat-Gazette" or "Post-Dispatch." The old rivals merged when the market for papers shrank.

Now broadcast TV news is suffering due to defections to cable and the Internet. Meanwhile, newspaper circulation continues to decline:

Circulation at 814 of the nation’s largest daily newspapers declined 1.9 percent over the six months ended March 31 compared with the same period last year, an industry trade group reported yesterday.

The decline continued a 20-year trend in the newspaper industry as people increasingly turn to other media such as the Internet and 24-hour cable news networks for information [SOURCE].

It may well be a generational thing, too. Those who I know who read newspapers tend to be of the generation that grew up with them when they were stronger than they are now.

Personally, I never read newspapers (except when I’m travelling and a complimentary one is shoved under my door). Frankly, I don’t want to get a newspaper at home. I already have too many books in my house, and I Don’t Need Any More Paper, Thankyou. Having someone throw more paper at my door every day would just clutter the place up.

In fact, I’m getting sick of having dead-tree books around. Given the volume of volumes in my library, I want everything to be space-savingly electronic (either readable or audio both), and I’m starting to become resistant to buying non-electronic books. Unfortunately, the publishers aren’t where I need them to be yet.

So I get all my news online or from cable and talk radio. I know that not everybody does that (or else newspapers would already be out of business entirely in dead tree form), but there are more and more folks who are getting their news from non-paper sources.

And the blogosphere has only intensified that shift.

You can spend hours a day (if you want to) reading commentary on any subject of your choosing. Fresh, new commentary! Churned out daily by the legions of pajamahadeen.

With all this commentary available for free on the Net, why would I want to pick up a newspaper to get my analysis?

Habit.

If I’m in the habit of doing so, if I’m not yet comfortable with the Internet, if I’m already attached to a commentator who’s not available online without an obnoxious registration requirement. In those cases, I might want to pick up a newspaper for commentary.

But I’m not in that habit. And neither are the new batch of kids being raised right now.

So what else might attract me to pick up a newspaper for commentary?

Quality.

Hypothetically, the newspapers could aggregate to themselves all the quality commentators and generate commentary of a markedly higher quality than what’s available in the blogosphere. But that ain’t gonna happen. It would mean chucking out the vast majority of the individuals publishing slop editorials today and recruting the most talented bloggers.

A little bit of that is actually happening (thus, for example the PowerLine guys occasionally write editorials for different papers, thus decreasing proportionately the amount of space devoted to non-blogger editorialists). But a full-scale, overnight housecleaning isn’t in the offing, and even if newspapers paid the best editorialists to stop blogging and write exclusively for them (which also won’t happen) then a new crop of bloggers would make the leap from Large Mammal to Higher Being in the TTLB Ecosystem and take their places as premier, for-free online editorialists.

So I don’t think it’s practically possible for newspapers to outperform the blogosphere in quality or price.

But if you can’t outperform someone in either quality or cost, that makes your survival precarious–as indeed the survival of major daily metropolitan newspapers now is.

Oh, sure, they’ll be around in some vastly shrunken form in the decades to come. And I’m sure that there will still be editorials in them. Editors, like everybody else, want to spout off about their opinions.

They want to have their own, daily dead-tree blogs.

But the market is changing. Dramatically. And fewer and fewer folks will be willing to pay for a daily dead-tree blog when they can get the same quality analysis online for free.

Now everybody can be an editor.

Something like Sowell’s hypothetical scenario is already happening.

Reality TV That's Actually GOOD???

EXCERPT:

‘The Monastery’, a new reality TV show slated to air this month on the U.K’s BBC 2, has reportedly left a deep spiritual impact on its five male participants, one of whom, an atheist pornography producer, who gave up his trade and became a believer.

The men, none of whom are Catholic, spent 40 days and 40 nights living and abiding by the rules of a Catholic monastery in an effort to show whether or not the monastic life, instituted by St. Benedict over 1,500 years ago, still has relevance in the modern world.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

Reality TV That’s Actually GOOD???

EXCERPT:

‘The Monastery’, a new reality TV show slated to air this month on the U.K’s BBC 2, has reportedly left a deep spiritual impact on its five male participants, one of whom, an atheist pornography producer, who gave up his trade and became a believer.

The men, none of whom are Catholic, spent 40 days and 40 nights living and abiding by the rules of a Catholic monastery in an effort to show whether or not the monastic life, instituted by St. Benedict over 1,500 years ago, still has relevance in the modern world.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

Cussin'?

A reader writes:

I guess my first question is: Are there situations where consciously swearing is not a sin?

First we need to give a brief taxonomy of what commonly goes by the name of "swearing" or "cussing" or other use of "bad language." Though people lump all this under one heading, there are several distinctions here that are relevant.

The first distinction is between profanity and everything else.

Profanity is treating what is sacred as if it is not. For example, using the name of Jesus Christ as an expletive.

In addition to profanity, there are several other forms of tabooed language, which can be classified several different ways. Among them are:

  • Malediction, or wishing someone or some thing ill, such as saying "God damn it" or "Devil take the hindmost" or "Go to hell." (The first of these may also count as profanity but does not necessarily for reasons that will become clear. The latter two are not profanity since the devil and hell are not sacred.)
  • Vulgarity, or the kind of language that would be used by "the common people" (Latin, vulgus) but not in polite society. Into this category go tabooed scatalogical, anatomical, and sexual terms.
  • Slurs, or derogatory ways of referring to people or things. These may be terms applying to a particular religious or ethnic group (fill in your own examples mentally–not in the combox!) or terms referring to personal dispositions (e.g., "He’s a jerk" or "He’s a nerd").

Now, the question was: Can these forms of language ever be used without it being a sin?

The simple answer is: Yes.

Here are two examples:

  1. Suppose that you are an actor in a play or movie and the script calls for you to use such language. As long as the play or movie is not glamorizing or otherwise endorsing the use of such language, it is morally licit for the actors to utter the lines. It is understood (on the above conditions) both by the actors and the audience that the language is not meant in earnest but is a depiction of how certain people (e.g., the vulgar) speak. For example: Many locales have Passion Plays in which the crowd present in front of Pilate cries "Crucify him!" Now, in real life this would be a species of profanity (specifically: it would be blasphemy; CCC 2149). But it is not blasphemous when uttered by actors who are in fact devout Christians and do not mean it and who are depicting the events of Our Lord’s life. Neither, for that matter, is it sinful when a lector reads these words at Mass.
  2. Some slurs, such as "jerk" are mild (i.e., weakly tabooed at best) and do not carry a huge emotional load. They also can be useful shorthand. "Jerk," for example is simply shorthand for "an obnoxious person." If it is true that someone is behaving in an obnoxious manner then it is perfectly within bounds to say "He was acting like a jerk."

Having answered the initial question as phrased, let’s go on to the reader’s elaboration of the subject:

I can see where swearing at someone would be a sin because of the anger behind the words but in that case it is a sin of anger, right? Or is the swearing itself sinful as well? What if the anger were just? Obviously it would be a sin if the swearing were somehow taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Obviously. But it seems that two things would be in play here. The first is the anger. Emotions themselves are not sinful. What can be sinful is how we react to our emotions. If we foster anger when we should be trying to cool it, that is a sin. If we undertake an evil action based on our anger (e.g., attacking someone we’re angry with), that also is a sin. But the emotion itself is not sinful.

If one is feeling an emotion–be it anger, frustration, awe, surprise, or what have you–there is nothing wrong in principle with expressing that emotion. One can do this either discursively (e.g., "I am remarkably angry at the moment, old chap") or by the use of an interjection if the interjection is not otherwise problematic.

In the case of using God’s name as an interjection, this gets us to the second element in play. The name of God is not a fitting interjection for use when we are angry. It is sacred and should not  be used simply to communicate what we are feeling at the moment. That is a misuse of the name.

This is not to say that God cannot be brought in to emotional expression. Of course, he can be. If you say "Praise God!" when something good happens, and you really mean that you want someone to praise (or at least attribute mentally credit to) God for the good thing, that’s no problem at all.

In principle, the same could be true of maledictions against evil things. For example, on 9/11 after the Twin Towers fell, many in America could have literally meant the malediction "God damn Osama bin Laden." That’s not automatically sinful since Osama bin Laden committed acts objectively worthy of damnation by God.

Saying "God damn Osama bin Laden" thus represents a wish that Osama would experience the just rewards of his actions. One has to hold out hope, even for bin Laden, that he will repent and not be damned, or that he was too crazy to be accountable for his actions, but so long as those are not the case, it is entirely appropriate to wish to see divine justice accomplished in his case.

God himself is willing to damn those who culpably do things like Osama bin Laden did, and if God is willing to do so (as the Church teaches) then it is not sinful for us to make our own what God is willing to do, as long as we also make our own the other things God is willing to do (like not damn Osama if he repents or if he was too crazy to be culpable for his actions).

In this case, the justified anger experienced by the attack of 9/11 finds expression in an utterance expressing this emotion and corresponding to reality (Osama bin Laden is damnworthy) on the appropriate assumptions (e.g., he is gravely culpable for his actions).

The reader continues:

And what if you were not swearing at someone but just let out an expletive in a situation of surprise or dismay?

If you just let an expletive slip out without it being a fully deliberate utterance then it affects your personal culpability for the action. Assuming that the use of the expletive was not otherwise morally permissible (e.g., like saying "God damn Osama bin Laden" in the wake of 9/11) then one will be venially accountable for it if it were done with partial deliberation and non-accountable for it is it were done with no deliberation.

Also, does it matter how coarse the word is considered? When I was a kid, I got scolded once the parents of a friend because I used the word "damn". At the time I really thought it to be equivalent to "darn".

It does matter how strong the taboo associated with the word is perceived to be. This is in two respects: how strong the speaker perceives the taboo to be and how strong the language community considers the taboo to be.

For purposes of illustrating this point, though, let’s prescind from talking about profanity and talk about non-profane tabooed words. In this case the issue of profaning the sacred is not involved. What is involved is the question of whether and in what circumstances it is okay to be break a social taboo–a convention of the linguistic community–not whether the sacred is being violated.

F’rinstance: I have a friend whose native language is an east Asian tongue but who came to America to go to college, where she heard a lot of college-age language. Not being a native-speaker of English, she didn’t have a native’s feel for what words were tabooed and how much. She didn’t even necessarily hear correctly what was being said.

Thus one day years ago I was talking to her in a chatroom and she described a particular software application as "a piece of crab."

I just about died laughing.

She obviously had misheard something from her English-speaking college friends. As members of the vulgus, they no doubt used a particular, well-known expression a great deal as a way of describing things of poor quality. My friend, not being a native-speaker, misheard the expression and thought it was customary in English to refer to things of poor quality using a seafood metaphor.

She was, appropriately, horrified when–so that she wouldn’t use this phrase again in polite company–I clarified for her what the actual phrase was and explained that it was tabooed. (Once she understood what the original phrase was, she also understood why it was tabooed.)

My friend didn’t perceive the taboo in the word, and that would have correspondingly negated her culpability for using it–assuming she’d used it correctly.

What if everyone felt that way? What is everybody (or at least the language community as a whole) didn’t perceive the taboo? Then there would be no taboo and it would not be inappropriate to use the word.

It’s important to realize that the taboos associated with words, like the meaning of words themselves, are arbitrary. They are assigned by society and thus not intrinsic to the word. For example: Think through a list of biological words that are tabooed. In each case (assuming that your vocabulary size is normal), you should be able to think of another word that means exactly the same thing but is not tabooed (or that is at least much less strongly tabooed).

The taboo levels of words also change over time. For example, back in the 1950s the word "pregnant" had a form of taboo associated with it that it simply lacks today. When Lucille Ball got pregnant while the series I Love Lucy was on the air, the producers decided not to hide the pregnancy (as some TV shows do) but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t offend audience sensibilities.

To cover themselves, they consulted several religious leaders (the proverbial priest, minister, and rabbi, if I remember correctly) and got several terms that could be used to refer to Lucy’s condition ("expecting" and the French word for "pregnant," as I recall), but the religious figures agree that she should not be referred to on the air as "pregnant." That word was too indelicate.

Today, whatever taboo was affecting the use of "pregnant" in this case is simply gone. As a result, people can and do say "pregnant" on TV with no moral impropriety at all.

Taboo levels thus change over time. They go up and down based on social mores.

But when a word is tabooed by a language community, and to the degree it is tabooed, it should be avoided apart from special circumstances warranting its use. The impulse to put taboos on words corresponds to something very deep in the human psyche. Every language community has them. They are bound up with politeness codes and when one uses them in circumstances where the taboo applies, one is being impolite.

Being impolite, in turn, causes a rupture in social discourse, tends to create feelings of pain and anger and revulsion, and these feelings should not be thoughtlessly or deliberately created without adequate reason. Sometimes, though, there are situations in which being impolite is warranted, and there may be a good to be achieved that allows the breaking of a social taboo.

The general rule, however, is what St. Paul articulates:

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen (Eph. 4:29, NIV).

Cussin’?

A reader writes:

I guess my first question is: Are there situations where consciously swearing is not a sin?

First we need to give a brief taxonomy of what commonly goes by the name of "swearing" or "cussing" or other use of "bad language." Though people lump all this under one heading, there are several distinctions here that are relevant.

The first distinction is between profanity and everything else.

Profanity is treating what is sacred as if it is not. For example, using the name of Jesus Christ as an expletive.

In addition to profanity, there are several other forms of tabooed language, which can be classified several different ways. Among them are:

  • Malediction, or wishing someone or some thing ill, such as saying "God damn it" or "Devil take the hindmost" or "Go to hell." (The first of these may also count as profanity but does not necessarily for reasons that will become clear. The latter two are not profanity since the devil and hell are not sacred.)
  • Vulgarity, or the kind of language that would be used by "the common people" (Latin, vulgus) but not in polite society. Into this category go tabooed scatalogical, anatomical, and sexual terms.
  • Slurs, or derogatory ways of referring to people or things. These may be terms applying to a particular religious or ethnic group (fill in your own examples mentally–not in the combox!) or terms referring to personal dispositions (e.g., "He’s a jerk" or "He’s a nerd").

Now, the question was: Can these forms of language ever be used without it being a sin?

The simple answer is: Yes.

Here are two examples:

  1. Suppose that you are an actor in a play or movie and the script calls for you to use such language. As long as the play or movie is not glamorizing or otherwise endorsing the use of such language, it is morally licit for the actors to utter the lines. It is understood (on the above conditions) both by the actors and the audience that the language is not meant in earnest but is a depiction of how certain people (e.g., the vulgar) speak. For example: Many locales have Passion Plays in which the crowd present in front of Pilate cries "Crucify him!" Now, in real life this would be a species of profanity (specifically: it would be blasphemy; CCC 2149). But it is not blasphemous when uttered by actors who are in fact devout Christians and do not mean it and who are depicting the events of Our Lord’s life. Neither, for that matter, is it sinful when a lector reads these words at Mass.
  2. Some slurs, such as "jerk" are mild (i.e., weakly tabooed at best) and do not carry a huge emotional load. They also can be useful shorthand. "Jerk," for example is simply shorthand for "an obnoxious person." If it is true that someone is behaving in an obnoxious manner then it is perfectly within bounds to say "He was acting like a jerk."

Having answered the initial question as phrased, let’s go on to the reader’s elaboration of the subject:

I can see where swearing at someone would be a sin because of the anger behind the words but in that case it is a sin of anger, right? Or is the swearing itself sinful as well? What if the anger were just? Obviously it would be a sin if the swearing were somehow taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Obviously. But it seems that two things would be in play here. The first is the anger. Emotions themselves are not sinful. What can be sinful is how we react to our emotions. If we foster anger when we should be trying to cool it, that is a sin. If we undertake an evil action based on our anger (e.g., attacking someone we’re angry with), that also is a sin. But the emotion itself is not sinful.

If one is feeling an emotion–be it anger, frustration, awe, surprise, or what have you–there is nothing wrong in principle with expressing that emotion. One can do this either discursively (e.g., "I am remarkably angry at the moment, old chap") or by the use of an interjection if the interjection is not otherwise problematic.

In the case of using God’s name as an interjection, this gets us to the second element in play. The name of God is not a fitting interjection for use when we are angry. It is sacred and should not  be used simply to communicate what we are feeling at the moment. That is a misuse of the name.

This is not to say that God cannot be brought in to emotional expression. Of course, he can be. If you say "Praise God!" when something good happens, and you really mean that you want someone to praise (or at least attribute mentally credit to) God for the good thing, that’s no problem at all.

In principle, the same could be true of maledictions against evil things. For example, on 9/11 after the Twin Towers fell, many in America could have literally meant the malediction "God damn Osama bin Laden." That’s not automatically sinful since Osama bin Laden committed acts objectively worthy of damnation by God.

Saying "God damn Osama bin Laden" thus represents a wish that Osama would experience the just rewards of his actions. One has to hold out hope, even for bin Laden, that he will repent and not be damned, or that he was too crazy to be accountable for his actions, but so long as those are not the case, it is entirely appropriate to wish to see divine justice accomplished in his case.

God himself is willing to damn those who culpably do things like Osama bin Laden did, and if God is willing to do so (as the Church teaches) then it is not sinful for us to make our own what God is willing to do, as long as we also make our own the other things God is willing to do (like not damn Osama if he repents or if he was too crazy to be culpable for his actions).

In this case, the justified anger experienced by the attack of 9/11 finds expression in an utterance expressing this emotion and corresponding to reality (Osama bin Laden is damnworthy) on the appropriate assumptions (e.g., he is gravely culpable for his actions).

The reader continues:

And what if you were not swearing at someone but just let out an expletive in a situation of surprise or dismay?

If you just let an expletive slip out without it being a fully deliberate utterance then it affects your personal culpability for the action. Assuming that the use of the expletive was not otherwise morally permissible (e.g., like saying "God damn Osama bin Laden" in the wake of 9/11) then one will be venially accountable for it if it were done with partial deliberation and non-accountable for it is it were done with no deliberation.

Also, does it matter how coarse the word is considered? When I was a kid, I got scolded once the parents of a friend because I used the word "damn". At the time I really thought it to be equivalent to "darn".

It does matter how strong the taboo associated with the word is perceived to be. This is in two respects: how strong the speaker perceives the taboo to be and how strong the language community considers the taboo to be.

For purposes of illustrating this point, though, let’s prescind from talking about profanity and talk about non-profane tabooed words. In this case the issue of profaning the sacred is not involved. What is involved is the question of whether and in what circumstances it is okay to be break a social taboo–a convention of the linguistic community–not whether the sacred is being violated.

F’rinstance: I have a friend whose native language is an east Asian tongue but who came to America to go to college, where she heard a lot of college-age language. Not being a native-speaker of English, she didn’t have a native’s feel for what words were tabooed and how much. She didn’t even necessarily hear correctly what was being said.

Thus one day years ago I was talking to her in a chatroom and she described a particular software application as "a piece of crab."

I just about died laughing.

She obviously had misheard something from her English-speaking college friends. As members of the vulgus, they no doubt used a particular, well-known expression a great deal as a way of describing things of poor quality. My friend, not being a native-speaker, misheard the expression and thought it was customary in English to refer to things of poor quality using a seafood metaphor.

She was, appropriately, horrified when–so that she wouldn’t use this phrase again in polite company–I clarified for her what the actual phrase was and explained that it was tabooed. (Once she understood what the original phrase was, she also understood why it was tabooed.)

My friend didn’t perceive the taboo in the word, and that would have correspondingly negated her culpability for using it–assuming she’d used it correctly.

What if everyone felt that way? What is everybody (or at least the language community as a whole) didn’t perceive the taboo? Then there would be no taboo and it would not be inappropriate to use the word.

It’s important to realize that the taboos associated with words, like the meaning of words themselves, are arbitrary. They are assigned by society and thus not intrinsic to the word. For example: Think through a list of biological words that are tabooed. In each case (assuming that your vocabulary size is normal), you should be able to think of another word that means exactly the same thing but is not tabooed (or that is at least much less strongly tabooed).

The taboo levels of words also change over time. For example, back in the 1950s the word "pregnant" had a form of taboo associated with it that it simply lacks today. When Lucille Ball got pregnant while the series I Love Lucy was on the air, the producers decided not to hide the pregnancy (as some TV shows do) but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t offend audience sensibilities.

To cover themselves, they consulted several religious leaders (the proverbial priest, minister, and rabbi, if I remember correctly) and got several terms that could be used to refer to Lucy’s condition ("expecting" and the French word for "pregnant," as I recall), but the religious figures agree that she should not be referred to on the air as "pregnant." That word was too indelicate.

Today, whatever taboo was affecting the use of "pregnant" in this case is simply gone. As a result, people can and do say "pregnant" on TV with no moral impropriety at all.

Taboo levels thus change over time. They go up and down based on social mores.

But when a word is tabooed by a language community, and to the degree it is tabooed, it should be avoided apart from special circumstances warranting its use. The impulse to put taboos on words corresponds to something very deep in the human psyche. Every language community has them. They are bound up with politeness codes and when one uses them in circumstances where the taboo applies, one is being impolite.

Being impolite, in turn, causes a rupture in social discourse, tends to create feelings of pain and anger and revulsion, and these feelings should not be thoughtlessly or deliberately created without adequate reason. Sometimes, though, there are situations in which being impolite is warranted, and there may be a good to be achieved that allows the breaking of a social taboo.

The general rule, however, is what St. Paul articulates:

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen (Eph. 4:29, NIV).

Fair Trade

Were you wondering who is the hottest collectible personality in trading cards? Probably not, but you might be intrigued to learn that it is not Kobe Bryant or Johnny Damon, but a man who was a soccer player in his youth but found fame in another calling. Karol Wojtyla. Yep. A limited-edition trading card of Pope John Paul II recently sold for $8,100.

"Beckett Media, whose pricing guides are the acknowledged arbiters of value for collectible trading cards, said on Tuesday a limited-edition Pope John Paul II from the 2005 World Treasures line of card maker Topps has sold for $8,100.

"The Topps series includes other historical figures like Czar Paul I and King Frederick the Great, though their cards are trading for around $3,000. All the cards in the series have etchings of the figures’ autographs.

"In comparison, Beckett said, regular cards depicting Barry Bonds, who is contending for baseball’s all-time home run record, have never sold for more than $1,200."

Somehow, I think John Paul would be touched … and highly amused.

GET THE STORY.

EVIL PEOPLE: "Let The Unholy War Begin"

The Rainbow Sashers aren’t the only dissident folks who are gearing up for campaigns against the new pope.

Planned Parenthood wants to take him on, too.

EXCERPTS:

Planed Parenthood has launched a campaign to motivate all of its members and supporters, nominal Catholics and non-Catholics, to send letters to the editor, requesting that Pope Benedict XVI reconsider his “backward views” and change his opinion on sexual morality.

Pope Benedict XVI must be encouraged to “reconsider his dangerously outdated stances on birth control, abortion and sexuality in order to help move the Catholic Church into the 21st century,” reads a memo issued by campaign manager Eve Fox.

“The new Pope’s positions on these crucial issues pose a terrible danger to the health of millions of women and girls around the world and undermines efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS,” Fox wrote.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

In a related development, Frances Quisling of Catholics For A Free Choice was quoted as saying:

The bad news is that he is Pope, and he was elected by two thirds or more of the princes of the church, who knew what they were doing.

I can no longer delude myself about these princes’ almost total lack of interest in healing the divide in the Church, in showing compassion for or even in listening to the voices of the suffering. The time for nuance is over. Let the unholy war begin [SOURCE–WARNING: Evil Ad].

EVIL PEOPLE: “Let The Unholy War Begin”

The Rainbow Sashers aren’t the only dissident folks who are gearing up for campaigns against the new pope.

Planned Parenthood wants to take him on, too.

EXCERPTS:

Planed Parenthood has launched a campaign to motivate all of its members and supporters, nominal Catholics and non-Catholics, to send letters to the editor, requesting that Pope Benedict XVI reconsider his “backward views” and change his opinion on sexual morality.

Pope Benedict XVI must be encouraged to “reconsider his dangerously outdated stances on birth control, abortion and sexuality in order to help move the Catholic Church into the 21st century,” reads a memo issued by campaign manager Eve Fox.

“The new Pope’s positions on these crucial issues pose a terrible danger to the health of millions of women and girls around the world and undermines efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS,” Fox wrote.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

In a related development, Frances Quisling of Catholics For A Free Choice was quoted as saying:

The bad news is that he is Pope, and he was elected by two thirds or more of the princes of the church, who knew what they were doing.

I can no longer delude myself about these princes’ almost total lack of interest in healing the divide in the Church, in showing compassion for or even in listening to the voices of the suffering. The time for nuance is over. Let the unholy war begin [SOURCE–WARNING: Evil Ad].