Author: SDG

The Anglican Solution

The Church of England has come up with a "Let’s try to please everyone!"-solution to the problem of Anglican homosexual clergy and the gay clergy’s desire for "marriage." "Okay," sez the Church of England, "You can marry but you must remain celibate continent!"

"The Church of England is to allow gay clergy to enter into civil partnerships but only if they promise to abstain from sex, according to guidance issued yesterday.

"It has been drawn up to clarify the Church’s position on the Civil Partnerships Act, which will offer same-sex couples a legal status similar to marriage when it comes into effect on Dec 5.

"In a ‘pastoral statement’ [scare quotes in the original], the House of Bishops said that clergy would be able to take advantage of the Act, but only if they reassure their bishops that they will uphold Church teaching. Clergy were also told that they should not offer formal services of blessing for couples who had been through a civil partnership ceremony, but they could pray with the couple."

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I find it fascinating that a church created because of one man’s sexual indiscretions and rationalizations for his immoral behavior has constantly been at the forefront of the liberal Christian "sexual revolution" and the rationalization by some Christians of sexual behavior traditionally recognized to be immoral.

Cats Hate Sweets

That was the conclusion of a Very Important Scientific Study conducted recently:

"Now, there’s a scientific theory explaining, at least in part, why cats have such snobby eating habits: genetics.

"Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and their collaborators said Sunday they found a dysfunctional feline gene that probably prevents cats from tasting sweets, a sensation nearly every other mammal on the planet experiences to varying degrees.

"Researchers took saliva and blood samples from six cats, including a tiger and a cheetah and found each had a useless gene that other mammals use to create a ‘sweet receptor’ on their tongues. The gene in question does not produce one of the two vital proteins needed to form the receptors.

"’Because cats can’t taste sweets, they’re cranky,’ joked Joseph Brand, Monell’s associate director and an author of the paper being published Sunday in the inaugural issue of the Public Library of Science’s journal Genetics."

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Just what the world needs: Scientific proof that cats are finicky.

One wonders why scientists choose the research topics that they do. While a study like this might be entertaining, of what possible use could it be to the furtherance of scientific inquiry? Merely to be able to say that we know? I hope that there is some use to studies like this and that it is only my completely unscientific mind that barely scraped through required high-school science that cannot fathom it.

Raiders Of The Lost Templars

Those perennial heroes of conspiracy theorists everywhere, the Knights Templar, have surfaced again. Now the Knights are claimed to be responsible for Renaissance paintings of the pregnant Madonna:

"A string of artists working from the middle of the 14th century near Florence painted the Virgin Mary as they imagined her to have been while she was pregnant. The best-known of these swelling Madonnas is by the great 15th century Tuscan artist Piero della Francesca. It shows an apparently dejected mother-to-be with one hand resting on the burgeoning front of her maternity gown.

[…]

"Carvings and sculptures of pregnant Marys have a longer history before and after the early Renaissance. But the painting of them by artists of stature is almost entirely confined to Tuscany in the 130 years ending around 1467, when Piero della Francesco is reckoned to have created the fresco at Monterchi.

"In a 40-page booklet published last month, Renzo Manetti, a Florentine architect and author of several works on symbolism in art, argues that this is no coincidence.

"’Florence was a major Templar centre and these Madonnas start to appear soon after the suppression of the knights in 1312,’ he told the Guardian this week. The first by a celebrated artist is attributed to Taddeo Gaddi and dated to between 1334 and 1338.

"In virgin and child paintings, the child symbolises wisdom, knowledge, truth. So what the pregnant Madonnas represent is a temporarily hidden truth,’ Mr. Manetti said."

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When Mr. Manetti has time for a sabbatical from architecture, I suggest a course in Logic 101. The attribution of one thing to its immediate predecessor simply because it happened afterward is known as the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin, "after this, therefore because of this"). The article reports that an Italian priest has offered a far simpler explanation of the paintings of the pregnant Madonnas:

"In a 15-page article due to appear soon in the diocesan periodical, Father Giovanni Alpigiano argues for the traditional view that the expectant virgins represent the theological concept of incarnation. There is ‘no arcane secret’ attached to Gaddi’s Mary, he insists, despite her cryptic, knowing expression.

"’Great care needs to be taken in attempting to rewrite the history of art or literature solely with the help of esoteric clues,’ Fr. Alpigiano adds. An account of his counter-blast was splashed over the best part of a page in Avvenire, the national daily newspaper owned by the Italian bishops’ conference."

But, of course, simple explanations do not sell books or establish academic reputations so Fr. Alpigiano must be satisfied with being a Catholic apologist rather than an art "expert."

Christ Is Kewl

Hollywood may have been unwilling to honor Mel Gibson for his blockbuster The Passion of the Christ, but it is definitely willing to cash in on the success of his movie by scavaging religious imagery to plump up otherwise thoroughly secular films:

"In the summer blockbuster movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith, from 20th Century Fox, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play godless suburbanites and professional assassins. But when they steal their neighbor’s car for an extended chase scene, a crucifix hangs conspicuously from the rear-view mirror, and in the next scene the actors wear borrowed jackets that read ‘Jesus Rocks’ as they go on the lam.

"’We decided to make the next-door neighbor, whose crucifix it is, be hip, young, cool Christians,’ explained the movie’s director, Doug Liman. ‘It’s literally in there for no other reason than I thought: This is cool.’

"Liman isn’t alone. Mainstream Hollywood, after decades of ignoring the pious — or occasionally defying them with the likes of Martin Scorsese’s revisionist Last Temptation of Christ and Kevin Smith’s profane parody Dogma — is adjusting to what it perceives to be a rising religiosity in American culture."

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Uh huh. Sure.

What these Hollywood types don’t seem to understand is that Mel Gibson’s movie succeeded because it was sincere. It wasn’t aimed at milking the presumed "religiosity" of a target audience. (Had it been so crassly targeted it would have been far less overtly Catholic in its appeal to an overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian audience.) But draping a crucifix on a mirror and stuffing pop icons into "Jesus Rocks" jackets is so patently patronizing as to be immediately scorned by the audience whose bucks Hollywood wants.

Christians, in the eyes of Hollywood studios, are handy milch cows but are not worth taking seriously.

Who Wants To Be A Married Man?

Given current demographics, we can predict that coming soon to a Chinese audience will be a Made In China version of the game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? But the prize on the Chinese version of the show will not be a million dollars but a woman eligible for marriage:

"China will have more than 23 million men unable to find wives by 2020 because so many more boys are being born than girls, according to a study.

"The widespread practice of aborting female foetuses [i.e., fetuses] is being blamed for creating a generation of bachelors who will pose increasing social problems, it says.

"These men are known as ‘bare branches’ because they will never bear fruit. History suggests that they will give rise to higher crime rates and political instability. Their number might encourage China to become more authoritarian or seek an outlet for their energies through war."

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Of course, Americans don’t usually discriminate on the basis of the sex of the child. In America, unborn babies have an equal opportunity to be aborted. So, in America, we may one day have a game show titled Who Wants To Live?

And modern man thinks the ancient Greeks and Romans who abandoned unwanted babies to the vagaries of the elements were barbarians.

It’s Not All About You

One of my favorite secular commentators is Judith Martin, also known as Miss Manners. Martin often has a wildly hilarious, yet absolutely commonsense take on the details of everyday life. As a Catholic apologist, easily the bulk of the questions I get are on marriage, annulment, and weddings, so this article on planning weddings made me howl with laughter and nod with agreement:

"Have you considered doing something unusual and individualistic at your wedding — not personalizing it?

[…]

"But none of these advantages [mentioned in the column] is the reason Miss Manners urges bridal couples not to think of their weddings as opportunities to showcase themselves. The real reason is that despite what you think, and despite what you have been urged to think by the wedding industry, your wedding is not ‘about you.’

"Your courtship is about you, and your marriage will be about you. And unless you drag all your wedding guests off to an exotic destination, your wedding trip will be about you.

"But a wedding is about your public entrance into the civic and often religious rituals of the society. Its emotional strength comes from long continuity — knowing that you are repeating the steps of those who preceded you and those who will follow.

"It is a shame to trade that rich and momentous step for Madison and Brad’s Day to Show Off."

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A Catholic might add a bit more to this, such as pointing out, as Fulton Sheen did in his book Three To Get Married, God’s role in the production, but Martin’s basic analysis is definitely spot-on.