Month: February 2006

Godcasting

You’ve heard of podcasting. Well, now there’s Godcasting — more specifically, The GodCast Network, a global Christian podcasting network.

"This is a podcast site, home of free MP3 audio shows that you can listen to now on your computer by clicking on the MP3 icons below. Or, using podcasting client software such as Apple’s iTunes, you can subscribe to our shows and have them downloaded automatically to your computer and optionally to your portable MP3 player whenever new shows become available."

VISIT THE SITE.

(Nod to the reader who sent the link.)

Oh, and JA.org’s sci-fi fans will want to be sure to check out Klingon Word, a show that promises to have listeners "thinking about the Scriptures through the lens of the Klingon Language Version of the World English Bible."

SEARCH THE KLINGON SCRIPTURES.

(And, no, I’m not making that up. It’s amazing what people put on the Internet and that Google finds.)

"vaD joH’a’ vaj loved the qo’, vetlh ghaH nobta’ Daj wa’ je neH puqloD, vetlh ‘Iv HartaH Daq ghaH should ghobe’ chIlqu’, ‘ach ghaj eternal yIn."

Translation: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

Abortion & Battlestar Galactica

BoomerBattlestar Galactica has recently addressed the issue of abortion–twice–and they’ve done it well both times.

The first time it happened was when the question of aborting Boomer’s human-cylon baby came up.

For those who don’t know, the cylons are artificial entities (who seem more biological than not) that wiped out human civilization in a distant star system. (The survivors are now fleeing the cylons and trying to find the lost colony called Earth.)

Boomer (left) is a cylon who was able to mate successfully with a human, and now she’s pregnant. In view of what her people did to ours, though, there are a lot of folks who want her and her hybrid baby dead, and the question of forcing an abortion upon her was floated on the show.

Ultimately, there was no abortion. This was good not only from a moral perspective (violence was done neither to the baby nor the mother) but also from a dramatic perspective. (Killing Boomer’s child would deprive the show of a huge amount of dramatic possibilities as well as completely turn off the audience.)

They also had the saving of the child result (via a kind of stem cell-like thing) in curing the terminal cancer of President Laura Roslin (below), who was the chief one wanting the baby dead. So even before the child was born, it saved a life.

Abortion then came up a few weeks later, when a girl from a pro-life colony tried get an abortion from the doctor aboard the Galactica.

RoslinThis episode established that abortion had been legal before the cylon attack, and so it was still legal. Further, President Roslin was very much a pro-abort. Yet she was also regarded as a religious figure by the pro-life colony, and she needs their political support to stay in office and keep the ragtag fleet of survivors safe.

As we know from the opening credits of the show every week, there are only 40-something thousand humans who survived the cylon attack, and more are getting picked off each week.

As Roslin herself said in the immediate wake of the attack, human civilization is doomed if they don’t get away from their home solar system " . . . And. Start. Having. Babies."

So the episode pits her pro-abortion ideology against the fact that humanity is facing extinction, and in this episode she’s told that unless demographic trends change (the trends including new cylon attacks on a regular basis) that the human race will be dead in less than 18 years.

Dramatically, this is very good. We’ve got internal conflict in the character. Laura Roslin is in the process of being mugged by reality.

And so in the end she issues an executive order that criminalizes abortion and makes anyone who would interfere with the birth of a child–whether mother or doctor (fathers don’t get mentioned explicitly for some reason)–subject to criminal penalties.

Two points for BSG!

But only two, because the writers throw a bone to the pro-aborts in the audience by letting the girl from the pro-life colony have the abortion before the executive order is issued–possibly costing President Roslin the support of the pro-life colonials in the upcoming election.

This also may not be the last time the subject comes up, because Roslin–who is now a "personally-in-favor-of-abortion-BUT" candidate (how’s that for a switch!) is pitted against a true pro-abort.

Interesting stuff.

Part of what I find interesting is that the writers of the show seem to be quite liberal (as you learn if you listen to the podcast commentary), but they’re telling a story that regularly forces them into having to take conservative positions on the show, because the conservative positions are the ones that are required for the survival of mankind.

"Liberalism is a luxury we can’t afford" is the message that keeps coming out.

Watching the characters from a pampered civilization get mugged by reality and have to shed their former illusions may not be one of the reasons that TV Guide called this "The best show on television," but it could have been.

Is There NOT ENOUGH Sci-Fi On JimmyAkin.Org?

A reader writes:

I find your website a joy in the
midst of boring stupidity.  However, I have a complaint:  As a lover of
sci-fi, you haven’t posted anything in-depth about sci-fi lately.  As a
fellow "nerd" (I imply no disrespect), I enjoy the compatibility you
bring towards both Catholicism and Science Fiction.  The only problem
(which is two-fold) is that you have neither posted anything lately on
Science Fiction nor about Battlestar Galactica.  Why is this?

It’s
because I blog at night after work and frequently grab whatever is
handy to blog about. Lately, I’ve been trying to deal with some of the
questions (particularly pastoral ones) that have come in. Without many
sci-fi questions, the topic mix altered for a bit, which is normal. The
topic mix tends to go through cycles.

I did run a reply to a query on what happend to Jonah Quinn on
Stargate, though, and I’ve been planning to comment on something from
last week’s Battlestar Galactica, so that post will go up next.

If folks want more sci-fi on JimmyAkin.Org, they’re welcome to send in sci-fi related questions–particularly if they involve the theological and moral dimensions of science fiction. The same thing goes for fantasy, horror, weird fiction, and whatever else.

Catholic Blog Awards Reflections

By now the voting on the 2006 Catholic Blog Awards is over (or is scheduled to be over). I don’t yet know whether I won anything, because I am writing this in advance and am going to be out of town on the day that the voting closes.

I want to thank all who supported the blog in the various categories it was nominated for. I really appreciate your support. This blog is a labor of love for me, and to have people express the value they see in it by voting for it is an incentive to keep going.

I also want to thank CyberCatholics for hosting the awards. I know that they did a LOT of behind the scenes work to get the awards done, and they did it amid very difficult conditions, including major Internet connectivity, bandwidth problems, and data loss in one category. So a big thank you to them as well.

That being said, I think that there were some problems with the way the awards were conducted this year, and these should be addressed in the future.

In particular, there was the vote once per day thing.

The Catholic Blog Awards page explaind that this was "to keep voting fair." How this could serve to keep voting fair is something that I did not understand. So I asked, and I was told that the reason that this was implemented was to allow people who share a single IP address to both vote (e.g., a husband and wife who have a single computer with a cable modem, or the people in an office or school who share the same IP).

Unfortunately, this was not explained on the voting page. It also doesn’t really put married couples, schools, and offices on the same footing as single people, since in the course of the week of voting a single person would have seven theoretical votes to cast, while a married couple, school, or office would have seven votes to split between them.

Since the voting page simply explained thing in terms of one vote per day, the potential positive effect of this was blunted in that it encouraged single people to exercise their extra votes just as much as those sharing an IP.

It also put the nominated bloggers in a really delicate position.

As soon as I learned about this aspect of the voting, I hated it. I realized that some bloggers would take the "Vote early and often" line, which would (a) come across as unseemly to the readers and (b) would give those bloggers an advantage over those who wanted to stick to the "one person, one vote" principle and this (c) could lead to bad blood between the two groups of bloggers, which is the antithesis of what should happen in the Catholic blogging community.

Since I was one of the "one person, one vote" bloggers, I sat back for several days and didn’t mention the possibility of multiple votes.

Until I started losing in the one category I was most interested in (Best Apologetics) because my principal competition in that category started using the "Vote early, vote often" line.

Now, I know some folks have taken the attitude that this is all in fun and these awards don’t mean anything, and that’s a very easy position to take if you aren’t one of the nominees. But if you’ve invested a lot of personal time and effort in building something that people see enough value in to nominate then it does mean something to you. Receiving recognition for all your hard work is important.

That’s not vanity. That’s an expression of an aspect of basic human nature. People need recognition for their efforts. That’s true in marriages and in friendships and in job situations and in blogging. Recognition is incentive to keep going.

This year one of the ways the Catholic blogging community could give recognition to bloggers who have worked hard was through these awards, and there was one category in particular that I have a special interest in because of my profession.

So when I saw the "vote early, vote often" meme looking like it would unbalance the results in that category, I reluctantly decided to point out this aspect of the rules. That way the blogs were put back on an equal footing.

Which is required if the results are to mean anything at all.

Unfortunately, the multiple votes thing of itself diminishes the meaningfulness of the results. It doesn’t deprive them of all meaning because if a blog’s readers are enthusiastic enough to cast multiple votes then that says something about the blog.

But it doesn’t say as much as if the awards had been conducted under the "one person, one vote" principle.

It was thus with great reluctance that I eventually said to myself, "Well, this is the way the rules are this year. I didn’t choose that. I would have opposed it if I had been asked about it. But that’s the way it is, and if these results are to mean anything then the rules need to be pointed out."

I also left my comboxes open in the two posts where I pointed it out, and I took my lumps, as people accused me to my face (virtually speaking) of "vanity" and "egregious self-promotion," and said deliberately cruel things like I "do not deserve" particular awards or that my pointing out the multiple-vote rule and saying mild things like "Please support JimmyAkin.Org" caused them to vote against me.

I noticed other bloggers turning off the comboxes in posts where they pointed to the multiple-vote aspect of the rules, and I can understand why. The kind of reaction I got when I left them on underscores the problem with the multiple-vote rule.

In all this I was trying to do the best I could in a bad situation. I didn’t want to criticize the rule while the voting was still underway since that would serve no purpose (the rule couldn’t be changed once it was announced), but I wanted to thank those who voted for the blog, and I felt y’all deserved a public explanation of where I stand on the multiple-vote rule.

I appreciate the Catholic Blog Awards, but the multiple-vote rule needs to be altered in some way to avoid the problems that were encountered with it this year.

At the same time, I want to reiterate my thanks to those who put on and ran the awards this year. I know that they had a tremendously difficult job, and I want to give them full credit for the efforts they put in.

Building A Catholic Utopia

Avemarialogo_1

Newsweek eyes Tom Monaghan’s Ave Maria University and the planned surrounding town with some alarm:

"For Tom Monaghan, the devout Catholic who founded Domino’s Pizza and is now bankrolling most of the initial $400 million cost of the project, Ave Maria is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to spreading his own strict interpretation of Catholicism. Though he says nonbelievers are welcome, Monaghan clearly wants the community to embody his conservative values. He controls all the commercial real estate in town (along with his developing partner, Barron Collier Cos.) and is asking pharmacies not to carry contraceptives. If forced to choose between two otherwise comparable drugstores, Barron Collier would favor the one that honored that request, says its president and CEO, Paul Marinelli.

[…]

"The ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] of Florida is worried about how he’s playing the game. ‘It is completely naive to think this first attempt [to restrict access to contraception] will be their last,’ says executive director Howard Simon. Armed with a 1946 Supreme Court opinion that ‘ownership [of a town] does not always mean absolute dominion,’ Simon will be watching Ave Maria for any signs of Monaghan’s request’s becoming a demand. Planned Parenthood is similarly alarmed. So far, Naples Community Hospital, which plans to open a clinic in Ave Maria Town, says it will not prescribe any birth control to students. Will others be able to get the pill? ‘For the general public, the answer is probably yes, but not definitely yes,’ says hospital point man Edgardo Tenreiro. The Florida attorney general’s office says the issue of limiting access will likely have to be worked out in court. Barron Collier and Monaghan say they’re following Florida law."

GET THE STORY.

(Nod to the reader who sent the link.)

So, unless contraceptives and abortion are available on every corner, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are going to be frightened that their constituents do not have "legitimate access"? For the sake of argument, let’s briefly set aside the question of the morality of contraceptives and abortion: Who says that everything a person could be expected to have access to must be in his hometown? Surely most people have recourse to cars and other forms of transportation to take them to the products and services they demand?

Unless, of course, they are poor, and the poor are the major customersprime targets of groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.

“Prove Jesus Existed” Trial Thrown Out

Y’all may remember a piece back when there was word of an absurd trial in Italy where a priest was ordered to prove that Jesus existed.

Well now sanity has prevailed and that trial has been thrown out of court. (CHT to the readers who e-mailed.)

Luigi Cascioli, a 72-year-old retired agronomist, had accused the Rev.
Enrico Righi of violating two laws with the assertion [that Jesus existed], which he called
a deceptive fable propagated by the Roman Catholic Church.

In fact, Cascioli may now get in trouble for falsely accusing the priest:

Judge Gaetano Mautone said in his decision that prosecutors should investigate Cascioli for possible slander.

GET THE STORY.

Marriage In A Catholic Church After Divorce Without Annulment

We get a lot of questions at work from Catholics who got
married outside the Church and want to know if they need an annulment. The
answer is that they do.

Catholics are bound to observe the Catholic form of marriage or to get a
dispensation from it in order for their marriages to be valid. For a Catholic
to "marry outside the Church" without a dispensation thus results in
an invalid marriage, and for such a person to remarry, he needs the Church to
look at his first marriage and officially establish that it was invalid and
that he is thus free to marry someone else.

This process is commonly known as "getting an annulment." The fact
that the annulment is an open-and-shut thing in this case doesn’t mean that the
person doesn’t need one. The Church needs to look at anything that appears to
be a marriage to see if it was before it can give a person permission to marry
someone else.

But what if that doesn’t happen?

Sometimes we get people who say, "Well, our priest said that we didn’t
need an annulment because we were married outside the Church, and he went ahead
and married us anyway. Does that mean our current marriage is invalid?"

Fortunately, no it doesn’t.

The thing that determine the validity of the marriage in this case is whether
the parties were genuinely free to marry each other. If they were bound to
prior partners then they were not free and the marriage is invalid. But if they
were free then, even though they didn’t get the annulment they should have
gotten, the marriage will be valid.

Here’s how the canon law on that works: The Code of Canon Law provides as
follows,

Can.  1085
§1. A person bound by the bond of a prior marriage, even if it was not
consummated, invalidly attempts marriage.

§2. Even if the prior marriage is invalid or dissolved for any reason, it is
not on that account permitted to
contract another before the nullity. . .  of the prior marriage is
established legitimately and certainly.

The first part of this canon deals with those who are bound
by a prior bond and says that they invalidly attempt marriage.

The second part deals with those who are not bound to a prior partner, and it
says they are not permitted to attempt marriage until they receive an
annulment.

But permission only addresses the subject of liceity (conformity with the law),
not validity (objective reality). You need an annulment to get permission to
marry someone else, but if you don’t have permission, that doesn’t mean that
the new union is invalid. It means that it was illicit (not conducted in accord
with the law), but it can still be valid (objectively real).

The situation is the same as it would be if a priest celebrating the Mass fails
to say a required preface to the Eucharistic prayer. He doesn’t have permission
to omit that, and as a result his celebration of the Mass will be out of
conformity with the law and thus illicit. But the consecration of the
elements will still be valid because it isn’t the preface but the words
of consecration that bring about the consecration.

In the same way, in celebrating the sacrament of holy matrimony, under current
law it isn’t the parties having of an annulment that fundamentally determines
their ability to marry each other. It’s their objective freedom to marry.

Thus the green CLSA commentary on the Code of Canon Law notes:

If a Catholic [whose previous marriage was null] re-marries according to the canonical form after a divorce but before a declaration of nullity is granted, the marriage is illicit but valid and need not be convalidated after the previous marriage is declared null [p. 1287].

So in cases where a priest erroneously told a couple they didn’t need an
annulment and went ahead and married the parties, they will be validly married
as long as they had the freedom to marry each other.

How To Catch Up On What You Missed

Daniel_jacksonA reader writes:

You’ve helped answer a question or two in the past about Stargate physics, but now, it’s personnel. Life has really acted up for me – in a good way – where I can’t plant myself down on Sci-Fi on Monday’s to catch several episodes of SG, so I haven’t seen this. But, how did they "transfer" Jonah when Daniel came back the first time from being dead/evolved. Is there a synapsis site I can go to?

First the answer to the specific question; then more general info on how to catch up on what you missed in an episodic TV show.

Daniel was expelled from the commuity of the Ascended and returned to our plane of existence when he broke the Ancients’ non-interference directive in an attempt to defeat Anubis. This happened at the end of season 6.

At the beginning of season 7 Daniel was found back in physical form and suffering from amnesia. His memory started to return over the next couple of episodes, when he fought alongside Jonah and the rest of SG-1 as they continue the struggle against Anubis, who was threatening Jonah’s homeworld of Kelowna.

By the end of the second episode, Daniel is functional enough to resume his place on the team, and Jonah returned to his own people on Kelowna.

If you want a mini-synopsis of each episode of the series, check out THIS ONE AT GATEWORLD.

Also, TV.COM has epsiode guides for an amazing number of shows.

In fact. TV.com is usually the first place I look when seeking an episode guide for a show.

WIKIPEDIA also usually has info on individual characters in shows, as well as the shows themselves.

And if all else fails you can GOOGLE the name of the show together with "episode guide" (in quotes) and turn up something.

This works not just for SG-1, but Lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica, and even shows you dimly remember from your childhood.