Hard Sayings Of The Old Testament

A reader writes:

I have a very important question about God and right now my faith is at stake.  I doubt you will be able to provide a satisfying answer but please try your best.

In the Exodus and several other instances God ordered the Israelites to perform what I think we can all agree is genocide.  Samuel told Solomon to go forth and kill and kill every man, woman, child and beast.  Making no distinction between age, sex or whether or not they were innocent. 

These were real people living real lives.  They were not wicked evil doers in some cases, they were just in a land that was supposedly promised.  The people God ordered executed had been living there for generations and the Israelites came and murdered them for their land. 

I now know two men who will be dead soon from cancer.  A girl that was in my kindergarten class was hit and killed by a bus in first grade.  I have experienced death first hand and will soon do so again.  Nobody deserves to die and what God did was a despicable, disgusting and unjustifiable crime. 

God said every man, woman, and child.  Put yourself in the shoes of the murdered.   Maybe you have a son/daughter, perhaps a nephew or a co-worker has a child.  Imagine any child that you regularly come in contact with and then imagine some terrorist coming in and killing him/her.  "They say, oh our God ordered it.  You see, even though you own this land it really belongs to us because our God told us it was ours so we have to kill you."  You don’t believe in their God but that doesn’t matter to them.  You are just in their way and you happened to worship a different God, therefore you deserve to die.

How could a God that supposedly loves us perform genocide on us at the same time?

I am sorry to hear that your faith is currently being challenged, and will certainly pray for you. I encourage my readers to do likewise.

It is understandable that, if anything were to challenge your faith, this kind of thing would. Not only are the passages in the Old Testament difficult to understand, but the reality of suffering and death in our lives is the hardest thing for many people to endure. I have had to endure it myself, and I sympathize entirely with your situation.

Let me do what I can to see about answering your questions. I hope you’ll bear with me as I lay some principles that will become relevant later in the discussion. I want to give you as thorough an answer as I can.

First, regarding the commands to exterminate particular populations, these are, indeed, horriffic from a modern-day point of view. Such commands are incompatible with the Christian age, and anyone today who would claim to have received such commands–such as the terrorists you mention–is wrong. God does not work that way today.

The question is whether he ever worked that way, and the answer to this question must be either yes or no. We will look at both possibilities.

Continue reading “Hard Sayings Of The Old Testament”

The Nine Choirs Of Angels

A reader writes:

I would like a brief description each of the 9 choirs of angels.  Thanks you.

St. Thomas offers the best brief description of the nine choirs that I know of. It’s found in two articles in the Summa Theologiae: HERE and HERE.

You also might want to read Pseudo-Dionysius’s THE CELESTIAL HIERARCHY, which was the work that kicked off the whole nine choirs business.

There’s a brief treatment of the subject in THE ARTICLE IN THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA.

And WIKIPEDIA’S ARTICLE may have some useful bits, but it’s got a bunch of unreliable junk mixed in, so be careful.

In fact, I’d urge caution regarding the whole idea of nine choirs of angels. This is a highly speculative way of classifying angels and is not part of Church teaching (you will note, for example, that it’s not mentioned in the Catechism). The foundations of it are also shaky, biblically. It rests on stitching together several different passages of Scripture and then making the assumptions that the things mentioned in them (1) are all angels and (2) are all different types of angels.

Both of these assumptions are open to challenge.

For example, I am not convinced that there is a difference in kind between an angel and an archangel. The term archangelos in Greek simply indicates a high ranking angel. Archangels may differ from ordinary angels in the same way that high ranking officials differ from low ranking officials or the way that high ranking military officers differ from low ranking military officers. In other words: The difference is one of rank, not of essence.

Indeed, that is what suggested by the very terms. "Angel" in the biblical languages simply means "messenger," with the understanding that the angels are the messengers one would find in God’s heavenly court, just as earthly kings have messengers in their courts. In earthly courts, some messengers may hold higher rank than others, but they’re all human beings. In the same way, the distinction between a messenger and a high-ranking messenger would seem to be one of rank rather than kind.

When we come to cherubim and seraphim, we’re on a little bit firmer ground. These at least look different when they appear in Scripture, though because of the way visionary experience works, I can’t rule out the possibility that there is one underlying class of beings behind both, and sometimes it manifests in a way that conveys one visionary impression and sometimes it manifests in a way that conveys another.

Even if we grant that seraphim and cherubim are different from each other, though, that doesn’t mean that they are distinct from the choir or choirs of angels and archangels. It might turn out that all angels are either seraphim or cherubim (that there isn’t another class). And it might turn out that there are high ranking angels (archangels) among both the seraphim and the cherubim.

So these classes may all co-penetrate each other. They may not be four distinct classes, contrary to assumption (2), above.

When we look at the other five classes–thrones, dominions, principalities, powers, virtues–we’re on even shakier ground because it isn’t clear from Scripture that these are angelic beings at all. These names are derived from three passages in St. Paul’s writings (I’ll stick the relevant names after the key terms where it isn’t obvious in the English translation):

[God] raised [Christ] from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the  heavenly places, far above all rule [principality] and authority [power] and power [virtue] and dominion, and above
every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which
is to come [Eph. 1:20-21].

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his  might.  Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be  able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 
For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the
principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this
present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the
heavenly places [Eph. 6:10-12].

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities [powers; it’s the same word in Greek as in the former passage: exousiai]– all things were created through him and for him [Col. 1:15-16].

It is not obvious in these passages that Paul is talking about distinct types of angels. That rests on a chain of assumptions that are open to challenge. It is not clear, for example, that he is thinking exclusively of the heavenly realm here. He may have earthly rulers in mind ("in heaven and on earth"), in which case some of these terms may be being used to describe humans. Even if we could identify which terms he’s thinking of as referring to spiritual things, he may not be thinking of angels but of Greco-Roman religious concepts that use the same terms (e.g., virtues like Piety were often worshipped as deities, and the Roman emperor and many other rulers were worshipped as well), with the message being that Christ is superior to all of these and that we struggle against them as Christians. Even if we could show that these terms all referred to angels, this still wouldn’t show that they are distinct classes of angels, any more than the fact that some humans could be described as principalities and some as powers wouldn’t mean that they weren’t all humans.

It strikes me as much more likely that Paul is speaking in a generalized way here, piling up near-synonyms that are intended to overlap–and overlap both the earthly and the heavenly spheres–in a way that makes it impossible to use this as a technical listing of different kinds of non-overlapping groups of angels that differ from each other in essence.

A Cure For Cancer?

A reader writes:

Is this for real?

I know it is from a student newspaper, but if this is for real… yikes!

HERE’S THE LINK THE READER IS TALKING ABOUT.

And despite the fact that it’s from a student newspaper, it is indeed for real. I did some checking and found other references to the same possible cancer cure, and it’s been picked up by other news outlets.

HERE’S THE ARTICLE ON IT IN NEW SCIENTIST.

And, of course, it’s found its way onto Wikipedia.

HERE’S THEIR ENTRY ON THE REPORTED CURE.

For those who haven’t immediately zoomed off to read the above links, here’s a synopsis of the story: Researchers in Alberta have found a chemical–dichloroacetate or DCA–that appears to kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells unaffected. The links above contain details on precisely how it does this, but there are two striking things about this chemical: (1) It appears to work on a wide variety of different types of cancer cells and (2) it’s cheap–really cheap–because it can’t be patented.

The latter point is a significant part of the story because, since it can’t be patented, it can’t make a boatload of money for some drug company. Consequently, drug companies aren’t interested in doing the research needed to find out if it actually works in humans, what the therapeutic dosages are, what the side-effects are, etc.

This is not a new story in medicine, though it may be the first time some readers have run across this phenomenon. In fact, drug companies spend millions and millions of dollars so that they can produce near-knockoffs of natural or already-known substances so that they can patent the near-knockoff and use it to make money, when the already-existing substance that they’re imitating would treat the same condition just as well or better.

THAT’S ONE OF THE REASONS THAT I OFTEN RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not down on drugs or conventional medicine. I simply recognize the distorting effects that economic interests can have in this area, as in every other. Sometimes a drug is the best way to treat something. Sometimes a nutritional approach is better. It just depends.

Having said that, I am very intrigued by the reports concerning DCA and will be trying to find out more.

The odds are always against something like this panning out, but I would love it if this one did! A cheap and effective cancer cure would be the answer to countless prayers throughout the world.

One note: For people who are suffering from cancer or who know someone who is, there is going to be a huge desire to try personal therapies with DCA even before human clinical trials are done. It’s understandable that people would want to do this. I do not yet know if DCA is commercially and legally available in the US, but even if it is available and legal, caution is warranted here. There are side-effects if DCA is taken in the wrong dosages.

Remember the first law of toxicology: "The poison is in the dose."

Flight Of The PhoenixBumblebee

Bee_wing
When 9/11 happened, I wanted our forces to release thousands of tiny, bird- or bumblebee-sized aircraft to swarm over the landscape in Afghanistan to search of Usama bin Laden.

But we didn’t have them yet.

Now we’re closer.

Good.

GET THE STORY.

What amazes me is that it took us this long to figure out something rather basic about the way such aircraft need to work: They need to have wings that are less flexible on the front and more flexible on the back.

Duh! you can tell that by looking at a bumblebee’s wing!

Just look at all that structure on the front that ain’t there on the back! (Above.) That translates to more rigidity on the front and more flexibility aft. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel on this one. God already did it for us. We just need to miniaturize to the point that we’ve got countless "drones" waiting to swarm out in search of terrorist masterminds.

Oh, and we’re close to having

OTHER SCI-FI WEAPONS, TOO.

Good on that also.

The second link covers things like the panic-inducing Active Denial System (which was announced some time ago) as well as other systems that are still a bit down the road.

These systems, which are non-lethal, will change the face of warfare and result in it producing even less casualties than it does now, which is far smaller than in the past. Ironically, as our ability to make war has grown, a smaller and smaller chunk of the population has ended up dying due to warfare. These types of systems hold the promise of helping us get to the next level in non-lethalness.

How Catholic moral doctrine absorbs the impact of these new, non-lethal systems remains to be seen.

New Bioethics Document From The CDF

Word is that there’s a new bioethics document cookin’ at the CDF.

Good!

I tol’ y’all that we’d see doctrinal development on bioethical questions during the coming years.

The latest document is supposed to be a sequel to Donum Vitae, which was prepared under the auspices of Cardinal JoePre-16 back in 1987 and that presciently looked forward to things like embryonic stem cell research. (In fact, just recently I was quoting Donum Vitae in a guide on stem cell research I was writing).

The new doc is expected to pick up where DV left off, covering new bioethical challenges that were unthinkable 20 years ago but that are now not only thinkable but in hot development.

I’m lookin’ forward to it!

Let’s hope it’s as prescient as its predecessor was!

GET THE STORY.

P.S. It ain’t gonna deal with the use of condoms to stop the AIDS virus. No big surprise there.

P.P.S. There’s a new document on natural law in the works, too! That’s another one I’m really looking forward to! (See above link.)

Old Religious Objects

A reader writes:

First, I very much enjoy your blog.  I hope you can keep at it for long time.
Now, my question concerns what is the proper way to dispose of religious
objects such worn out bibles, tarnished or worn crucifixes, old prayer
cards, broken rosaries, religious pamphlets, etc.?  Some of my coworkers
and I had a discussion today about what to do with them.  One person
couldn’t bring himself to dispose of them in the trash out of respect.
Another felt that broken or worn items could be thrown out without any
guilt.  Can you help us out?  We all want to do the right thing.

The disposition of this type of religious object is not something that is regulated by canon law. Consequently, there is not a canonical "right answer" here.

Catholic doctrine also does not treat the subject in any detail, and thus there is no doctrinal "right answer" beyond the general axiom that a religious object should be treated with the reverence that is due it. The question is: How much reverence is that?

It is difficult to give a definite answer, but there are certain levels of reverence that would clearly be wrong. For example:

1) So little reverence that we commit actual sacrilege with the items (e.g., using them as part of a Black Mass)

2) So much reverence that we can never get rid of them and have to squirrel them away when they can no longer be used.

The correct answer falls somewhere between these two extremes, and it is likely to vary from one object to another. Indeed, a pious custom of many Catholics is to distinguish between those objects that have been blessed and those that have not. This appears to be a useful division in that in the case of blessed objects, the Church has in at least a minor way consecrated the item to sacred use, while in the latter case it has not. It thus would make sense to show more reverence in the disposition of a blessed object than an unblessed one.

Correspondingly, a common pious custom is to dispose of blessed objects by either burning them (if they are flammable) or burying them (if they are not). In the former case, the object is destroyed, thus removing its blessing, and the ashes (or other remains) can simply be thrown away.

In the case of objects that were never blessed (or that have been destroyed, removing their blessing), this custom holds that they can simply be thrown away like any other non-blessed object.

As indicated, this is a pious custom and not a matter of law or doctrine, so individual consciences may vary without there being sin. If one person feels comfortable disposing of a religious object in a way that happens to be different than my preferred way of doing it, I would not on that account tell him he’s doing anything wrong. If the Church wanted to mandate ways of doing this, it would.

The key thing is not the physical manner of disposing of these objects but the fact that one is doing so with a right heart. If one "reverently throws away" something then his heart is displaying reverence, which is the important thing. What physical act is used to express this reverence is not what is at issue–be it burning or burial or even if there is no outward act but simply a grateful recognition of the role God has allowed the object to play in one’s religious life.

Googlewhacking JA.O

A reader writes:

Hey, Jimmy – you’re a Googlewhack!

I don’t know if you’re aware of the Googlewhacking phenomenon, but your blog is the only page on the Internet to feature both words ‘ediacaran gerrymandered’.  You’re a one in three billion chance!

I can’t claim credit for finding this out myself; some friends
and I on h2g2 were trying to find some and yours was the first to be
found.

Congratulations, and have a great day!

Thanks much! I had no idea!

MORE ON GOOGLEWHACKING.

Gotta Pay Your Dues?

Religion Today is reporting:

Union Told Me to Pay Dues or Change Religion, Teacher Says

Told by a union official to pay forced dues or "change religions," a teacher in southern Ohio is challenging a state law that allows only those public employees who belong to certain denominations the right to claim religious objection to paying union dues. CNSNews.com reports that Carol Katter, a mathematics and language arts instructor in the St. Marys district, filed a federal complaint in the U.S. District Court in Columbus this week over an Ohio law that prevents the lifelong Catholic from diverting her dues from a union she refuses to fund because it supports abortion on demand. The current law states: "Any public employee who is a member of and adheres to established and traditional tenets or teachings of a bona fide religion or religious body which has historically held conscientious objections to joining or financially supporting an employee organization and which is exempt from taxation under the provisions of the Internal Revenue Code shall not be required to join or financially support any employee organization as a condition of employment." The teacher said she had been "shocked" to learn her dues had to go to the OEA [Ohio Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association]. However, she later learned that members of only two religions (Seventh-Day Adventist or a Mennonite) receive the charity exception.

CHT to the reader who e-mailed!

MORE HERE.

EXCERPTS:

While discussing the situation with an OEA official, Katter "pretty much pleaded with the lady," saying: "I can’t do this. It’s against my belief and my conscience. Isn’t there anything I can do to just give the money to charity?"

The teacher’s request was turned down "basically because I could not come up with proof that my individual church — not the Catholic faith, but my individual church — had a record of anyone having successfully fought a union," she said. "In my little parish church, no one’s ever done this, and that’s what threw it out."

Katter said the union attorney told her she had two choices – pay her dues or "change religions."

Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, union officials may not force any employee to financially support a union if doing so violates the employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs, Gleason said.

To avoid conflict between an employee’s faith and a requirement to pay fees to a union he or she believes to be immoral, the law requires union officials to accommodate the employee – most often by designating a mutually acceptable charity to accept the funds.

[VP of the National Right to Work Foundation Stefan] Gleason added that SERB officials cannot claim ignorance in Katter’s situation. He noted that the state government was involved in a case last year that led a federal judge to issue a decree affirming that all public-sector employees with religious objections to union affiliation could not be forced to pay dues to such organizations.

The ruling was made in a foundation-assisted lawsuit regarding union contracts for state workers. Ohio Environmental Protection Agency employee Glen Greenwood, a Presbyterian, had objected to paying union dues because he believed the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association supported abortion and same-sex marriage.

"I’m hoping that this case will set a precedent so anybody from any religion who has these feelings will not be pressured into compromising their convictions," [Katter] said. "I can’t not do this."

A few thoughts on this story:

First, I’m not a fan of compulsory union membership. I support the right of laborers to organize, but I also support the right of laborers to not organize. Forcing labor to organize distorts the economics of the labor market just as much as prohibiting them from organizing. In principle, they’re the same. When business owners wish to use the law to prohibit their workers from organizing, it’s an attempt by business owners to eliminatekeep individual workers from banding together and exercizing their clout in aggregate. When labor unions wish to use the law to prohibit workers from not joinging the union, it’s an attempt to prevent individual laborers from competing with the union. In both cases, one party (business owners in one case and labor unions in the other) is trying to use the law to eliminate competition for their interests in the labor market.

To see the selfishness of this more clearly, turn the situation around so that it deals with business/consumer relations instead of management/labor relations: Suppose that a business wanted to use the law to prevent customers from organizing a boycott–preventing customers from organizing and using their purchasing power as clout in getting the goods and services it wants. That’s the equivalent of business owners preventing unions from existing. Similarly, suppose that a business wants to use the law to prevent other, competing businesses from springing up; in other words, it wants a monopoly on who will be allowed to provide a particular good or service. That’s the equivalent of labor unions being able to legally mandate membership, so that if you want to provide a particular service (labor), you have to do it only through the monopoly of the union.

In each of these cases, it’s one group trying to use the law to protect its power/money from free competition in the marketplace.

Second, I hope Katter is successful in her action. The idea that you have to be a member of an individual local church that has a history of conscientious objection to union membership is nutty, and I expect that to fall by the wayside.

I’d also like to see her succeed in her quest to strike a blow for religious freedom in general. If she’s not able to get a right-to-work law in her area (which would be preferred), then at least people of all religions should be able to exercise the option of donating their union dues to charity if they can document that their religion would support consientious objection in this case.

Third, I do not think it would be difficult for Katter to establish this in the case of her own Catholic faith. Not only are there existing conscientious objector passages connected with abortion in official Church documents, but I suspect that the Vatican would be quite willing to issue a finding supporting conscientious objection in this case.

A while back they did issue a finding supporting the rights of parents to have their children exempted from mandatory innoculations drawn from immorally-cultivated stem cell lines, and if the request were put to them in the right way, I suspect that they would be most willing to issue a document supporting the right of people to conscientious object when they are being required by law to pay money to unions that promote or support abortion.

Fourth, I’m a little nonplussed about the claim (mentioned in the second link, above) that the Ohio law creates an establishment of religion and thus violates the First Amendment. While I recognize that it creates a more favorable environment to some religions than others, that’s just not what "establishment" means. Ohio hasn’t set up an Official Church of Ohio (which it would have been entitled to do under the Constitution as originally written and interpreted).

Still, we’re dealing with a clear injustice here, and I suspect that Katter will succeed.

Clarence Thomas Update

I’ve pointed out before how much I really like Justice Clarence Thomas. I appreciate his willingness to apply originalism in a more thoroughgoing manner even more than Justice Scalia does (Scalia, while still very, very good, shows too much deference to precedence, and as someone once said, "Stare decisis is fo suckas").

I was very interested yesterday to read

THIS STORY ABOUT JUSTICE THOMAS’S ROLE ON THE COURT.

It turns out that Harry Blackmun, author of The Evil Decision, kept detailed notes on how the justices voted in private before their final decisions were announced. Now that Darth Blackmun has gone to his eternal reward, those notes are available for study, and they reveal that Justice Thomas has had much more of an impact on the court than many had been aware of.

Fascinating reading.

GET THE STORY.

H & R Block’s Dehumanizing Upsell

While I was doing my Monday blog posts on Saturday morning, I got a message on my voicemail that started like this:

Hello, this is <NAME> with H & R Block. We did your taxes last year at our <LOCATION> office, and I was calling to set up an appointment.

Now, not everyone may see it this way, but this kind of thing really rubs me the wrong way. It’s a sales technique that involves a dehumanizing form of upselling. Upselling is a sales technique whereby the salesman offers the customer goods, services, or options that the customer hasn’t requested but might want (e.g., "Do you want fries with that?").

When done in a humane manner, this technique can actually provide the customer with things that they wanted or would have wanted to know about (many people do want fries with their burger), but upselling can also be done in a dehumanizing manner that treats the customer like an object to be exploited (e.g., making your first question to the customer "Do you want our Bacon Cheddar Jack Number One Extra Special Value Meal?"–which is just trying to push something on the customer before he can tell you what he really does want).

H & R Block’s phone message to me is a dehumanizing form of upselling. It’s upselling because it’s offering me a service that I haven’t requested (they called me; I didn’t call them), and it’s dehumanizing because of the assumption that I’m even going to use them again this year.

Maybe I had such a bad experience with them last year that I want to go somewhere else. Maybe one of their competitors is offering a service that I find more attractive. Maybe I recently noted a tax preparer whose office is more conveniently located for me. Maybe I’m one of the millions who’s bought TurboTax. Or maybe I’ve simply decided to do my taxes the old fashioned way with pen and paper.

There are a lot of options out there for people to get their taxes done.

Yet because I happened to use H & R Block as my tax preparer last year, they feel entitled to phone me up out of the blue on a Saturday morning and tell me that they’re calling to schedule an appointment.

I, apparently, have no choice in the matter. It’s a given that they will do my taxes, and they have determined that the time has come for me to make an appointment.

That’s why this is dehumanizing.

It doesn’t respect the free will of the customer. It treats him as an object to be exploited.

The way to respect the customer would be to say

Hello, I’m <NAME> with H & R Block, and we did your taxes last year at our <LOCATION> office. We’d really like to do your taxes again this year, and I was wondering if you’d like to set up an appointment.

How hard would it be to say that?