Category: Culture

Masonry Book Recommend

A reader writes:

Thanks for all you do, God is smiling on you! Since Relevant Radio has move C.A. spot to 2pm I rarely get a change to hear your wisdom any more. I caught a bit last week, a listener asked about free masonry and you refer him to a book by Fr. Whelan at Ignatius, I think! I went to the Ignatius web sight and can not find it. Did I remember the information incorrectly? I appreciate any response.

The book was CHRISTIANITY AND AMERICAN FREEMASONRY by William Whalen.

Given the sensationalistic nature of most books on Freemasonry, this is the only one out there that I can recommend at present.

Book (Etc.) Recommends

A piece back a reader wrote to suggest that I do a permapost on book recommendations drawing together the various recommends I’ve made from time to time (a la what I do with Lent questions in Annual Lent Fight). I’ve decided to do so, so here goes.

(I’m not sure if I’ve got all the recommends, so if anybody finds ones that I’ve missed in the archives, e-mail me. Thanks!)

This list will become more organized over time.

So Now We ALL Know!

. . . Or at least all of us who want to know.

Here’s the explanation for why Klingons in the 23rd century were human-appearing, while those before and after are forehead-ridgers.

The episode of Star Trek: Enterprise that establishes the on-screen explanation should have aired in everyone’s town by now, but lest anyone not want to know, I’ll put the spoilers in white-on-white, so you have to select the text (by swiping it or hitting Ctrl-A) to see it.

Here goes:

  • In the late 20th century, a group of scientists created a "master race" of genetically altered humans, among them Kahn Noonien Singh. This led to the Eugenics Wars on Earth in the 1990s.
  • In the 22nd century, scientific genius Arik Soong (played by Brent Spiner) incubated and birthed a number of embryos from this time. These embryos, because of their augmented DNA, were known as "augments." They had the increased intelligence and aggression of the key players in the Eugenics Wars.
  • When Arik Soong unleashed several augments in the 22nd century, the Klingons perceived it as a threat.
  • Subseuquently, when several augmented embryos fell into their hands, they exploited their DNA to create Klingon augments to compete with human augments.
  • One Klingon augment had a virus that combined with the human augment DNA.
  • This virus spread to other Klingons, making them not only have augmented abilities but also to appear more human.
  • By the 23rd century (the time of Star Trek: The Original Series), this virus had spread throughout the Klingon race.
  • By the 24th century (the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation), this virus had been cured, making Klingons of that era profoundly uncomfortable in discussing why their appearance had temporarily temporarily lurched human-ward a over hundred years before.

So there!

That explains:

  1. Why the difference existed.
  2. Why characters in Enterprise’s time had the forehead-ridge appearance.
  3. Why characters in the TOS period had the human-looking appearance.
  4. Why characters from the beginning of the movies onward were back to the forehead-ridge appearance.
  5. Why characters introduced as human-looking in TOS were forehead-ridgers later on.
  6. Why it seemed to affect the whole race.
  7. Why Klingons were embarrassed to talk about all this with outsiders, and:
  8. Why the human-lookers were so . . . human . . . looking.

CHECK YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS

for this week’s episode, which spells it out in more detail.

“The Moral Question”

Recently I posted on the legal aspects of copying music and several asked me to go into more detail about the moral aspects of doing so.

Live to serve. Here goes:

  1. Private property is not an absolute right. According to the teaching of the Church, the goods of the earth have been given as a common gift to mankind. As a result, no individual has an absolute right to any particular piece of property (CCC 2403).
  2. Theft is thus defined not as "usurping another’s property" but as "usurping another’s property against the reasonable will of the owner." The Catechism then notes: "There is no theft if consent can be presumed or if refusal is contrary to reason and the universal destination of goods" (CCC 2408).
  3. The orderly functioning of society requires us to have laws to regulate the flow of goods and services, and the State is the entity charged by God (Rom. 13) to oversee such matters. Therefore, "Political authority has the right and duty to regulate the legitimate exercise of the right to ownership for the sake of the common good" (CCC 2406).
  4. One must presume that the entities charged by God with performing a task are performing it correctly unless the contrary is shown. Therefore, one needs to give the laws of the state regarding the regulation of private property the benefit of the doubt.
  5. If you can show that, in a particular case, these laws are contrary to the common good and that the costs of violating them (to oneself and others) are less than the benefits of doing so then one can, in principle, deviate from them (in which case one bears one’s punishment if one is caught).

Now let’s apply this to copying music. There are two aspects that need to be covered (a) copying music where it is not permitted by the civil law and (b) refusing to copy music when it is permitted.

In regard to the first:

  • Artists have a moral right to be rewarded for their efforts in creating works of music to entertain and edify us. So do the record company employees that invest in and promote artists in hoping of earning a living.
  • It must be presumed until the contrary is proven that the civil law adequately expresses these rights.
  • To show that in a particular case it is morally licit to make uncompensated copies of a song one will have to show that in that particular case the requirements of the civil law are contrary to reason and the common good required by the universal destination of goods. This is going to be much harder to do than in the typical example of a starving man needing food that he has no money to pay for.
  • In particular: It means showing that there is some reason why you need that song right now and you can’t pay the 88 cents needed to download it from Wal-Mart or another service. (Wanting to make a mix disk for your friend isn’t a good reason since you can pay for the burns you need to make of individual songs and then give the resulting disk to your friend.)
  • In the old days it may have been easier to show such things, but today, with all the ways we have available to us to get music in a way that compensates the artist and record company, it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so.
  • The only way I can see to argue for widespread uncompensated downloading would be to argue that copyright law is fundamentally contrary to the common good, which seems plainly incorrect (and contrary to the Bible’s teaching that artists need to be compensated for their labor; as in "the worker is worth his wages"). Also, if there were no copyright laws then fewer artistic works would be produced because there would be no profit in them, so such laws seem to foster the common good.
  • While one could argue something other than copyright as a way of ensuring compensation for artists, such systems are hypothetical. Copyright is what our society is using now to compensate artists.
  • The general damage done to society by widespread disregard for the law and the scandal done if others are aware of your covert variance of the law also must be factored into the above decisions.

Now for refusing to exercise all of the copying options that the civil law affords:

  • Again, the provisions of civil law enjoy the benefit of the doubt.
  • Therefore, if civil law judges a particular act of copying as licit, it should be presumed to be morally licit as well.
  • Thus if the civil law allows for the copying of a broadcast piece of music then it is to be presumed to be licit until the contrary is shown.
  • If one wants to argue against this, one could argue to the particular case or in general.
  • The only way I can see to argue against it in the particular (i.e., it is wrong to copy this particular piece of music when the law says you can) would be if doing so would gravely harm the artist (i.e., he really badly needs the two cents he would make off the copy if you bought it) or if the song itself will have bad effects on someone else (e.g., it’s going to tempt you to sin).
  • Arguing against taking advantage of copyright law’s fair use provisions in general also seems problematic. First, fair use provisions exist in order to protect the common destination of goods that the Church teaches to exist.
  • Second, many of the cases of fair use copying are actually compensated indirectly, removing the need for direct compensation. For example, if you’re copying a song from a broadcast service then the service from which you are copying it is compensating the artist and record company. The service then expects to make its money back from its audience either directly (e.g., by subscriptions, as with cable or sattelite radio) or indirectly (e.g., by advertising, as with broadcast TV and radio). The value added premium on blank recording media also contributes to this (Cowboy hat tip to the reader who provided the link in the comments box on the original post!).
  • Thus the money to sustain the system still flows from the audience to the service to the record company to the artist, it’s just handled differently. If it weren’t the players in the system would stop performing their function in it. If it weren’t profitable for them, they’d go out of business or find another line of work.
  • Third, and related to the former, the artists and record companies that have bought into the system have chosen to do so. Sure, they might like to make more money, but the fact is that they have chosen to do business under the conditions afforded by the civil law. If they don’t like that law, they can lobby to change it, but their decision to do business under the terms of civil law establishes a presumption that, while they may not like all provisions of civil law, they feel it better to do business under these terms than otherwise.
  • It is true that the Church recognizes that the consent of the worker is not a sufficient condition for the moral licitness of an arrangement, but this does not mean that the consent of the worker is not relevant to the moral licitness of the arrangement. The Church’s teaching on this point is meant to protect workers who are impoverished and virtually enslaved to their employers. It is not directed to multi-millionaire recording artists or multi-billionnaire record companies. When they consent to an arrangement, it is because they feel it is profitable for them to do so, not because they will starve if they choose to make money another way.
  • I thus see no problem in relying on the civil law’s provisions for fair use copying as a general matter.

"The Moral Question"

Recently I posted on the legal aspects of copying music and several asked me to go into more detail about the moral aspects of doing so.

Live to serve. Here goes:

  1. Private property is not an absolute right. According to the teaching of the Church, the goods of the earth have been given as a common gift to mankind. As a result, no individual has an absolute right to any particular piece of property (CCC 2403).
  2. Theft is thus defined not as "usurping another’s property" but as "usurping another’s property against the reasonable will of the owner." The Catechism then notes: "There is no theft if consent can be presumed or if refusal is contrary to reason and the universal destination of goods" (CCC 2408).
  3. The orderly functioning of society requires us to have laws to regulate the flow of goods and services, and the State is the entity charged by God (Rom. 13) to oversee such matters. Therefore, "Political authority has the right and duty to regulate the legitimate exercise of the right to ownership for the sake of the common good" (CCC 2406).
  4. One must presume that the entities charged by God with performing a task are performing it correctly unless the contrary is shown. Therefore, one needs to give the laws of the state regarding the regulation of private property the benefit of the doubt.
  5. If you can show that, in a particular case, these laws are contrary to the common good and that the costs of violating them (to oneself and others) are less than the benefits of doing so then one can, in principle, deviate from them (in which case one bears one’s punishment if one is caught).

Now let’s apply this to copying music. There are two aspects that need to be covered (a) copying music where it is not permitted by the civil law and (b) refusing to copy music when it is permitted.

In regard to the first:

  • Artists have a moral right to be rewarded for their efforts in creating works of music to entertain and edify us. So do the record company employees that invest in and promote artists in hoping of earning a living.
  • It must be presumed until the contrary is proven that the civil law adequately expresses these rights.
  • To show that in a particular case it is morally licit to make uncompensated copies of a song one will have to show that in that particular case the requirements of the civil law are contrary to reason and the common good required by the universal destination of goods. This is going to be much harder to do than in the typical example of a starving man needing food that he has no money to pay for.
  • In particular: It means showing that there is some reason why you need that song right now and you can’t pay the 88 cents needed to download it from Wal-Mart or another service. (Wanting to make a mix disk for your friend isn’t a good reason since you can pay for the burns you need to make of individual songs and then give the resulting disk to your friend.)
  • In the old days it may have been easier to show such things, but today, with all the ways we have available to us to get music in a way that compensates the artist and record company, it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so.
  • The only way I can see to argue for widespread uncompensated downloading would be to argue that copyright law is fundamentally contrary to the common good, which seems plainly incorrect (and contrary to the Bible’s teaching that artists need to be compensated for their labor; as in "the worker is worth his wages"). Also, if there were no copyright laws then fewer artistic works would be produced because there would be no profit in them, so such laws seem to foster the common good.
  • While one could argue something other than copyright as a way of ensuring compensation for artists, such systems are hypothetical. Copyright is what our society is using now to compensate artists.
  • The general damage done to society by widespread disregard for the law and the scandal done if others are aware of your covert variance of the law also must be factored into the above decisions.

Now for refusing to exercise all of the copying options that the civil law affords:

  • Again, the provisions of civil law enjoy the benefit of the doubt.
  • Therefore, if civil law judges a particular act of copying as licit, it should be presumed to be morally licit as well.
  • Thus if the civil law allows for the copying of a broadcast piece of music then it is to be presumed to be licit until the contrary is shown.
  • If one wants to argue against this, one could argue to the particular case or in general.
  • The only way I can see to argue against it in the particular (i.e., it is wrong to copy this particular piece of music when the law says you can) would be if doing so would gravely harm the artist (i.e., he really badly needs the two cents he would make off the copy if you bought it) or if the song itself will have bad effects on someone else (e.g., it’s going to tempt you to sin).
  • Arguing against taking advantage of copyright law’s fair use provisions in general also seems problematic. First, fair use provisions exist in order to protect the common destination of goods that the Church teaches to exist.
  • Second, many of the cases of fair use copying are actually compensated indirectly, removing the need for direct compensation. For example, if you’re copying a song from a broadcast service then the service from which you are copying it is compensating the artist and record company. The service then expects to make its money back from its audience either directly (e.g., by subscriptions, as with cable or sattelite radio) or indirectly (e.g., by advertising, as with broadcast TV and radio). The value added premium on blank recording media also contributes to this (Cowboy hat tip to the reader who provided the link in the comments box on the original post!).
  • Thus the money to sustain the system still flows from the audience to the service to the record company to the artist, it’s just handled differently. If it weren’t the players in the system would stop performing their function in it. If it weren’t profitable for them, they’d go out of business or find another line of work.
  • Third, and related to the former, the artists and record companies that have bought into the system have chosen to do so. Sure, they might like to make more money, but the fact is that they have chosen to do business under the conditions afforded by the civil law. If they don’t like that law, they can lobby to change it, but their decision to do business under the terms of civil law establishes a presumption that, while they may not like all provisions of civil law, they feel it better to do business under these terms than otherwise.
  • It is true that the Church recognizes that the consent of the worker is not a sufficient condition for the moral licitness of an arrangement, but this does not mean that the consent of the worker is not relevant to the moral licitness of the arrangement. The Church’s teaching on this point is meant to protect workers who are impoverished and virtually enslaved to their employers. It is not directed to multi-millionaire recording artists or multi-billionnaire record companies. When they consent to an arrangement, it is because they feel it is profitable for them to do so, not because they will starve if they choose to make money another way.
  • I thus see no problem in relying on the civil law’s provisions for fair use copying as a general matter.

Star Trek: The Forgotten Series

While we’re talking about Trek, lemme mention something that many may remember but many may have forgot or never known about.

There’s a sixth Star Trek series that is seldom discussed today except in fearful whispers.

Despised and shunned more than Voyager, it is Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS).

It ran for two years (22 episodes) in the 1973-1975 seasons.

To quote H. P. Lovecraft: "It was horrible . . . blasphemous . . . loathsome . . . abnormal."

Or was it?

The series did indeed have clunker episodes, and a disproportionate number of them. But then so did The Original Series which ran 78 episodes and, in the words of Phillip J. Fry were "About a third of them good."

TAS had the advantages of having the original cast members (Bill Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, etc.) doing the character voices. It had the advantage of Star Trek veterans and mainstream sci-fi writers doing scripts (Larry Niven, David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana). Its animated format allowed the creation of aliens, including crew members, who could never have been done in a live-action series at the time. It also introduced the holodeck technology that reappeared and became a fixture starting with Next Gen.

Some of the stories were very well done, including one (Yesteryear) set on Vulcan during Spock’s boyhood that was so well done details of it later became canonical on live-action shows despite the fact that the animated series has generally been ejected from continuity.

Yes, the series is regrettably considered non-canonical by most. Thus (except for events mentioned in Yesteryear) it is not included in Michael and Denise Okuda’s Star Trek Chronology. This is a pity because the two-year animated series could serve as a nice completion of the Enterprise’s famed "five-year mission" which only ran three years in the original series. Instead, the Chronology treats the five-year mission as having begun two years before TOS and ejects TAS from the timeline.

Admittedly, the series wasn’t up to the same standard. It had more clunker episodes, and even the good ones suffered from being only twenty-one minutes long (as opposed to about fifty for TOS) and aimed to a greater degree at children. Still, I have a fondness for it and, as bad as Trek has been on other occasions, I incline toward including it in the canon.

The series is currently out on VHS. Hopefully it’ll be out on DVD.

In the meantime,

HERE’S A SITE WHERE YOU CAN LEARN ALL ABOUT STAR TREK: THE ANIMATED SERIES.

Whither Trek? JMS Weighs In

Folks may know that DS9 veteran Manny Coto is serving this year as show runner on the now-final season of Star Trek: Enterprise.

He’s doing good stuff.

What folks may not know is that a slot as executive producer on the show was offered to Joe Michael Straczynski (JMS) of B5 fame, but he turned it down.

He did, however, collaborate on a work that was sent to UPN about how to revitalize the Star Trek franchise.

In the wake of Enterprise’s cancellation, just after midnight, he sent out

THIS NOTE TO B5 AND TREK FANS IN WHICH HE OPENLY LOBBIED THEM TO ASK UPN TO LET HIM AND DARK SKIES’ CREATOR BRYCE ZABEL CREATE A NEW STAR TREK SERIES.

Among other interesting things, he wrote:

Bryce Zabel (recently the head of the Television Academy and creator/executive producer of Dark Skies) and I share one thing in common. We are both long-time Trek fans, from the earliest days, who felt that the later iterations were not up to the standards set by the original series. (I’m exempting TNG because that one worked nicely, and was in many ways the truest to the original series because Gene was still around to shepherd its creation and execution.)

Over time, Trek was treated like a porsche that’s kept in the garage all the time, for fear of scratching the finish. The stories were, for the most part, safe, more about technology than what William Faulkner described as "the human heart in conflict with itself." Yes, there were always exceptions, but in general that trend became more and more apparent with the passage of years. Which was why so often I came down on the later stories, which I did openly, because I didn’t feel they lined up with what Trek was created to be. I don’t apologize for it, because that was what I felt as a fan of Trek. That’s why I had Majel appear on B5, to send a message: that I believe in what Gene created.

Because left to its own devices, allowed to go as far as it could, telling the same kind of challenging stories Trek was always known for, it could blow the doors off science fiction television. Think of it for a moment, a series with a forty year solid name, guaranteed markets…can you think of a better time when you take chances and can tell daring, imaginative, challenging stories? Why play it safe?

When Enterprise went down, those involved shrugged and wrote it off to "franchise fatigue," their phrase, not mine.

I don’t believe that for a second. Neither does Bryce. There’s a tremendous hunger for Trek out there. It just has to be Trek done *right*.

Last year, Bryce and I sat down and, on our own, out of a sheer love of Trek as it was and should be, wrote a series bible/treatment for a return to the roots of Trek. To re-boot the Trek universe. Understand: writer/producers in TV just don’t do that sort of thing on their own, everybody always insists on doing it for vast sums of money. We did it entirely on our own, setting aside other, paying deadlines out of our passion for the series. We set out a full five-year arc.

He said that, though he had lots to keep him busy until 2007, he’d set it all aside for the chance to do the Trek series he had in mind.

A few hours later (JMS stays up crazy late at night) he sent out

THIS POST BELAYING THE REQUEST AS HE HAD LEARNED THAT PARAMOUNT PLANS TO LET THE STAR TREK TV FRANCHISE LIE FALLOW FOR A YEAR OR TWO.

He expressed hope, though, that when Paramount is ready to reactivate the franchise that his schedule will be clear and he’d get a shot at doing the show.

I don’t necessarily agree with JMS about the quality of Trek declining after Next Gen. My current impression (this may change after the DVD release of Enterprise) is that the Trek series are to be ranked from best to worst in this way:

  1. Deep Space 9
  2. Next Gen
  3. Original Series
  4. Enterprise (if the fourth season is counted)
  5. Voyager
  6. Animated

I thus feel DS9 rather than TNG was the highpoint.

Nevertheless, I think JMS doing Star Trek could be awesome.

I’m a little cautious about his use of the term "re-boot" in connection with the Star Trek universe. I’d like to see existing Trek continuity stay intact, though I have to admit that I’ve pondered where the franchise might go next, given all that has been established. They’ve written such an extensive backstory that writers may be boxed in creatively. After Voyager closed, their best chance for finding new creative room was in doing a prequel, and they botched that (until the current season). This prevents them from doing another prequel to TOS. If they go further into the future than VOY, they run the risk of having so much technological wizardry that it overwhelms the story. ("Activate a trans-warp conduit! We’ve got to get to the other side of the galaxy before the next commercial break!") So I’m at least theoretically open to the idea of a re-boot.

I suspect that most fans are not, however. Jettison all their beloved stories and intricate continuity and chronology debates and they will be far less understanding than comic book fans were when DC rebooted its universe.

On the other hand, I suspect that JMS may have been using the term "re-boot" in another sense: Just a reinvigoration rather than a complete restart from scratch.

Either way, I’d like to see him get his shot.

I think he could do for Trek what Ron Moore did for Battlestar Galactica. (Though I’m not entirely satisfied with the latter, it’s still several Quantum Leaps [pun intended!] above the 1970s version.)

So Now We Know . . .

. . . the answer to why Klingons looked different in The Original Series (TOS) than they did both before and after this, that is.

Last night’s episode of Enterprise revealed the reason.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil the answer in this post. If you haven’t seen the episode, it may be re-run on Saturday or Sunday night on your station.

CHECK YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS.

I will, however, talk a little bit about the problem.

First, the offscreen explanation for the change is clear: When TOS was being filmed, they had miniscule makeup budgets, so they couldn’t make the original Klingons look that different from humans given that they were a major race that would be appearing often.

They tried to have a little more elaborate makeup for the Klingon leaders (other starship commanders equivalent to James Kirk), but the Klingons in the background were often just black guys in Klingon uniforms.

Notably absent were the forehead ridges that got introduced . . . in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Offscreen, when Star Trek went from the small screen to the big screen they went from a small budget to a big budget that could be used on all kinds of things . . . including makeup. So the alien race of Klingons became more . . . alien.

When the change was made, fan theories about it prospered, but onscreen there remained no explanation for the change, the producers of the show hoping that the fans would recognize the makeup change for what it was (the outworking of a budget change) and would just "go with them" on this one.

Fan theories about the change included:

  1. The "human-looking" and "forehead-ridged" Klingons were two different races within the Klingon Empire.
  2. The human-lookings were hybrids with humanity, while the forehead-ridgers were purebloods.
  3. The difference was the result of a virus.
  4. The difference was due to Klingons wanting to appear more human in a particular phase of their history (e.g., we know that one character in the TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" was deliberately disguised as a human for covert ops purposes).

When ST:TNG kicked in, a Klingon (Lt. Worf) joined the main cast, and in keeping with larger TV budgets (and better makeup techniques), the Klingons on TNG were forehead-ridgers.

The same inevitably replicated on the sequel to TNG, Star Trek: Deep Space 9. But DS9 added new wrinkles to the puzzle.

First, DS9 established Klingon characters who had originally been introduced in TOS. All those old Klingon ship captains who squared off against Kirk–Kang, Kor, Koloth? They were all back now–as old men–and played by the same actors. But they were in new makeup. Thus here’s a comparison of how Koloth looked in the two series:

Koloth1 Koloth2

Okay. Big diff.

It also ruled out one of the popular fan theories: that the diff was due to there being more than one race of Klingons.

A theory that could have explained the difference (but that I don’t know was ever posed by fans) was that the forehead-ridge appearance developed with age, so that all the Klingons seen on TOS were younger, while those seen later were . . . older. The change might even strike different Klingons at different times of life the way . . . baldness . . . strikes different human men at different times.

We have our own forehead changes, see.

Well, events continued to overtake speculation, and in the 30th anniversary episode, "More Tribble, More TroublesTrials and Tribble-ations," Lt. Cmdr. Worf establishe a new onscreen fact about the difference: Klingons are embarrassed about it. Specifically, Whorf looked uncomfortable and said: "We do not discuss it with outsiders."

When Enterprise initially hit the airwaves four years ago, it had the forehead-ridgers that we were familiar with from TNG onward.

So this left the writers of Enterprise, now that it finally got good and got cancelled, an interesting puzzle once they decided to finally do an onscreen explanation of the difference. Specifically, they needed to explain:

  1. Why the difference existed.
  2. Why characters in Enterprise’s time had the forehead-ridge appearance.
  3. Why characters in the TOS period had the human-looking appearance.
  4. Why characters from the beginning of the movies onward were back to the forehead-ridge appearance.
  5. Why characters introduced as human-looking in TOS were forehead-ridgers later on.
  6. Why it seemed to affect the whole race.
  7. Why Klingons were embarrassed to talk about all this with outsiders, and:
  8. Why the human-lookers were so . . . human . . . looking.

To my mind, the answer eventually provided last night by ST:ENT to this long-standing Star Trek mystery was a good one.

Don’t spoil it in the comments box.

I’ll reveal it before next week’s episode.

Music Copying

A reader writes:

I was wondering if you have or could write on your blog on the subject of copying music–covering all aspects.  Some of the experts on the EWTN website have touched on it, but they are not really up on all the technology.
Hoooo-eeee! All aspects? ‘Fraid not on a blog. The field’s too big. But I’ll do what I can to answer the points you raise in your e-mail.
I definitely don’t want to do anything sinful.  However, if some form of copying is ok, I would like to do it.  I always thought it was ok to tape some songs from the radio onto a cassette tape.   Now I’m not so sure.
They have sold cassette recorders for years and blank tapes.  For years I have been taping Christmas music and classical music from the radio for my own listening pleasure.  Also, I have taped with my VCR some musical programs shown on PBS (like operas) and saved them for future viewing over the years.  Now I’m wondering  if I’ve been stealing for years.  Are we allowed to tape like this?
You definitely can record songs off the radio or TV (whether to a cassette or any other medium) for your personal use. This was settled a coon’s age ago by a legal case that defined such personal use of broadcast material (TV shows included) as kosher under U.S. copyright law. This is not considered stealing. (Perhaps one of the lawyers reading the blog can fill in the case citation in the comments box.) When technologies like the cassette recorder and the VCR were introduced there were lawsuits trying to get their manufacture stopped, and the lawsuits failed. It’s okay to record off radio or TV for personal use.
I recently read somewhere (during a Google search), that companies or artists (I don’t remember which) get part of the money from blank tapes.  Does this cover any stealing aspect?
To the best of my knowledge, this is not happening. You may have read someone’s proposal for how to address the current situation, but I have no evidence that this is being done. While it initially sounds plausible and might work for purposes of satisfying the recording companies, it would be harder to get royalties to the artists on this basis. Fights would errupt over whether a given artist’s fans are taping him more and therefore he needs a bigger chuck of the pie than some other artist with equally large record sales but who (it is claimed) has fans who copy him less.
I have learned that it is wrong to share music with family or friends.  In other words, I can lend someone my original CD or tape that I bought, but I can’t make a copy for them.
You can’t make a copy for someone else. You can lend them the original recording that you bought and you might be able to lend them a back-up copy you made for yourself (perhaps a lawyer reading could clarify this), but it is my understanding that you would not legally be allowed to simply give someone a copy you made with no intention of getting it back.
These new inventions like the ipod–how does the music get on them?  Are these ok?
In principle, they’re fine. They’re simply new recording & playback devices like cassette players or VCRs. As to how the music gets on them, there are several ways, but the most basic two legal ways are:
  1. You buy a CD in a store and then you "rip" it on your computer (i.e., convert it to a file format that your computer knows, such as .mp3 format) with a program like iTunes (comes with the iPod), which then transfers it to the iPod. Since this is making a personal copy from something you bought, it’s allowed.
  2. You go to a music purchase service like musicdownloads.walmart.com and pay for a copy of the song, which you then download and transfer to the iPod. Again: You’re paying for it. A royalty is going to the record company. So it’s all perfectly legal.
Where some folks get into trouble is they download songs from music services that don’t send a royalty to the record company (like Napster when it first started out, though it has now been revamped after being sued mercilessly and is now clealry kosher), which gets the record company hopping mad and claiming that this is illegal behavior. Whether it is illegal behavior is hotly disputed, but the courts have not been casting a friendly eye on the groups doing this.
Another way people get in trouble is ripping their CDs and simply giving copies of the files to friends, which is analogous to making a cassette copy of an album you bought and then giving the cassette to a friend so he doesn’t have to buy the album for himself and the record company and the artist that produced the album get bupkis.
What about the new satellite radios (like Sirius) where we pay a monthly fee?  Can we tape and save music from them for our personal use, since we are paying for it?  Or are we "stealing" from the artist because we are not buying the song.
My understanding is that, as a broadcast medium, you can tape whatever you want off sattelite radio. Sattelite radio is equivalent to a pay TV service such as cable. If you’re paying for it, you certainly can copy off it for personal use.
You might get into trouble, however, if you had hacked a sattelite or cable service, though. Descrambling something that you aren’t paying for might be regarded as stealing–whether or not you then make tapes from it.
I am trying to grow in holiness, and I don’t want to do anything that is, in essence, stealing. 
Good for you. That’s exactly the right attitude to have.
Hope this helps, and God bless!