2006 Catholic Blog Awards

This is the 2006 Catholic Blog Award nominations week!

YEE-HAW!!!

This year I actually learned about the nominations week in time to note it on the blog, so here goes.

GO HERE TO NOMINATE YOUR FAVORITE CATHOLIC BLOGS FOR AWARDS.

The categories are:

  • Most Informative Blog
  • Most Humorous Blog
  • Most Bizarre Blog Entry
  • Best Presentation
  • Most Devotional
  • Best Blog By A Group
  • Best Blog By A Man
  • Best Blog By A Woman
  • Most Insightful Blog
  • Most Theological Blog
  • Best Blog By A Priest Or Religious
  • Best Blog By A Seminarian
  • Best Political Analysis
  • Best Apologetics Blog
  • Most Intellectual Blog
  • Best Blog Design
  • Best New Blog
  • Best Social Commentary Blog

Nominations will be accepted until this Friday, so be prompt if you’d like to participate.

I also hope that y’all’ll remember your humble JimmyAkin.Org when you nominate.

Out of an old fashioned sense of chivalry, I will not be nominating JA.O for anything, though I can see several categories that strike me as plausible.

(One category I hadn’t expected was Most Bizzare Blog Entry. I’m sure there are some real oddballs in the archives here.)

I will be nominating others for things, and may make some recommendations. F’rinstance: I’d recommend Southern Appeal for Best Political Analysis. I’ll have to think about other possible recommendations.

In the meantime, THE COMBOX IS OPEN FOR DISCUSSION!

(NOTE: I may have this blog entry hang at the top of the blog for a while, so new posts may appear underneath it.)

The Death Star

I present the following with some caution.

It comes from Hugh Ross, who is a good guy from what I can tell about the man, and who does significant apologetics work, particularly in developing things like the arguments for God’s existence based on the apparent design of cosmological and local astronomical constants. I’m glad he’s out there, doing that work.

But when Hugh strays into certain areas, he makes mistakes (like all of us). For example, I think that his interpretation of Genesis 1 is demonstrably wrong (he advocates the day-age interpretation of the hexahemeron, and that dog just won’t hunt).

In other cases Hugh advocates things that I don’t consider demonstrably false but that I’d am highly skeptical of.

Put the following into that category. I present it here not because I think it’s true but because I think it’s an interesting (if far-fetched) idea.

His idea is this: The ages of the patriarch are to be taken literally and the consequent dramatic shrinkage in the human life span has a natural cause that science may have unwittingly stumbled across.

Take it away, Hugh!

In my own and others’ writings, the Vela supernova (a massive stellar explosion that occurred early in the human era) has been identified as the possible culprit. It seems this event may be at least partly responsible for the cosmic radiation that keeps people from living longer than 120 years or so. In recent months, however, a new and much more likely suspect has been identified.

First, some background. Deadly, cancer-causing (life-shortening) radiation comes from two main sources: 1) the decay of radioactive materials in Earth’s crust, and 2) massive stellar explosions (supernovae) within the Milky Way Galaxy. Cosmic radiation from supernovae (and their remnants) showers the Earth all the time. Most of that radiation is benign and fairly constant, just electrons and protons moving at less-than-dangerous velocities. But some—such as the electron-stripped atoms of oxygen and iron moving at hyper-fast velocities—can do major damage to living things.

Since 1996 Anatoly Erlykin and Arnold Wolfendale have been studying cosmic radiation’s particle energy spectrum—in particular, the high end (above a quadrillion electron volts per nucleon). They have found two peaks in the spectra, protruding high above the background. These peaks, they say, are the signature of a single, major event—a local, recent supernova blast. In other words, the thousands of supernova remnants scattered throughout the Milky Way Galaxy account for the relatively constant radiation background, but the two peaks tell of a local, recent supernova, the shock waves of which would have increased the velocities of oxygen and iron nuclei, turning them into killer radiation.

Initially, Erlykin and Wolfendale loosely identified this supernova as one closer than 3,000 light years and more recent than 100,000 years ago. These features suggested the Vela supernova (distance = 936 light years; eruption date = 20,000-30,000 years ago) as a prime possibility. With improved data, however, Erlykin and Wolfendale have been able to make a more positive identification. This particular supernova occurred so close to Earth that our solar system likely resides just inside the shell of its remnant. That remnant itself, they point out, occupies a significant portion (up to 40 degrees) of the sky—so vastly spread out that astronomers would have had great difficulty distinguishing it from the background.

GET THE STORY.

While I don’t think it likely that Hugh’s astronomical explanation for the shortening of the Genesis life spans is likely the correct one, it is quite possible that such supernovae are having a depressing effect on the human life span. There really are deadly stars out there in the sky spitting out radiation that will cause cancers in humans that would not otherwise occur. I just don’t think the effect is likely to be as dramatic as Hugh does. There are plenty of other things on Earth to kill you besides cosmic radiation (like germs, for example), and this change (together with the others he mentions) does not strike me as being at all likely to explain the shrinkage of the Genesis life spans.

That’s not to say it’s not interesting to think about, though.

DNRs & Immortality Pills

The same reader from earlier writes:

If I understand our Church’s teaching, it is wrong to purposefully
forego "reasonable" treatments such as medicines, food and water, and
defribbrilation.  In essence, a DNR (do not resuscitate) order is not
allowable for a Catholic hospital patient.  Is this understanding correct?

No. DNR orders can indeed be morally licit. The Church has not judged that defibrillation is required in all cases of heart failure. The Church hasn’t determined that defibrillation is morally obligatory at all, and there are certain situations in which it clearly is not morally required. For example: Suppose that someone’s heart is failing because there is a systemic problem in their body that simply restarting the heart will not fix–even if you bring them back with a defibrillator, you won’t have them back for very long (perhaps just minutes) and they may suffer horribly if you bring them back.

In such a circumstance, the costs of using defibrillation are not proportionate to the good to be achieved and it is permissible to simply accept the coming of death and refrain from resuscitation.

We also have to be careful about the other things you mention–food, water, and medicine. There are situations in which these also are disproportionate to the good that may be achieved through them. For example, if a person’s body has stopped maufacturing albumin then putting additional fluids into them will cause them to swell up until their skin literally tears open and their flesh weeps. This is not good of the person, and it reveals that there are circumstances in which more water will actually harm the person because of the way their body has broken down. The same is true, in other circumstances, of food and medicine.

That being said, as long as food, water, medicine, and anything else ARE proportionate to the good to be achieved then their use cannot be morally foregone as one has a duty to take reasonable (proportionate) means in caring for one’s life.

What about 100 years future, when a cheap medicine or procedure may
offer us unlimited natural life? 

It’d be really sweet! (Maybe.)

Would we be bound to forego the
treatment, welcoming our natural mortal ends? 

Not necessarily. As I discussed in an earlier post today, there is no such thing as true immortality this side of the Resurrection, only a prolongation of the human lifespan. That, in itself, is not a problem.

If so, is that any
different than a person rejecting medical treatments of today that did
not exist until recently?
 

This question has already been answered per se since one would not be required to refuse a dramatically life-extending treatment, but there’s an issue here that’s worth surfacing: Technological changes have indeed impacted what treatments one may reasonably refuse. The fact that so many conditions can be treated so much more easily today means that we are obliged to undertake many treatments now that we would not have been obliged to undertake in the past.

Until the 19th-20th centuries, medicine had only been slowly getting better (if that) for thousands of years. As a result, there was a kind of consensus among theologians about what one was and was not be required to do medically. This distinction was expressed in the ordinary/extraordinary distinction: One was obliged to undertake ordinary forms of care but not extraordinary ones.

The rapid change in medical technology–particularly in the last 40 years–has put huge pressure on this distinction, as it’s no longer obvious what’s "ordinary" vs. "extraordinary." As a result, the ordinary/extraordinary distinction has been giving way to a new one: proportionate vs. disproportionate. This is a much more useful way of getting at the underlying issue (does the treatment overall cause more harm than good to the patient when all factors–physical, mental, financial, etc.–are taken into account?). The new distinction has become sufficiently established in moral theology that Vatican documents have taken note of the shift and are starting to use the proportionate/disproportionate language, which has the advantage of not being easily undermined by future technological developments. As medicine progresses, more treatments will fall into the "proportionate" category.

Basically the question is this:  when does it [refusing a radical life-extension treatment] become "suicide?"  When
does it become "euthanasia?"

This is a good question. Refusing to take a life-extension treatment would, under the current calculus, be immoral if the treatment is proportional to the good to be achieved. This is something we just don’t know enough about right now.

What the good is in having a human live to 1,000 years old is
something that we just can’t say at this point. There may be unforeseen
costs in such a thing (like having incurable major depression set in as
soon as you hit 150, for instance). We’ll just have to get farther down
the road and remain attentive to the Magisterium before we can answer
this question.

Even before the development of radical life-extension technologies (if that ever happens) there’s going to be further doctrinal development in this area. The rapid aging of Europe will force that to the front of the theological burners at the Vatican. We’ve already seen some of this, and there will be more to come, possibly as soon as this papacy and, if not, definitely within the next two or three.

 

Catholic Village People

A reader sent an email about an old post I did on a Catholic community in Arkansas, called Star of the Sea Village. The reader writes:

"I just read your blog [post titled It Takes A Catholic Village…] about ‘Star of the Sea’ and found it interesting to hear others’ opinions on … a Catholic community. I am sorry that I was not aware of it earlier so I could also repond. However, if in the future you would like to open another blog [post], the residents here would love to comment and let others know what it is like to live here at Star of the Sea."

Done. Let the comments begin!

“May You Live Really, Really Long And Prosper”?

A reader writes:

I’ve been wondering:  100 years ago we didn’t have many of the
life-extending medicines and surgical techniques that we do today, that
allow us to extend our lives.  In the same manner, 100 years from now we
will (presumably) have many more extraordinary technologies that allow
us to treat and extend life spans.  Suppose there is one that even lets
us extend it so far that we will never have to worry about death from
natural causes – only worrying about, say, car crashes, or massive
physical damage.

I think that would be really cool!

In fact, there are folks who think that this is achievable. There are individuals who are talking about an expoential growth in medical technology in the next few decades (through things like the nanotechnology to repair all kinds of bodily problems that currently can’t be fixed) that may allow for the indefinite prolongation of the human lifespan–and with better health than the elderly currently enjoy.

In fact, there are folks (like Ray Kurtzweil) who think that, if we play our cards right in terms of what technologies we invest in now, that if you are able to survive the next 25 years then the technology will begin to come online that will let you extend your life indefinitely.

I’m all for that!

But this isn’t the same thing as true immortality. Even with an indefinite lifespan, you WILL eventually die (if Jesus doesn’t come back first so that you are one of those still living at the time of the Second Coming). Either a car will hit you or a disease will get you or a gun will shoot you or an asteroid will squash you or a supernova will fry you or SOMETHING.

There ain’t no such thing as true immortality this side of the Resurrection. Tain’t possible.

But if we can have dramatically longer lives than we do now, with improved health, that’s really cool. (Maybe.)

This is not to say that ALL such life-extension techniques would be legitimate. Some might involve unacceptabale forms of cloning or embryo manipulation, for example. Others might not really result in the survival of you. F’rinstance: Some are talking about jettisoning our bodies and uploading our minds to machines.

That’s not you.

If there’s an upload of you then the upload is no more you than Max Headroom is Edison Carter, as shown by the fact that both you and the upload can be around at the same time.

On the other hand, if you get rid of your body then YOU die and something else that thinks and remembers like you takes your place. It’s a technological Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The impact of indefinitely long lifespans on society would also be enormous, and not all of the effects would be good. Studies have been done about that, too. I’ve seen scenarios suggesting the likely effects on society of an "immortality pill" at various numbers of years after the introduction of the pill. It’s all just speculation, though. Whether the good effects outweigh the bad effects is something that we’d have to figure out with time.

And we might conclude in the end that humans just aren’t meant to live indefinitely–that there are design features in the human critter that makes it unsuitable for such long term survival. There are all kinds of dystopian nightmares here, but we simply don’t know enough in this area to write off the entire project without getting more data about the effects of enhanced lifespans.

Thus if someone offered me today an otherwise moral medical procedure that would dramatically extend my life, I’d be very interested in it.

I’m just speaking for myself, of course.

And the question has yet to be asked of what God would think of all this. Because of the Fall, we all die, and no futuristic medical technology is going to change that. The question is: Does God mind us extending our lives?

The prima facie answer is no, he doesn’t. Scripture contains praise for the physician, whose function is to extend lives (read Sirach 38). Further, God gave us the gift of reason to figure out the world, and it gives him glory when we do that in a way that doesn’t violate moral law.

There doesn’t seem to be any barrier that we can discern from revelation where God says "Thus far shalt thou live, and no farther." We may be able to figure out such a line through reason, but revelation doesn’t give it to us.

Some have thought that 120 years is the max cap that God wants on our lives, based on Genesis 6:3 ("My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years") but this most likely refers to something else–to the amount of time God was giving man before the Flood.

This is evident from the fact that if you watch the lifespans in Genesis they don’t suddenly snap down to 120 after God makes this announcement. Noah, for example, lived for 350 years after the Flood, for a total of 950. Nor do the people born after the Flood have 120 year life spans. Noah’s grandson Arphachshad–who was born AFTER the Flood–lived to be 438.

The lifespans do drop off, but they don’t level out at 120, they drop right through that level. So Genesis 6:3 does not seem to mean that the max cap on the human lifespan will be 120. It more likely means that God determined 120 years before the Flood that the Flood would happen and determined to get Noah working on Project Ark.

Further, if one takes these early chapters of Genesis and the numbers in them literally then it would count as evidence that–at least in some circumstances–God does not mind humans having close-to-a-thousand-year lifespans.

EWTN MP3?

A reader writes:

Do you know if EWTN will someday provide downloads of its Audio Library in MP3 format?  The .ra format is virtually worthless to me.

Yeah, the application that plays the .ra format–RealPlayer–went Darkside on us a number of years ago. It experienced its own anti-purgatory and has been thoroughly evil ever since. I would favor Annihilationism in the case of RealPlayer rather than allowing it to continue to fester and bubble and blaspheme on the Internet.

That being said, you’re in luck!

EWTN ALREADY HAS ITS SHOWS AVAILABLE IN MP3 FOR DOWNLOAD.

They even have podcasts set up.

This applies, at least, to the shows that they produce themselves. Independently-produced shows like Catholic Answers Live are handled by their producers.

In the case of Catholic Answers Live, WE ALREADY HAVE MP3S FOR DOWNLOAD, but we don’t quite have the podcasting feature set up yet. But we hope to soon.

Deus Caritas Est: The Kung Perspective

Been wondering what Hans Kung thinks about Pope Benedict’s new encyclical Deus Caritas Est? Well, there’s a surprise and a no-surprise to report.

The surprise: Kung liked the encyclical and had some positive things to say about it.

"Hans Kueng [sic], who was banned from teaching Catholic theology in 1979, hailed his former university colleague for writing a first encyclical that was ‘solid theological fare’ and ‘not a manifesto of cultural pessimism or restrictive sexual morality.’"

The no-surprise: Kung thinks the Pope’s next encyclical should be based on the Gospel According to Hans Kung.

"[Kung’s] statement, written in their native German language, then said the second encyclical he sought [from Pope Benedict] should show kindness to Catholics who use contraceptives, which the Church bans, or men who leave the priesthood because of mandatory celibacy.

"Kueng asked for more understanding for ‘critical voices in the Church’ and divorced Catholics who remarry and are therefore no longer allowed to receive communion in church.

"His last appeal was for ‘more loving treatment’ for Protestant clerics ‘whose Eucharistic services have been declared invalid.’"

GET THE STORY.

Pourquoi??

SmartinI like Steve Martin, I really do. I was in high school when he broke big on the scene in the mid-seventies. I bought the albums, saw The Jerk in the theater, owned two copies of King Tut. I intentionally bumped into my friends in the hallway, just so I could say "Excu–u-u-u-u-use Me-e-e-e-e-e!!!".

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is still one of my favorite guilty pleasures when I just feel like wasting some time and giggling. Steve Martin may be one of the few people on the planet who could make the act of brewing coffee genuinely roll-on-the-floor-with-tears-in-your-eyes funny.

Kevin Kline is also a great comic talent. Who can forget his deranged, Nietzche-quoting, Ugly American criminal mastermind wannabe in A Fish Called Wanda? Funny stuff!

And now, they are doing a movie together!

So, why do I have this feeling of dull foreboding? Why do I find even short trailers for the new Pink Panther movie sort of painful to watch? It’s like this movie is radiating it’s badness right through my television.

I haven’t seen the film, so I admit I could be 180 degrees wrong.

I hope I am.

But how often do you need to re-make a classic film? Anyone seen the remake of Gone With The Wind? How about Citizen Kane or A Day at the Races? Good grief… remember The Wiz?

Steve Martin has had enough moments of celluloid brilliance to warrant great respect, but what made him think of taking on Peter Sellers in his most memorable role? Martin is great, but if you look up the phrase "comic genius" in a dictionary, you’ll see a picture of Peter Sellers. He is Clousseau, and Clousseau is Peter Sellers.

I just don’t know if I can bear to watch this new Pink Panther.

This is a job for the Decent Films Guide!

Surely Steven Greydanus will post and tell me that I really am not being fair to the film (not having seen it yet), and that it really can’t be that bad.

Say it ain’t so, Steve!

JPII’s First Miracle?

Jpiidove

In the aftermath of the death of Pope John Paul II, there was a lot of speculation about his "first miracle." One cleric, commenting on CNN during the Pope’s funeral, said it was when Israeli and Arab leaders shook hands during the sign of peace. Many faithful Catholics said that it must have been when Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was elected as Pope Benedict XVI. These are miracles in the looser sense and don’t count toward sainthood.

Now, though, the Vatican may have found a miracle that could count in the process of canonization for JPII: a nun miraculously cured of Parkinson’s Disease after praying to him for his intercession:

"Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the Catholic Church official in charge of promoting the cause to declare the late Pope a saint of the Church, told Reuters on Monday that an investigation into the healing had cleared an initial probe by doctors.

"Oder said the ‘relatively young’ nun, whom he said he could not identify for now, was inexplicably cured of Parkinson’s after praying to John Paul after his death last April 2.

"’I was moved,’ Oder said in a telephone interview. ‘To think that this was the same illness that destroyed the Holy Father and it also kept this poor nun from carrying out her work.’"

GET THE STORY.

It looks like those who suffer from Parkinson’s Disease now have someone on the fast-track to becoming their patron saint.

Parish Ratings?

A reader writes:

Do you know if there is a website that has a directory of parishes around the country and how they rate with respect to orthodoxy and liturgical fidelity? It would be valuable for people who travel around to determine which parish they should attend.

I know that there’s a lot of demand for this kind of thing, but I don’t know of any that exist. The closest thing I am aware of is MASSTIMES.ORG, which offers basic parish information (like, uh, what times the Masses are) and links to individual parish web sites. I’ve found this to be very helpful, and not only when I’m travelling (e.g., if I just want to know when the Masses are at a particular local parish or when I want to find a parish web site).

There are a number of major problems that would confront somebody actually trying to do a nationwide parish ranking site, though. Among them are these:

  1. The bishops would HATE the site. I mean HATE, HATE, HATE it. And not just the bishops as a whole. I mean EVERY SINGLE BISHOP, NO MATTER HOW GOOD THE BISHOP IS. Partly because nobody likes it when someone publicly points out the weak spots in something they’re responsible form, but also for a bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with the natural human desire not to be criticized. Like these . . .
  2. Who’s doing the evaluating? Unless a multi-millionnaire decides to fund such an initiative, it’s going to have to rely on locals to do the evaluating of their own parishes. But how good will the locals’ estimations be of their parish’s orthodoxy and conformity to liturgical law? Most folks aren’t trained in such matters. Furthermore,
  3. Opinions will differ WIDELY among the people who actually attend the parishes. Some people would rate the parish highly because of the hip, zippy, perky teen guitar Mass with all the hip, zippy, perky teen tunes written by Haugen and Haas and the St. Louis Jesuits that get played there. Others will rate it low for precisely the same reason.
  4. The folks who are most unhappy with the parish might be the ones who would be most motivated to provide data to the site, skewing the ratings low. Or,
  5. If the people who like the parish get involved then there will be battles between them on individual parish pages (possibly starting disputes in the parish).
  6. Some people who have vandettas against their parish or priest or DRE will try to use the system as a way of striking back at their parish.
  7. There will be complaints from parishes about inaccuracies (and non-inaccuracies) on the pages, which at the very least will be a huge administrative headache for the people running the site.
  8. The data will go out of date. I mean, sure St. Paul’s parish used to have a flaky pastor, but that was three years ago, and all the data still reflects things while he was here. Meanwhile, St. Peter’s parish used to have a really great pastor, who has since been replaced by a lemon with a collar.
  9. We’re talking about a HUGE undertaking, given the thousands of parishes
    there are in the country. Further, we’re talking about a project that
    will require an INDEFINITE TIME COMMITMENT from those who run it. Both
    of those mean that real money is likely to be required to run the
    project and make it useful.
  10. Without going into a lot of detail, I can even see the potential for BOTH civil AND canonical actions against the site.
  11. How useful will the site really be? Given challenge #1 (above), the people running the site are likely to be the kind of folks who don’t care what the bishops think about them. This means that they may have some kind of axe of their own to grind, which could harm the usefulness of the site.

This is not to say that such a site couldn’t be done or will never be done. In fact, it’s probably inevitable–given the way that the Internet works–that some people will start a site or sites like this. Heck, we even have sites for tracking individual dollar bills! But how useful and successful the site will be will depend on how well it deals with the above challenges.