Month: June 2005

Logic Help

A reader writes:

I have to write an essay about " why logic is important " in my philosophy class, but i donot have many ideas to write it. Can you help me or show me how to fine some informations online.

A) The basic reason why logic is important is that the rules of logic are the rules of good reasoning. Therefore, if you wanted to take a bit of a risk you could simply turn in the following as your essay:

  1. The rules of logic are the rules of good reasoning.
  2. It is important to use the rules of good reasoning.
  3. Therefore, it is important to use the rules of logic.

B) I suspect that your teacher may be looking for a bit more than that, though, and the most promising way to flesh out the paper, it seems to me, would be to talk about logical fallacies.

INFO ON FALLACIES HERE.

To emphasize the importance of logic, I’d give a bunch of examples (the more practical, the better) in which people commit logical fallacies and show how this harms them in important ways. (Thomas Sowell is a great source for exposing various fallacies and how they hurt the poor, but if your philosophy teacher is a rabid leftie, you might ought to stay away from using examples from him.)

C) If you want to grab for the brass ring, you might write a paper in which you yourself commit numerous fallacies one after the other in such a fashion that it is clear to your teacher that you not only know the fallacies, you understand them so well that you are committing them deliberately to illustrate the value of logic in a backhand way. That, however, is a risky strategy, for if you get the fallacies wrong or don’t make it sufficiently clear that their use is tongue-in-cheek then you may get lower marks. If you can pull it off, though, your teacher will be delighted.

All told, I’d probably recommend the middle, pedestrian strategy (i.e., B).

Hope this helps!

The Sin Of Sodom

A reader writes:

I have a question about Ezekiel 16:48-50

    48  As I live, says the Lord GOD, I swear that your sister Sodom, with her daughters, has not done as you and your daughters have done!
49  And look at the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were proud, sated with food, complacent in their prosperity, and they gave no help to the poor and needy.
50  Rather, they became haughty and committed abominable crimes in my presence; then, as you have seen, I removed them.

It appears from this that guilt of Sodom was a type of moral complacency and indifference towards the less fortunate. How does the Church understand this vis-a-vis the usual description of the sin of Sodom?  Is it that the gluttony and apathy of Ezk 16:49 causes or is merely correlated to the prevalence of sexual sin?  Or could it be that these attributes, along with concupiscence, are emblematic of a narcissistic or solipsistic culture, which is disgraceful in the sight of God? Any commentary would be greatly appreciated.

Although you don’t bring out the point explicitly, I gather that what you are dealing with here is a common argument from homosexual apologists who wish to discount the Sodom narrative as an example of the biblical rejection of homosexuality. The strategy employed is to take passages like this one and use it to argue that the sin of Sodom was some kind of callous inhospitality rather than homosexuality (and homosexual rape in particular).

That argument is total nonsense.

First, let’s look at the structure of the passage in question. Verse 49 starts by listing different things that the Sodomites should have done but failed to do: (a) they were proud, (b) they were gluttonous, (b) they were  complacent in prosperity, and (d) they didn’t give thought to the poor. These are indeed marks of a decaded and self-indulgent lifestyle. But does it follow that one can reduce what is mentioned in the next verse ("they became haughty and committed abominable crimes in my presence") to simply these?

No.

A feature of the text that is not clear in English is that the material in verse 50 simply continues the chain of offenses begun in verse 49. Hebrew is different than English in the way that it handles long strings of conjoined elements. In English, especially in literary English, we don’t keep sticking "and" between elements in a list. Thus we don’t say "I went to the store and bought corn AND peas AND bread AND milk AND meat." What we do–at least in written English–is drop all the "and"s except the last: "I went to the store and bought, corn, peas, break, milk, and meat."

Hebrew doesn’t have that rule, though. It has a much greater tolerance to simply prefixing "and" on the front of each element in the chain. ("And" in Hebrew simply being a prefix you stick on the front of a word.) To give the passage over again, with more attention to preserving the Hebrew word order:

Behold, this is the iniquity of Sodom your sister: arrogancy, fulness of bread, and quiet ease have belonged to her and her daughters, AND the hand of the afflicted and needy she hath not strengthened. AND they are haughty AND they commit abomination before me, AND I take them away as you saw.

The committing of abomination is thus the capping incident in a chain of offenses that led to their being taken away by the Lord. Because of the construction of the passage, the abominations that Sodom committed are not to be  read as simply a restatement of things earlier in the list. If I say, "She committed W and X and Y and Z," the natural understanding of Z is that it is a new and additional item not previously covered in the list. The homosexual activist’s attempt to reduce Sodom’s commission of abominations to just a proud and uncharitable attitude goes against the structure of the text.

The reference to committing abomination in the passage itself, though, is ambiguous. If we just had this passage, we wouldn’t know what the abomination was. Indeed, we wouldn’t even know who Sodom was from this passage. But the text occurs in the broader context of the Hebrew literary tradition, and if we want to understand it, we have to draw upon that tradition.

The tradition makes it clear–following the keystone text concerning Sodom in Genesis–that Sodom was a city known for attempting to committing homosexual rape on travellers, an act which immediately preceded its destruction (also referred to in Ezek. 16:50). The natural understanding of the text is thus that the homosexual rape was the abomination that the text is referring to.

Now, an activist could try a fallback position and argue that it was the rape that was the problem here, not the homosexuality, but this would suppose that the Hebrews put homosexuality and rape in two different categories, the first being non-abomination and the second being abominable. This is simply unsustainable from what else we know about ancient Hebrew mores.

If you look at passages like Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, you’ll see that homosexuality is specifically called "abomination" (the same word as in Ezekiel 16:50). So the idea that the Hebrew ethical tradition viewed homosexuality as a-okay but rape as a no-no is simply wrong. They were both abomination, and combining the two was doubly abominable–the kind of thing that could, y’know, get your city destroyed by God or something.

The natural understanding of Ezekiel 16:49-50 is that Sodom was characterized by a bunch of decadent and self-indulgent sins that eventually led it to commit abomination before God, leading him to destroy it–the abomination in question being understood as homosexual rape in a literary allusion to the Sodom narrative in Genesis, where attempted homosexual rape is presented as confirming the iniquity of the city for the angelic messengers and being the final straw that results in its destruction.

 

Miranda Or Caliban?

MirandaToday is the anniversary of the 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona, in which the Warren Court once again created a Constitutional right nowhere mentioned or implied in the Constitution.

The "right" in question is the right to be read one’s "Miranda rights"–a term based on this decision. They are the standard things you hear on TV shows: "You have a right to remain silent, etc., etc."

The case involved Ernesto Miranda (left), a hoodlum (despite his dress in the picture) who was constantly being arrested for various offenses. In the instance leading to the Miranda Case, he was arrested for kidnapping, robbery, and rape. He confessed during police questioning but his lawyer argued to the Supreme Court that he didn’t have adequate awareness of his right not to confess.

Though folks today tend to accept the Miranda Decision without question, at the time it was hotly controversial. In fact, the Court was divided 5-4, with notables such as Justices John Marshall Harlan II, Byron White, and Potter Stewart dissenting.

People at the time–both police officers and ordinary folks–thought it was absurd to compel police to go out of their way to, in essence, encourage criminals not to confess their crimes.

The counter argument, of course, involved claiming that this was a way of ensuring that the police did not coerce confessions out of innocent individuals in their custody.

Whatever one may think of the merits of the matter, there is not one bit of the Constitution that states or implies that police have an obligation to do this. The Warren Court’s mandate that they do so, therefore, constituted legislating from the bench and one more of its usurpations of the democratic process–for where the issue should have been settled was in the legislatures.

Following the Miranda decision Miranda himself was re-convicted of kidnapping and
rape and put in prison. After he got out, he went back to his life of
hoodlumry and was eventually killed in a knife fight. The man who killed him was then dutifully read his Miranda rights, following which he refused to confessed, was released, and escaped. He was never reapprehended.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MIRANDA THE MAN.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MIRANDA THE DECSION.

Is The Pope Christian?

Those seeking to ask a rhetorical question that begs a no-brainer "Yes!" response sometimes say, "Is the Pope Catholic?" Well, not only is he Catholic, but he’s Christian, too:

"The war conducted by revisionist Catholics, they understand full well, is not simply against reactionary old men in the Vatican, but Baptists in Virginia, Anglicans in Nigeria, Pentecostals in Brazil, and against the heart of [o]rthodox doctrinal and moral teaching. It is not only against the beliefs of old-fashioned Catholics, but has been unmistakably revealed in the last generation, as revisionism marches steadily from the controversial to the abominable, to be against all Christians, everywhere, and at all times.

"A revisionist victory in a papal election would not be a small thing, but neither would it be as large as many of the liberal Catholics and their friends in the secular media seem to think it would. The Church — and by this I mean the Church as C. S. Lewis’s spirits could see it, spread down through the ages, as terrible as an army with banners — will survive it, and become stronger and more unified with the disciplines it imposes."

GET THE STORY.

"The Church — and by this I mean the Church as C. S. Lewis’s spirits could see it, spread down through the ages, as terrible as an army with banners — will survive it, and become stronger and more unified with the disciplines it imposes."

And the Pope will be leading and directing the charge.

Non-Catholic Doing Readings

A reader writes:

At a meeting last week, a friend from my parish informed me that her Methodist husband (who attends Mass with his wife) has been asked by our parish priest to say the readings at Mass on a Saturday evenings (I attend Sunday morning Mass, so I wasn’t aware of this and I was a little suprised by it).

I want to know if it is in accordance with the Teaching’s of the Church, that a non Catholic can say the readings at Mass, or not.  My friends husband does a great deal of work for the parish in other areas,  playing the organ at Mass and making the parish web site accessable , which I’ve never thought to question…but when I was told that he is saying the readings, I wondered if this might be in error. Maybe I just ask too many questions, hope you don’t think this is a silly question.

Okay several things here:

First, who can do the readings at Mass isn’t a matter of Church teaching but of Church discipline. There is certainly a theological appropriateness for it to be a member of the faithful doing the readings, but the Magisterium hasn’t distinctly articulated that fact in a doctrinal statement to my knowledge.

It has, however, written its law in such a way that this is going to be indicated in the great majority of cases. The Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism states:

133. The reading of Scripture during a Eucharistic celebration in the Catholic Church is to be done by members of that Church. On exceptional occasions and for a just cause, the Bishop of the diocese may permit a member of another Church or ecclesial Community to take on the task of reader.

Your bishop, therefore, could authorize the gentleman to read "on exceptional occasions and for a just cause" (e.g., in an ecumenical service of some kind), but not on a regular basis in a typical parish Mass.

One other note: If the gentleman has been involved at your parish as you say (attending Mass, doing other things), it might well be that the priest who asked him to read has simply forgotten that he isn’t Catholic (if he knew that to begin with, that is). I’ll never forget years ago when my wife was dying and our parish priest came to give her the anointing of the sick. While there he gave her Communion and started to administer Communion to me as well until I stopped him. I was not yet Catholic at this time, but I had been hanging around the parish so much (attending Mass, etc.), that even though the priest and I had had a tense confrontation at Easter Vigil when he refused to admit me to the Church, by this point a few months later he’d already forgotten that I wasn’t yet Catholic.

Something similar might well be happening in this case. If you show up, they tend to assume that you’re Catholic unless you’re constantly reminding them that you’re not.

Quake!

Quake

Got woke up this morning by an earthquake. Just one of the fringe benefits you get for living in California.

This one took place at 8:41 a.m. and the epicenter was located six miles east of Anza Borrego in the desert northeast of San Diego. (I stayed there overnight once.)

I checked, and the quake was centered 56 miles from where I live, and the quake was strong enough to wake me up–not surprising if you look at the map above and discern from the big red box that the magnitude of the quake was in the 5 range.

In fact, it was 5.6. It only lasted a few seconds (at least the shaking here, 56 miles away, only lasted that long), but it was violent enough that my bed and my whole bedroom wobbled so forcefully that it snatched me, protesting, from a dream.

CHECK OUT THE RECENT QUAKE TOOL I USED TO GET THE ABOVE MAP.

Menial Work & Dead-End Jobs

The problem with the current administration’s economic policies is that it dooms people to taking dead-end jobs consisting of menial work.

This is simply unjust. Menial work is beneath human dignity, and everyone should be able to get a promotion to a higher position without changing employers.

What we ought to do is adopt policies that would eliminate menial work in our lifetime and ensure a promising promotional path for every job in the economy. Right?

THOMAS SOWELL HAS THE SMACKDOWN.

Menial Work & Dead-End Jobs

The problem with the current administration’s economic policies is that it dooms people to taking dead-end jobs consisting of menial work.

This is simply unjust. Menial work is beneath human dignity, and everyone should be able to get a promotion to a higher position without changing employers.

What we ought to do is adopt policies that would eliminate menial work in our lifetime and ensure a promising promotional path for every job in the economy. Right?

THOMAS SOWELL HAS THE SMACKDOWN.

The Dead Know Nothing?

A reader writes:

In the Book of Ecclesiastes, one passage says that the "dead know nothing" or the "dead know nothing of the living". How is this reconciled with intercessory prayer to the saints and to apcryphal passages stating the contrary?

There are a number of possibilities here, but let me try to articulate the central problem with opposing something Ecclesiastes says with things elsewhere shown in Scripture: Ecclesiastes is not your typical book of Scripture. It is written in a very distinct genre that is unlike anything else in the Bible. While it may broadly be classed as a piece of wisdom literature, the wisdom in question is of a wholly remarkable sort.

Rather than affirming the commonsense wisdom of ancient Israel (like the book of Proverbs) it calls this wisdom into question and subjects it to cross-examination. The book assumes a what might be termed a perspective of theistic existentialism in which the weight of the human condition is given full voice and allowed to express all the doubt and questioning that a soul in anguish and despair at the apparent absurdity in the world is wont to express.

The questioning process that the book subjects conventional religious piety to is so thorough that many in the ancient world were scandalized by the book and questioned whether it should even be included in Scripture.

It’s not hard to understand why when you look at a book and its opening line is "Vanity of vanities, says the  Preacher,   vanity of vanities! All is vanity" or, in a more modern idiom, ""Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless" (Eccles. 1:2).

After an opening line like that, you know that you’re in for a wild ride. This is not going to be a book that easily affirms a simple and pious worldview that concludes that meaning in life is easy to find.

Instead, the book’s author assumes a perspective of natural philosophy. Rather than turning to the declarations of the prophets to find meaning and the revelation of God’s will, the author tries to apply human reason to the workings of the world to see what it can determine. He accepts the existence of God, but his methodology prevents him from simply trusting in the words of the prophets and concluding that his task is done.

In a way, the author of Ecclesiastes is like the philosopher Descartes. Descartes was a Christian (and a Catholic) who knew that at the end of his meditations he would affirm the Christian worldview, but he refused to take any shortcuts in arriving at that affirmation. In the same way the author of Ecclesiastes ends up affirming "Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of  man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with  every secret thing, whether good or evil" (Eccles. 12:13-14), but only after travelling a torturous path of philosophical reasonings.

Thus one cannot read Ecclesiastes as if it is a theological treatise of St. Paul. It is more like the book of Job, where different viewpoints are allowed to exist in dialogue and tension with each other. As Eccleiastes progresses, the author tries out various different viewpoints without fully endorsing any of them. One thus cannot lift a specific verse out of Eccleaistes and treat it like one of St. Paul’s theological deliverances. The book is far too paradoxical and tentative for that.

A special characteristic of the book is that it tends to assume a non-revelatory methodology. In other words, it tends not to rely on divine revelation to answer the questions it poses. It instead tries to use human reason. As a result, it finds some questions unanswerable from a human frame of reference. Thus early in the book we read:

Who  knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the  beast goes down to the earth? (Eccles. 3:21).

The implied answer is: No one knows–at least no one assuming the non-revelatory perspective the author is assuming.

The author thus confesses that from the perspective of human reason, one can’t say that the fate of man is any different from the fate of animals. One can’t even say what that fate is beyond the fact that both die (3:19).

It is this non-revelatory perspective that informs the book’s later statements that:

1: But all this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the
righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God; whether
it is love or hate man does not know. Everything before them is vanity,

2: since one fate comes to all, to the righteous and the
wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him
who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As is the good man, so
is the sinner; and he who swears is as he who shuns an oath.
3:
This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that one fate comes
to all; also the hearts of men are full of evil, and madness is in
their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.
4: But he who is  joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better  than a dead lion.
5:
For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and
they have no more reward; but the memory of them is lost.
6:
Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and
they have no more for ever any share in all that is done under the sun.

7: Go,  eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry  heart; for God has already approved what you do.
8: Let  your garments be always white; let not oil be lacking on your head. 
9:
Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life
which he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in
life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.
10:
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no
work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are
going.
11: Again I saw that under the sun the race is not
to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor
riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and
chance happen to them all [Ecclesiastes 9].

         

The perspective of this passage (particularly in vv. 7-10) comes close to "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die"–a viewpoint expressly repudiated by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:32. St. Paul, though, was repudiating a more hardened version of this viewpoint than what the author of Ecclesiastes is advocating.

The author is articulating a view based on the human perspective that death seems to end everything, and consequently that life is vain and meaningless. We know that he doesn’t ultimately conclude that if we read through to the end of the book, but that is the viewpoint he is trying out at the moment.

And it is a view with some elements of truth in it: One may as well live life with gusto, or carpe diem, because death is coming and one will no longer be able to act (on earth). (This being a viewpoint that St. Paul could endorse, it being quite close to something Jesus said; see John 9:4).

Because the author is exploring matters from a human perspective, according to which death seems to end everything and makes life meaningless, one cannot seize upon statements like Ecclesiastes 9:5 ("the dead know nothing") or 9:10 ("there is no . . . thought or knowledge or wisdom in sh’ol") and make them doctrinal pronouncements.

They’re not.

They are what a person assuming a non-revelatory human perspective could conclude. If you look at a dead person, he doesn’t seem to know anything anymore or think anything or possess any wisdom. His body is inert. It is as if everything ended for him. Confined to a purely human perspective, that is what you might conclude. You might then conclude that his life was meaningless as it all came to an end.

But you can’t glom onto the "no knowledge" statements without recognizing the context in which they occur. If you want to make them absolutes then you’re going to have to make absolute also the idea that death ends everything and life is meaningless.

That, of course, you shouldn’t conclude. The author of Ecclesiastes doesn’t (see the last two verses of the book), and the other authors of Scripture certainly don’t.

In fact, other books of the Old and the New Testament both indicate that the dead do know things (see Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man and Revelation’s depictions of the saints in heaven knowing things on earth) and that they do pray for us (see 2 Macc. 15:14; Rev. 5:8).

The passages in Ecclesiastes (and a few other places) that speak of the dead as if they have no consciousness thus must be understood as what they are: Passages written from a this-worldly perspective addressing a point that further divine revelation has clarified.

They do not constitute disproof of what is said elsewhere in Scripture.

Ed Peters Has An Interesting Idea

Y’know how people in many parishes can’t seem to keep their hands to themselves during the Our Father?

In many parishes they get grabby and, though in American culture holding hands with another person is a gesture of intimacy (sweethearts do it, spouses do it, parents and children do it, complete strangers do not do it), suddenly the person next to you wants to engage in the gesture with you, a complete stranger.

In my own case, I solve this problem by clasping my hands in front of me and closing my eyes. 99.99% of the time that takes care of the issue, though I did once experience an elderly woman using her fingers to pluck at my elbow in an attempt to pierce through my obviously meditative attitude and get me to Conform to the handholding she wanted to inflict on me.

Needless to say, a lot of folks find this (unauthorized) grabbiness disturbing, and there has been perplexity at the episcopal level concerning what to do about it.

In come some helpful liturgists, who have suggested that instead of holding hands, people imitate the priest, who happens to be in the orans position at this moment, with his hands outstretched in prayer.

This has the advantage of not automatically inflicting hand-to-hand contact on the people next to one in the pew, though in an especially crowded pew it is not a sure recipe for avoiding all bodily contact. (One may experience a whack to the face, or at least the uncomfortable experience of becoming visually acquainted with the back of a stranger’s hand better than you know your own.)

One detects in the liturgists’ suggestion a further motive besides avoiding excessive touchy-feeliness (particularly since liturgists have themselves been excessively touchy-feely in recent years). Could it be . . . a desire to get the laity to imitate the priest and thus further blur the lines between the two?

"Oh, surely not!" you’re saying. "Liturgical planners have been scrupulous since the reform of the liturgy about making sure the roles of priest and laity are at all times clearly distinguished. Just ask them! They’ll tell you!"

However that may be, the Holy See has been concerned about the laity unduly aping the priest at Mass, and in the 1997 Instruction on Collaboration, an unprecedented conjunction of Vatican dicasteries wrote:

6 § 2. To promote the proper identity (of various roles) in this area, those abuses which are contrary to the provisions of canon 907 [i.e., "In the celebration of the Eucharist, deacons and lay persons are not permitted to say the prayers, especially the eucharistic prayer, nor to perform the actions which are proper to the celebrating priest."] are to be eradicated. In eucharistic celebrations deacons and non-ordained members of the faithful may not pronounce prayers — e.g. especially the eucharistic prayer, with its concluding doxology — or any other parts of the liturgy reserved to the celebrant priest. Neither may deacons or non-ordained members of the faithful use gestures or actions which are proper to the same priest celebrant. It is a grave abuse for any member of the non-ordained faithful to "quasi preside" at the Mass while leaving only that minimal participation to the priest which is necessary to secure validity.

This instruction, incidentally, was approved by John Paul II in forma specifica, meaning that the pope invested it with his own authority and is binding on us with the pope’s authority and not merely the authority of the authoring congregations.

Now, what gestures are proper to the priest celebrant? The orans gesture when praying on behalf of the people is certainly one of them. The priest celebrant and no others (not even concelebrating priests) are directed to make this gesture in the rubrics.

In some places, some laity may spread their arms whenever the priest spreads his in a kind of "Back atcha!" motion. I’ve even seen some do a phenomenal pantomime of tossing an invisible ball to the priest by swooping their palms close together and then spreading them apart as they assume the orans posture. But this is clearly apart from the rubrics.

If the orans posture is one proper to the priest celebrant in the liturgy then the laity should not be imitating it.

But Ed Peters raises an interesting question:

SHOULD EVEN THE PRIEST CELEBRANT HIMSELF BE MAKING THIS GESTURE DURING THE OUR FATHER?

The rubrics at present call for him to do so, so he should do so until the rubrics are changed, but given the underlying logic of the rubrics and the way the saying of the Our Father has developed in Mass, Ed raises an interesting question as to whether the rubrics might oughta be changed.