Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

UG-leeeee!

Naked_mole_ratHooo-EEEEE!

Man!

That thing will break mirrors, won’t it!

This here critter is a naked mole rat, as you may know, and it has been voted one of the top 10 ugliest animals on LiveScience.Com.

Personally, I don’t agree with all the votes.

In fact, the contest has an INEXPLICABLE omission: It left out the ugliest critter of all time, the sanity-shattering STAR-NOSED MOLE.

Nevertheless, there’s some critters over at LiveScience.Com whose visages will curdle milk, make paint peel, and send small children scurrying away in fright.

AMBLE BY AND GAWK AT THEM!

The Funeral Of John Paul II

A reader writes:

I know you will appreciate having a copy of the official Vatican program for the Funeral Mass and Burial Rites for Pope John Paul II. I have attached to this e-mail a PDF format of the official program. It is in two files. The program includes everything–including the "non-public" rites celebrated inside St. Peter’s Basilica just before and just after the public rites outside in the square.

I definitely do appreciate it! It’s a fascinating read (though it is in Latin and Italian). Having these available is a great good.

MASS1.PDF

MASS2.PDF

Only thing I’m not sure about is the file format. I think St. Paul was pretty firm on rejecting the idea that we should use evil file formats that good may result. ;-D

He Gave Us Dragons

H. P. Lovecraft writes:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

This is from Lovecraft’s monograph Supernatural Horror In Literature, which is considered the seminal 20th century treatment on the subject. In it, he surveys many masters of the macabre in the centuries and decades up to his time.

I don’t agree with him that fear is the oldest or strongest emotion or that fear of the unknown in particular is. I think mankind came into this word (whether you buy evolutionary accounts or not) with a robust set of emotions, no one of which predominates the others.

That being said, fear is a powerful, primal emotion, and fear of the unknown is one of its major expressions.

That is a sufficient reason for horror stories being popular despite the efforts of those who would cramp literature down into just those forms of naive realism that would seek to uplift all readers into "smirking optimism." (Gotta love that phrase.)

God gave the human imagination dragons, whether as symbols of actual or fanciful evils, and as Lovecraft points out in his monograph, the weirdly horrible has haunted human literature since its dim beginnings in primitive folklore. It’s part of the human psyche, and nothing is going to change that.

One of my own theories is that we like such literature for the same reason that kittens and puppies wrestle with each other and that boys play mock combat games: It’s a way of preparing ourselves psychologically when we may have to face horrible dangers, a way of experiencing such situations in a safe way (think: holodeck with the safeties on) so that we will be psychologically prepared for them when we face terrible real-life situations with the safeties off. To prep us for these, we have an inbuilt drive that makes us want to "play" dangerous situations so that we have something to fall back on when we encounter them for real.

When we’re young, we physicalize this through play. When we’re older, we internalize it through literature. But it’s the same phenomenon.

We may never encounter in real life the specific dangers we read about in horror stories or thrillers. Cthulhu is, after all, fiction. But there are things in the world just as evil and–to us as individuals–just as deadly as Cthulhu.

Better to have some experience of such evils in a simulator than to face them cold.

GET THE STORIES.

A Doctor's Modest Proposal

One M.D. has a novel solution to warnings of an impending physician shortage: Embrace the shortage and become, in her words, "a rare commodity":

"Why would anyone in their right mind want to go into medicine now? Until something is done to corral the HMO and government administrators (who are expensive and time-consuming annoyances); until the pay for family practice and general practice doctors is made equal to that of general pediatricians and general internists; until there are special courts for malpractice complaints instead of the current lawyer-stealing-from-doctor tort system; and until we aren’t having to cope daily with the tragic stories of people who cannot afford medications and of people who are being dumped off insurance when they are sick, I’m advising my bright young patients to look elsewhere for an occupation.

"I think we should be allowed to become a rare commodity. Maybe then we will be paid enough and respected enough to make the profession worth doing again" (source).

After my second spit-take at the line suggesting that doctors aren’t compensated enough in money and respect for their services, I got to thinking.

In some ways, I can see this physician’s point. Given their long years of expensive training, the malpractice coverage they must pay, and the risks entailed with running a business (especially one where they are beholden to insurance companies to cough up payments in a timely manner) the dazzling salaries doctors reportedly make do seem less-glittering. And, of course, it is specialization that pays the most. General practice and teaching doctors do not make dazzling salaries. I can also concede that respect for doctors flies out the window when it’s time to start looking around for a scapegoat for a tragedy, whether or not an individual doctor could have done anything differently.

Still.

Advising that physicians allow themselves to become a "rare commodity" will only mean that patients, those whom doctors are supposed to serve, will only receive worse care as the insurance companies ration out treatment options ever more thinly to meet the increased demand. And, as the physicians left in the field grow ever more gray, who will replace them? Will it take a decade-plus to train the new physicians once the potential doctors and early-retiree doctors decide to come back from their "strike"?

All in all, a silly proposal for a serious problem.

(Nod to Kevin, M.D., for the links.)

JPII's Biblical Vision

Scott Hahn reflects on Pope John Paul II’s "superior command of [S]cripture" and how that influenced many Protestant Evangelicals — including Dr. Hahn, who converted to the Church in 1986:

"Though I was then a Protestant minister–Calvinist in training, evangelical in approach, and instinctively anti-Catholic–I was first drawn to Pope John Paul II in the early 1980s. I was not alone among his hesitant admirers. He captured our attention because of his effective combat in the culture wars. But he kept our attention because of something else.

"Gradually and grudgingly, many of us, Protestants and Catholics alike, came to admit that he was effective in the culture wars, not because of his bully pulpit or his media savvy or his philosophical suavity, but because of his superior command of scripture."

GET THE STORY.

(Nod to Karen Hall of Some Have Hats for the link.)

…Let God Sort 'Em Out?

Economist Steven Levitt has become the ELVIS of statistics by crunching numbers in unexpected ways and analyzing the results. He’s ruffled feathers on both ends of the political spectrum by arguing on the one hand that it is far more dangerous to own a swimming pool than a gun, and on the other that abortion reduces crime.

That’s right! We’ve all been enjoying a drop in crime thanks in part to the fact that we have been killing criminals in the womb.

This last theory seems to prop up the old truism that poverty causes crime. The two are statistically linked. What I have never heard discussed is to what extent crime causes poverty. Does he have his plow before his mule?

READ HIS PAPER (with John Donahue) HERE.

MLK

So the other day I was driving along in my pick-up truck, listening to country music, puffing my pipe, and thinking about Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, etc.).

Words in these languages tend to be built around roots that have three consonants, which then have a variety of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes shoved around and into them. (An infix is a affix that goes into a word, as you might imagine, instead of on the front or on the back, like a prefix or suffix.)

F’rinstance: the root K-T-B gets use in Semitic languages to make words like "write," "writing," "book," "bookkeeper," "library," etc.

‘Nuther instance: M-L-K gets used for a lot of royal words . . .

  • In Hebrew the word for "king" is melek, in Aramaic it’s malka, and in Arabic it’s malik.
  • In Hebrew the word for "queen" is malkah, in Aramaic it’s malktha, and in Arabic it’s malika.
  • In Hebrew the word for "angel" or "messenger" (i.e., a messenger of the king or the heavenly King) is mal’ak, in Aramaic it’s malaka, and in Arabic it’s malaak.

So lots of M-L-K words denoting kings and king-related things in Semitic languages.

Which got me thinking about this guy:

Mlkjr

America’s own M.L.K, or Martin Luther King.

Go fig.

Nailhead? Meet Hammer.

Columnist Maggie Gallagher writes (excerpts):

Pope John Paul the Great is not yet buried, but the divisions among American Catholics have already taken center stage on cable television: Will the next pope be Catholic?

Of course, JP II’s critics don’t put it that way. But the long-deferred hopes of this group (call them sexual liberals) — that the Catholic Church is about to abandon its ancient teachings on premarital sex, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and, above all, birth control — have burst out anew in the 24-hour coverage of the pope’s death.

Sexual liberalism has a lot of powerful things going for it in terms of attracting adherents: passion, for instance, the difficulty of self-restraint, the attractiveness of choice as the highest moral good. But sexual liberalism’s most powerful ally is the myth of progress. Sexual liberals, like Marxists of old, see themselves as the inevitable wave of the future. The Catholic Church is "out of step" with the future, they believe, and must eventually get in line with the poll numbers, or fade into irrelevance.

Puncture this myth, and see how quickly the power of this set of ideas drizzles away.

Like Marxists of old, sexual liberals are going to be shocked and disappointed to find how irrelevant and outmoded their ideas seem. In 1968, the advice of sexual liberals — accommodate the sexual revolution or die — may have seemed tempting, even to the College of Cardinals. By 2004, it has become clear that Christian denominations that accepted this advice have not experienced religious revivals. Instead, such mainline Protestant sects are rapidly dwindling in numbers.

Sexual liberalism has a lot going for it, but it does have this one little drawback: Religions or societies that adopt it appear to die out.

GET THE STORY.

(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who e-mailed!)

Successor Of Simon Peter Or Simon Magus?

A reader wites:

In the document of the Conclave of Cardinals, it states that any cardinal who bribes or commits simony is exommunicated by that act itself. It also says that thie does NOT change the votes at all.

True. Universi Dominici Gregis states:

78. If — God forbid — in the election of the Roman Pontiff the crime of simony were to be perpetrated, I decree and declare that all those guilty thereof shall incur excommunication latae sententiae. At the same time I remove the nullity or invalidity of the same simoniacal provision, in order that — as was already established by my Predecessors — the validity of the election of the Roman Pontiff may not for this reason be challenged.

The reader continues:

We (those at our High School Religion class) assume that this is to promote Church unity and such.

True again. JPII specifically set that aside so that "the election of the Roman Pontiff may not for this reason be challaneged."

And people can only be de-excommunicated by the pope.

A quibble: Excommunications can be lifted by folks other than the pope, but this excommunication, even though the pontiff doesn’t say so, would almost certainly be reserved to the Holy See under normal circumstances.

So what’s to stop a cardinal from bribing 2/3 of the people, getting in office, and un-excommunicating them? Are we to merely assume that no cardinal would ever do such a thing? In view of actions in the Middle Ages? And the increasing moral corruption of our day and age?

Hypothetically speaking, the possibility you mention could happen, which is why John Paul II provided that a simoniacal election would still be valid.

Practically speaking, it strikes me as quite unlikely for several reasons:

  1. The Holy Spirit’s action to the contrary.
  2. These days you don’t generally rise to being papabile if you are tempted by sins as blatant as committing simony to gain the papacy. Your temptations are likely to be much more subtle.
  3. It’s not possible to bribe 2/3rds of the cardinal electors. That’s almost eighty folks. What are you going to offer them? Money? Most don’t want it and papabile usually aren’t rich. Power? There are only so many high-level positions to go around, and these guys are already occupying most of them. They’re cardinals: They already have the top slots.
  4. While it might be possible to bribe a few electors (e.g., enough to swing things in a close election), is that something you really want to do? If you can trust them to keep the bribe a secret, they’re likely already your friends or think highly enough of you that they’re voting for you anyway.
  5. Further, if you can’t trust them to keep the secret then you’d better not try bribing them, because there is no faster way to lose a papal election than for it to be publicly known that you tried to bribe somebody. That’s the one thing that’s certain to unify your opponents and alienate your supporters! The anti-simony ethic of the college of cardinals thus itself serves as a barrier to this happening.

I can thus think of five factors (off the top of my head) that make a simoniacal election unlikely: the action of the Holy Spirit, the usual character of papabile, the lack of resources for making effective bribes, the lack of good candidates for accepting bribes, and the reaction the college would have if attempted bribery became known.

Back centuries ago, when matters were very different, it may have been possible to obtain the papacy by simony, thus simulaneously becoming the successor of Simon Peter and Simon Magus, but it seems very unlikely to me to happen today.