Like many, I’ve been following the current events in the Middle East with significant concern.
I don’t know where this is all going. I just hope we can avoid a major war breaking out.
If you know less about the current situation than you’d like,
AMERICAN PAPIST HAS A GOOD OVERVIEW OF THE SITUATION WITH LINKS TO FURTHER RESOURCES.
There have been a lot of sightings lately of the recently-deceased Johnny Cash. No, he hasn’t been backing-up Elvis at Memphis honky-tonks. His music has been selling like hotcakes.
"In life, Johnny Cash was merely a legend. In death, he is proving immortal.
"Almost three years after he died at the age of 71 after a decade of poor health, the country outlaw is the most popular artist in the United States, currently at No. 1 on the pop and country charts with an album of new material.
"The album, ‘American V: A Hundred Highways,’ recorded in Cash’s final months as he looked forward to reuniting with his late wife, June Carter Cash, sold 88,000 copies in the week ended July 9. It’s his first chart-topper since 1969’s live prison album ‘Johnny Cash at San Quentin.’"
I suppose most of the Cash fans these days hopped on the bandwagon with the success of the bio-flick Walk the Line. Having grown up in a family of country-music lovers, I liked Johnny Cash before it was cool to like Johnny Cash. Some of my favorites are A Boy Named Sue, Ring of Fire, and One Piece at a Time.
[JIMMY ADDS: Those are three of my favorites, along with Folsom Prison Blues.]
The only thing that ever really annoyed me about Cash was not Cash himself but the idealization by many people of his marriage to June Carter Cash … a relationship that began when at least one of them was married to someone else. I forget the full details of their "love story" but my repulsion at the popular idealization of adultery is one of the reasons I skipped Walk the Line when it was in theaters. (To be perfectly clear, I’m not saying anything here about Johnny and June Carter Cash. My disgust is with those who seemed to think their marriage one of the Greatest Love Stories of All Time.)
As a side note, reporters can be a real hoot sometimes:
"Almost three years after he [Cash] died at the age of 71 after a decade of poor health…"
Wow, whoever heard of dying after a bout with "poor health"? And here I thought that only the healthy died.
A reader writes:
I know that The Church allows for cremation, and that there is a law that says that the ashes must be buried. Is this a moral issue?
I ask because my recently-passed-away mother was cremated, and my sister has the ashes in her house and wants to keep them. I have expressed my desire to have them buried, but she does not want to bury them. My mother was not Catholic, so should I be concerned?
First, let me say that I am sorry for your loss and will pray for the repose of your mother’s soul and for your family.
There is ecclesiastical law that requires the burial or other interment of the cremated remains of an individual. According to the Order of Christian Funerals:
"The cremated remains of a body should be treated with the same respect given to the human body from which they come. This includes the use of a worthy vessel to contain the ashes, the manner in which they are carried, the care and attention to appropriate placement and transport, and the final disposition. The cremated remains should be buried in a grave or entombed in a mausoleum or columbarium. The practice of scattering cremated remains on the sea, from the air, or on the ground, or keeping cremated remains in the home of a relative or friend of the deceased are not the reverent disposition that the Church requires. Whenever possible, appropriate means for recording with dignity the memory of the deceased should be adopted, such as a plaque or stone which records the name of the deceased." (Order of Christian Funerals, Appendix No. 417)
If your sister, like your mother, is not Catholic then neither of them are bound by this norm legally. That still leaves the other question you ask, which is whether your sister is bound by it morally.
The answer appears to be no.
What natural law requires is that the remains of the dead be treated with reverence, and the above norm expresses the way in which reverence is to be shown to cremated remains in Catholic circles. However, it does not appear that natural law requires that reverence be shown in this particular way.
It may be helpful here to realize that there is an enormous amount of diversity in different cultures regarding the proper way to show reverence for the remains of the departed.
This was made clear to me a number of years ago when I was talking with a friend of mine who as raised in a different culture and she expressed horror at the idea of archaeologists digging into graves to learn about previous cultures. To her this was an unacceptable desecration, and the respectful thing to do would be to leave the graves alone.
Coming from an American cultural perspective, my reaction was exactly the opposite: Opening the graves (e.g., tombs in Egypt) so that we could learn about past cultures was precisely the means needed to honor the people who built them. Examining the tombs of past cultures would enable us to learn more about them and thus appreciate and respect them more fully. For some of these cultures, their tombs were the best-preserved things about them we had, and to refuse to examine them would deprive us of precious knowledge about a people who would otherwise be lost to history.
There are many other examples of how respect for the remains of the departed varies from culture to culture. In Jesus’ own day–as you may recall from the "St. James ossuary" incident–it was customary for some individuals to be placed in a tomb while their bodies decayed and then, a year later, their relatives would clean the bones and place them in an ossuary.
In Rome it is customary to honor the dead in the catacombs not just by doing archaeological excavations in them but by going on pilgrimages through them.
There is also the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione, where the bones of numerous Capuchins (some collected as late as 1870) are displayed in the most striking fashion.
Now, as an American, I find some practices that other cultures use as creepy as I’m sure many readers do, but the point is that there is a huge amount of variation culturally in how respect for the dead is to be shown to their remains.
And then there is the whole custom of venerating the relics of the saints, which are parts of their remains that are not buried.
Thus when we get to the question of what natural law requires interment it seems that it does not.
If it did then the Church would not have the relics of the saints on display in reliquaries. They would all have to go into graves or tombs.
To look at it another way, there is nothing about the molecules that once formed part of a person’s body that requires that these molecules be housed in a particular structure, such as a grave or a tomb. We the living can show our respect for the dead by so housing them, but this is a means of showing respect–and thus subject to cultural variation–rather than something required by the molecules themselves.
If your non-Catholic sister (assuming that she is non-Catholic) wishes to keep your mother’s cremated remains in a sealed container in her house the way that you as a Catholic might keep the relic of a saint in a reliquary in your house then there is not a violation of natural law here. Both are ways that respect can be shown for the dead. Her way is not the Catholic way of doing it–and I personally would not show my respect in that fashion even if Church law permitted me to–but it is not prohibited by natural law.
As to whether you should be concerned about the situation, I would say two things: (1) You need not be concerned that the natural moral law is being violated by your sister’s proposal but (2) it would be desirable if a solution could be found that was acceptable to all of the surviving relatives (assuming that your mother didn’t herself indicate what she wanted the final disposition of her remains to be). One sibling being the exclusive arbiter of what happens to the remains is not the most desirable solution. Whether a mutual solution could be reached and whether it would be prudent to push for it would be a judgment that those involved in the situation would be in the best position to make.
I’m now working my way through
THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON OF THE NEW DOCTOR WHO SHOW.
For those who are keeping score, this is the first and only season to feature the ninth incarnation of the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston).
I’ve seen some of the episodes in the series, though I also missed a bunch because they conflicted with square dancing, and I’d be too tired to stay up to watch the repeats on Sci-Fi.
Like most Americans (or at least, most Americans who know about Doctor Who), I was introduced to the character when he was being played by Tom Baker (the fourth doctor) and the show was running on PBS stations across the country.
I have to say that, in the main, I like what I’ve seen of this series, though there are things I don’t.
I like the fact that there is an overall story arc to the series and the fact that they try to deal with the impact of time travel on the ordinary life of the Doctor’s main companion (Rose Tyler). Her mom and her boyfriend and her deceased father are significant characters in the series, and it’s nice to see what the effects would be on those close to a person if that person suddenly started jaunting about time.
I also like Eccleston’s portrayal of the doctor. He has a kind of enthusiastic optimism that he uses to hide an inner crushing grief, and the way that these two play off of each other is interesting.
Interestingly, Eccleston (who is a native of Lancashire) is one of the few doctors allowed to speak with a non-BBC accent, leading to one of my favorite lines in the episodes I’ve seen. When Rose has explained to a 21st century woman that the Doctor is an extraterrestrial, the woman asks, "Then why does your friend talk like he’s from the North?" to which Rose replies, "Lots of planets have a North!"
Still, if you’re a dyed-in-the-woolen-scarf Tom Bakerite, you might want to check out the other, recently-released complete Doctor Who season with its own season-spanning storyline,
Earlier today I commented on the hypothetical "Green Beard Effect" that may lead organisms to behave favorably toward other organisms displaying the same trait or traits.
The "Hey, we’re the same" instinct–whether it specifically captures what Dawkins et al. have in mind with the Green Beard Effect–is definitely something present in higher species (and many lower ones as well).
But there’s also the contrary impulse–what we might call the "Vive la difference" instinct–which causes us to favorably regard others specifically because their traits are different than ours.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the fact that we find the opposite sex attractive. If we didn’t, mating and reproduction wouldn’t occur and the species would die out. We are therefore genetically programmed to find those with the opposite sexual characteristics to be sexually attractive.
This instinct manifests in other ways, too.
For example, all human societies have an incest taboo. The nature of the taboo (i.e., exactly who you can’t marry) varies from culture to culture, but there is always an incest taboo of some kind. It is a human universal and thus seems to be based in our genetics.
The reasons for the incest taboo are debated.
One of the most common explanations you hear for why the incest taboo exists is that, if it didn’t and if a lot of incest went on as a result, it would harm the population by causing children to have birth defects due to inbreeding.
Maybe.
If that’s the reason for the taboo then it isn’t a conscious one. The ancients, who didn’t have access to modern science, didn’t seem to justify the prohibition of incest on those grounds.
St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, says nothing about it in his discussion of why incest is wrong.
I did some research a number of years ago on the subject (as part of answering the regular question "Where did Cain get his wife?") and found individuals arguing that the birth defects resulting from incest are not as common as is commonly supposed and that, if really severe, survival-affecting ones appear in a population, they’ll die out (or cause the population as a whole to die out). Also, until very recently, many humans lived in small, fairly isolated communities and didn’t have a lot of opportunity for marrying outside their neighbors, with the result that there has been a lot more inbreeding (if not incest) in human history than is often supposed.
Then there are people who argue the opposite of all this.
I don’t know which side is correct, but I mention the former position just to call attention to its existence, for you seldom hear it articulated.
My own suspicion is that we have the incest taboo because it’s just in us genetically and we have historically and are presently trying to come up with intellectual justifications for why something that we instinctively feel to be wrong is actually wrong.
In other words, it’s just part of the law of God written on the hearts of men.
God’s laws are for our good, and so I’m sure that there is a benefit–or several benefits–that come to mankind as a result of the incest taboo. One of them may be that it helps to prevent birth defects, but I’m not sure that there aren’t other, greater reasons.
In general, the incest taboo has the effect of bringing new genes into a family line and thus increasing its genetic diversity. Genetic diversity will allow it to withstand hardships better since there is a greater likelihood that some in it will be able to better weather the latest plague, famine, forced migration, or what have you.
A prohibition on inbreeding also helps broaden social ties, which result in an individual having greater social resources to draw upon. Of all the arguments that St. Thomas makes against incest, the one that strikes me as having the most force is this:
[Incest] would hinder a man from having many friends: since through a man taking a stranger to wife, all his wife’s relations are united to him by a special kind of friendship, as though they were of the same blood as himself. Wherefore Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xv, 16): "The demands of charity are most perfectly satisfied by men uniting together in the bonds that the various ties of friendship require, so that they may live together in a useful and becoming amity; nor should one man have many relationships in one, but each should have one."
If people marry outside their own families then the social fabric is strengthened and the society does better as a result.
Whatever the benefits God intends us to have as a result of the incest taboo–whether it’s avoidance of birth defects, increase of genetic diversity, stronger social ties, or a combination of these or something else entirely–we do have an aversion to incest that appears in all societies and that is likely genetic.
It would thus seem to involve a preference (at least in terms of mating) for those who are different from us in that they aren’t too closely related.
But the preferential option of those who are different goes beyond a preference for the opposite sex and beyond a preference for those who aren’t too closely related to us. There is some, though weaker, evidence that there is at least something of a drive in us toward exogamy, or marriage outside our own group.
The fact that most people marry within their own group and have done so historically suggests that this is a weak desire, but there is still an attraction to the exotic. People from other cultures can seem mysterious and romantic or their accents may be perceived as sexy.
Or not.
Like I said, it’s a weak desire in humans or people would have gone further afield to find mates than they historically did most of the time.
Nevertheless, we’re attracted not only by similarities but also by differences.
Last weekend when I was doing my first post on Pirates of the Caribbean (go see the movie if you haven’t), I was doing some research on Wikipedia about the origin of the phrase "Dead Man’s Chest." I knew it was from a sea shanty, but I didn’t remember the full lyrics of it.
TURNS OUT IT APPEARS TO BE FROM A SHANTY MADE UP BY ROBERT LOUIS STEPHENSON IN TREASURE ISLAND.
Though it may be based on a real-life event involving Blackbeard the pirate.
That got me to thinking: There have been quite a number of pirates known by the color of their beards, but I couldn’t remember which of them were real and which were fictional. (I’m not much of a pirate expert, I’m afraid.)
I remembered hearing about "Bluebeard," for example (I think in a Scooby-Doo cartoon I saw as a kid or something), but I couldn’t remember if Bluebeard was real or fictional. So I Wikipediaed him.
Turns out he was a fictional aristocrat rather than a pirate.
I also remembered that there was a movie about pirates called Yellowbeard (though I never saw that and suspect I wouldn’t like it).
And there’s a comicbook character called Redbeard.
"Just how far does this go?" I wondered. "There can’t be many more pirate characters with colored facial hair designations."
So I typed in "greenbeard" and, sure enough, there was no such pirate.
BUT THERE WAS A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT KNOWN AS "THE GREEN BEARD EFFECT."
The basic idea is that there might be sets of genes that cause an organism to have a particular characteristic and to be altruistically disposed to other organisms that share that characteristic, even if they are otherwise unrelated. The gene set would thus promote its own replication apart from a close family connection.
For example, suppose that there were a gene set that caused certain humans to have green beards. Such people might form a kind of mutual defense league.
Supposedly they’ve actually documented the green beard effect in, of all things, red fire ants.
I don’t know if they need to look that far, though.
I don’t want to give away any secrets of the Red Headed League, but I’ve noticed that women who are or who used to be red heads often seek to engage me in what I can only describe as "red-head mutual bonding conversations" (e.g., complimenting my hair color, observing that it’s a darker red on the sides of my head than on the top, telling me about their hair color and things they may have done to maintain or accentuate it). Guys don’t do this, but then guys don’t generally talk much about their hair color in my experience (except to complain about gray).
Being a guy, I don’t have much to say in such conversations, but I’ve been struck by the number of times present and former red heads start them with me, and there’s a definite, positive "Hey, we’re two of a kind" vibe that comes across, even from women old enough to be my grandmother and whose hair is now white.
I also suspect that this effect–if I understand it correctly–is all over the place in biology, even across species.
For example, it’s often been remarked that the reason we find puppies and kittens so cute is that they, like our own offspring, have big heads and big eyes compared to their mature forms. Mammals that have big heads and big eyes in infancy get perceived by us as cute and we want to take care of them, which promotes their survival. They trigger the parenting instinct in us.
There thus may be a set of genes that produce the quality of having a big head and big eyes in infancy and that foster altruism toward those organisms that have this quality, even in other species.
It all started with a cheerful electronically-generated voice telling me that my cellular service provider needed to change the SIM card in my phone and could I please come down to the nearest store location so that this could be done?
So, I headed out to the nearest store location I knew of and found out it was no longer in business. Figures. Eventually I found another location and pulled into the lot. When I entered the store I found out that this must have been the day a whole lot of other people were also told to get new SIM cards. I was in for a wait.
After waiting thirty minutes, more or less, and joking with people in line that apparently the store locations were not given the heads-up on the Great SIM Card Switch, I finally handed my phone over to an employee for service.
"Oh," I’m told, "This phone is too old for the new SIM card. You’ll have to get an upgrade."
Yes, the phone I had was old. I originally purchased it in 2000 when I decided that I would rather not hike to a freeway call box if my car broke down by the side of the road somewhere. I ended up using it more than the two or three times in its lifetime I needed to call AAA from a broken-down vehicle, but I never did upgrade the phone. It was clunky and didn’t do much beyond send and receive calls, but that was all I needed.
But the perk to losing a faithful friend would be a free phone, right?
Riiiight.
For a two-year contract and $20 more — after mail-in rebate — I could get a phone that looked somewhat like my old one but was so small it looked like I’d have to hold it to my ear to hear and then move it to my mouth to speak. So, for a mere $40 more — after mail-in rebate (and that two-year contract), don’t forget — I could get a cell-phone that looked like a phone. It also had a camera, which I thought was neat, but didn’t really need. I would learn later that it also had a confusing host of other features that I am still trying to figure out how to navigate.
After forking over $85 — after tax of almost $15 — I was the owner of a new phone. "Would you like any accessories today?" asked the clerk who should have just given me a new SIM card or a free phone to compensate for my cellular provider’s decision to reprogram their networks in such a way that they could no longer accommodate long-term customers (six years in my case) who had old phones. It was all I could do not to snort.
You may be wondering why I didn’t protest more forcefully. Well, remember that thirty-minute wait? There was another thirty-minute wait behind me and another gentleman was patiently trying to get redress from the clerks who had basically destroyed his phone by putting in a SIM card that restricted his access and couldn’t be replaced by his old SIM card — because, one, they had thrown away the old one; and, two, because they had already transferred his phone’s information to the new, faulty SIM card. In the face of such suffering by fellow customers, it seemed churlish to raise holy hades at having to pay for a new phone.
Why am I telling you all this? To give you the heads-up on what lies ahead should you receive a call or letter asking you to replace your cell phone’s SIM card. What happens should you choose not to replace it? Funny you should ask. A customer put that very question to one of the clerks.
"Well, your service just keeps getting worse and worse until finally you can’t use your phone at all."
NOTE: Now that I have a cell phone I no longer can use, I was intrigued to find out that there is such a thing as a cell-phone recycling program.
Maybe!
In my research on dieting I’ve run across a number of indicators–both in published literature and anecdotally–that suggest weight gain is associated with lack of sleep.
The reasons why are not clear.
Some have suggested that when we don’t get enough sleep it messes with our hormones, which produces weight gain.
Others have suggested that we simply have less time to eat if we’re asleep more.
Or maybe it’s that we don’t burn quite as much energy and so our appetites don’t get stimulated.
Or maybe we’re eating more to try to boost our energy levels when we feel tired during the day.
Or maybe it’s the other way around and people who have weight gain have a harder time staying asleep (in which case forcing youself to get more sleep might not have any effect on your weight).
Whatever the casusality, there seems to be a connection between lack of sleep and being overweight.
GET THE STORY.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)
Unfortunately, I haven’t had the ability to make a really good personal test of the "Get more sleep and lose weight" theory due to my lifelong battle with insomnia.
Hey, wait . . .
I’m looking for a utility that would enable me to change British to American spellings in a document. Maybe some kind of grep thing. Anyone have a line on anything like that?
Some of those can mess with Internet texts that I convert to speech.
So I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest last Saturday (actually, before my pre-written post on it went up) and I thought it really rocked.
It had a bunch of cool stuff in it, some of which I can’t say because it would be too much of a spoiler, but here are some isolated snippets of cool things that won’t give away the plot.
COOL THINGS IN PRACTES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2:
1) Johnny Depp’s performance.
2) The way the crewman finishes the line "The captain is acting strange."
3) Davy Jones (SDG’s really right on this one; Davy Jones has the potential to rival Jabba the Hutt as an iconic image, which is why I’m not posting a picture of him; I don’t want to spoil his entrance)
4) The make-up effects for Davy Jones’s men.
5) In particular the conch-headed man, and especially what he does in his very last appearance in the film.
6) The island escape sequence. MAN, THIS TOTALLY ROCKS! I CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING LIKE THIS EVER BEING FILMED BEFORE.
7) The "Jack-kabob"
8) The schlorp / shlub sound effects when the suckers on various tentacles are doing things.
9) The unusual "eye makeup"
10) The way that Jack and Elizabeth’s prophecies about each other come true.
11) The "Hello, beastie" moment.
12) The three-way swordfight.
13) The "rolling climax"
14) The humorous cliffhanger.
Don’t know what I’m talking about?
BTW, if the theaters are even half as hectic this weekend as they were last (when the film was selling out right and left), buy your tickes online or over the phone and make a point of showing up a little early.
If you have seen the film, feel free to share your own cool things in the movie. (SPOILERS OKAY since it’ll be in the combox.)
BTW, next summer’s final part of the Pirates trilogy may not be the end of the series.
JOHNNY DEPP HAS INDICATED HE’D BE INTERESTED IN PLAYING THE PART AGAIN.