Orphans.

This morning when you woke up, you were thinking, “Gee, Jennifer needs to clean the house, takes the kids to dance class, drop by the church to return her very overdue books from the parish library and pester the DRE about something, maybe go downtown for one errand and the post office on three, and what she really really wants to do is go the garden center and pick out some drought-resistant plants for the flower beds.”

And furthermore, you were thinking, “I wish I knew more about problems facing orphans in Haiti.”

Perfect!  Here’s your article:  Complexity of Orphan Care, at Sit a Spell.

***

After which, although you might be planning to take the Ironic Catholic’s advice and give up hand lotion or cinnamon for Lent, I suspect she’d approve if you’d squeeze in some prayers for orphans and their parents.

 

Wake up! Hey, Wake up!

That’s what my then two-year-old used to shout at his baby sister in the next seat when we arrived at our destination.  The parents were not amused.

These two articles might not amuse you, either.  But if you need to be really grumpy, these’ll do it.

–> I’m continuing with the regular-life-requires-my-attention-theme, so outsourcing my invective to ‘things that showed up in my inbox’.

From Christian LeBlanc, interesting link to an essay on contraception and the fall of the west.

The West lasted from AD 732, when Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours, until 1960, where it fell without a battle. In 1960, the birth control pill became widely available. Many think of it as heaven, sexual nirvana, the route to self-expression, wish fulfillment, and liberation for millions of women. I think of it as Auschwitz in a bottle. It was and is genocide, as, using it, the women of my generation happily traded off 1,200 years of unparalleled growth, wealth, security, stability, scientific and ethical progress for a second BMW in the garage.

I’m not persuaded of author’s provocative conclusion (“Islam is the only way”), but the irony is there.  In the 19th century the French quit reproducing — yes, before effective contraception became widely available — and by the late 20th were wringing their hands over the cultural impact of all the muslims they’d imported to do the labor of the children they’d never had.  Germany has followed suit, and the US isn’t far behind.

(Though, luckily for our culture, we are importing truckloads of macho catholics with their awesome mariachi masses.  Maybe God does love us more?  Kidding.  Really.  The French have Brie — if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.  But yes, I do like a rousing Spanish mass now and again.  Perks up the excessively-somber soul.   And as much as I am moved by the beauty and devotion of faithful muslims at worship, no, I can’t slip down to the corner mosque for a mini-revival.)

Anyhow, key point of link for me is this:  You can’t refuse to bear children, then get all shocked and horrified at the presence of the people you imported to do the work of the offspring you never had.  You want someone t0 mow your lawn and do your dishes?  Either rear yourself a pair of middle-schoolers, or hire someone else’s.

[Teenagers everywhere are now saying aha!  You really did raise me to be a slave! The mother points out that she does a thing or two for her own children that she doesn’t do for the random low-wage stranger.  Indeed, here may lie a bit of the problem: rather than a steady flow of youngsters who do the grunt work for a decade and then move on to greater work, we attempt to create a society divided between perpetual overlords and perpetual economic-teenagers.  And then are shocked, just shocked, when the daring, hard-working, self-sacrificing immigrants turn out to be just like our own children — ready to move up in the world after a spell.]

****

Your other link is this article from the HSLDA, from Swedish parents who moved to Finland in order to homeschool.  I will use this as my cue to get off the internet educate a few fresh faces of my own.

****

PS, castle news: We got a new roof.  Looks a lot like the old one, only much, much younger.

 

 

 

 

 

March 1 Last Day to Register for CWC Online

Catholic Writers’ Conference Online: It’s free, no-obligation, and exceedingly helpful even if all you do is drop in for one or two things the whole week.   Anyone is welcome, and you don’t have to be published or smart or talented or anything.  I haven’t seen this year’s schedule, but typically there are courses of interest for all abilities and types of writers.

Tomorrow is the participant registration deadline. So go sign-up ASAP if you haven’t already.

Opinions Solicited (How often does that happen?)

Hathaway’s looking for opinions on his Crash Course in Catholic Ethical Thinking .  I’m having my turn at the busy week, so I promised him I’d comment by mid-week or he should pester me.   But you, aren’t you looking for someone to argue with today?

Here’s his ending:

. . . The Church can have compassion for the person in the extreme without saying “this teaching no longer applies because there is this one extreme case, and the rest of you can go on and do whatever you want.”When someone’s holding a gun to your head, either literally or metaphorically, and you do something intrinsically evil, you’re not a sinner. If the Nazis are at your door, and you lie out of fear, that’s not heroic virtue, but it’s also not a sin.

Again, intrinsic evil just means that the act is always evil and can never be virtuous in and of itself. It does not mean that it’s as bad as something else or better than something else.

So:

1. Means, motive and end are all good? Act is virtuous.2. Means, motive and end are good, circumstances are extreme? Act is heroically virtuous.

3. Means are neutral or good. Intentions are good. There are multiple ends, at least one bad and one good? This is “double effect”.

4. Means are bad. Intentions are good. Ends are bad. Circumstances are extreme or person is ignorant? The act is wrong, but culpability is reduced, possibly to nothing.

5. Means are bad. Intentions are bad. Ends are bad. Person is ignorant or not acting in total freedom; and/or matter is not grave? Venial sin.

6. Means are bad. Intentions are bad. Ends are bad. Person acts in full knowledge and freedom. Matter is grave. Mortal sin.

It is really crucial to be clear on these distinctions. To say “X is intrinsically evil” is not the same thing as saying “Y is a sinner for doing X” or even to say that “X is always mortally sinful”. It’s just to say that the using X as a means puts the action under categories 4-6 above.

Read the lead-up.  Tell him what you think.  Friendly guy.

Lent-o-rama: Slubgrip; Sardines

1. Slubgrip.

You may have been wondering:  What could cause a person who doesn’t post ads on her blog, to suddenly post an ad on her blog?

And you would not have been far off, if you thought, “She just wanted that cool-loookin’ gargoyle image.”  Except that she hadn’t seen the gargoyle image until after she wrote to Fr. L saying she’d be happy to post his ad.

Very puzzling, isn’t it?  The solution to the mystery is this: The Gargoyle Code is a really good book.  And your hostess likes to promote really good books, because, well, the more good books people buy, the more good books publishers will print, and thus the more good books your hostess will find crowding the shelves of her favorite local Catholic bookstore.

Blatant self-interest.  And now, in a fabulous wish come true, Father Longenecker has written yet more gargoyle-y fiction goodness.  You can read this week’s episode here. And then you will know why you should buy his book.  Which you can do by clicking the ad in the sidebar, or by visiting your favorite local catholic bookstore.

 

2. Sardines.

This is not usually a food blog, which is strange given how much I like the stuff.  But as many of my readers eat, and a few of them cook, why shouldn’t we go off topic now and again?

Now is the time for my older sister and all other people who don’t like seafood to depart by clicking on one of the fine links in the sidebar.  Many of them contain no horrid accounts of eating things that used to swim.

Anyway, here’s the story:  SuperHusband points out to me, a person who eats tuna straight from the can, that anchovies and sardines are superior in every way.   Insert list: health, environment, mercury . . . you begin to get the picture of the moral superiority that can be had by purchasing the flat rectangular tin instead slightly taller round tin.

How could I resist such an opportunity?  I cannot be upstaged in the food-virtue department by my own spouse, can I?

So I go buy the stuff on the next grocery trip, and stick it in the cupboard where the tuna used to sit.

And then a couple weeks later, I get really really hungry, on a Friday when my normal non-lenten penance of staying off the internet has once again spectacularly failed and not eating meat seems much simpler, and we are all about light penances here, and in a fit of braveness I open the anchovies.

Here is the part where you laugh.  Because, you who know anything about anchovies (as your hostess did not), knows that one does not eat them straight from the tin as one might do with tuna.

So now I have this open tin of anchovies, moral superiority on the line, and no, I can’t just give them to the cat.  She is a small cat.  And the dog will just get indigestion.  And anyway, giving the pets expensive human food is no way to one-up the spouse.

But here’s what I discovered: You can cook with the stuff. And it’s good!  Convenient!  Useful!  Tasty!

Now all the readers who already know how to cook with sardines and anchovies may quit laughing at me and click on a link in the sidebar.

Also, all readers who can boil pasta and have three Joy of Cooking recipes you can make, but you don’t really know how to cook yet, because let’s admit it, “winging it” in the kitchen is a skill one builds over time, you should just maybe consider the sidebar too.  Because the potential for disaster and ridicule is quite high any time a can of tiny, strongly-flavored fish is involved.

*******

Now, to the empty internet, here’s what I figured out:

VERY IMPORTANT:  Purchase the sardines or the anchovies “in oil”. Not the one in mustard sauce or something.  Just oil.  Fish in oil.  That’s all you want.  Two ingredients. (Plus salt or whatever.  But no delightful surplus condiment flavors.)

Now you’ve got the proper tin in hand.  You know the part of the recipe at the very beginning, where you put oil in the bottom of the pan and saute your garlic or onions or ginger or whatever it is that needs to be sauteed first of all?

Instead of the butter or oil, just dump the whole tin of fish right into the bottom of the pan. Use that as your cooking oil for that sauteing step.  The fish will naturally get diced/shredded in the process of sauteeing your vegetables.  Then proceed with the recipe as normal.

MORE VERY IMPORTANT:  If you don’t like how fish tastes, don’t cook with fish.  This is not one of those “how to sneak seafood into the recipe” tricks.  This method gives the recipe a light seafood-taste, akin to say a crab recipe, or adding fish sauce to your curry.  Depth, complexity, and all the moral superiority for which you had hoped, but in a seafood-y way.

What it’s good for:

  • Recipes that call for ‘fish sauce’.  Think of certain thai recipes, curries, etc.
  • Soups that either already seafood-y, or that would like to be converted.  With the caveat that say your spouse really loves oyster stew, that does not mean he loves anchovy-oyster stew.  Don’t over-complicate recipes that want to be simple.  Use bacon drippings for the oyster stew, your spouse will thank you.
  • Pasta sauce!  Red sauce if you like, but this makes a great base for a vegetable-parmesan sauce, and maybe use up the last little bit of the cream leftover from the vichyssoise.

If you use anchovies, plan around the saltiness. You will not need to add the usual amount of salt or soy sauce to your recipe. Also, this is a good time to balance the intensity of the anchovies with something sweet and something sour (lime, vinegar, etc.)  Sardines are milder, so you season more or less like you would have if you’d just made the recipe the normal way.

Happy Lent.  Does it count as a penitential if you are looking forward to the new recipes?

 

Abortion and Tidiness.

Go read this at the Catholic Key Blog.  And not just because I am a person who likes both babies and a good drink now and again.  But because this resonates with maybe what you have seen elsewhere?

Because maybe right now you are facebook friends with one of the coolest teenagers in the universe?  And that kid wouldn’t even have been given a name, let alone a chance to see the light of day, if some scared 16-year-old and her mother hadn’t resisted the pressure to do what all those clean-cut wholesome small-town upper-class ladies were saying they had to do to “get rid of the problem”?

When someone has to die in order for me to maintain my sterling reputation?  . . . No.  Just no.   –>  If only all my lousy ideas and major mistakes could result in something as awesomely awesome as a certain favorite nephew of mine.  Why would someone want to kill the one good thing to be granted?

Go and sin no more.  That’s meekness.

Parents Caught Raising Well-Rounded Daughter

UPDATE: (Long as JDM has caught me goofing off again, I might as well do it right): Brad Warthen is on topic.  Check out the video he links, hilarious.  So true.

(Said by a fellow LLL grad who has not only CD’d, but hung them out to dry on the line. Then again, my 2nd-born’s first food was Tiramisu.  My credentials are doubtful.)

********

The Livesay’s on their daughter with the “weirdest life ever”.

I link because the whole parenting-police theme is central to that homeschooling book I’m reportedly writing.  (Yes I am in fact writing it.  Slowly.)  We live in a bizarre society where one of the national pastimes is getting all huffy because someone else’s life isn’t one long giant defense of your own personal decisions.

The really funniest one is when some lady (yes, usually a lady), says something along the lines of, “Sure, nobody’s perfect, but how can that family possibly homeschool, when their children’s socks don’t even match!”  [This is ironic, because of course if sock-matching were the measure of educational success, it would be so much easier to assess the schools.]

I kid not.  People — registered voters with college degrees, even — truly do say this stuff.   Lately I mostly hear it about those horrible horrible parents like the Livesays, who send their children to school, but the method can be used  against any parenting decision anytime anywhere, so long as you pick your audience properly.  The formula is this:

a)  Insist that of course you aren’t setting up impossible standards

b)  Choose someone or something you don’t like

c)  Randomly choose some criteria that you have decided should be the central measure of human worth.

d) Make sure it is something that you excel at, and your target does not.  Also, make sure the person to whom your are speaking manages well enough at the proposed criteria.

e)  Use a tone that suggests the parents are feeding the children excrement or mating them with livestock,  as you point out your target doesn’t meet your made-up requirement.

f)  Chortle triumphantly at your brilliant proof that your target should give it up and just come to you for lessons in proper living.

You think I exaggerate.  No I do not. People do this.  And it makes life a nightmare for parents who are genuinely trying to figure out the best way to rear their children under difficult circumstances.  So lay off the parents.  That’s my Friday sermon:  Lay off.

****

BTW if you aren’t feeling chastised (or smug) enough, Ruth at Wheelie catholic has more cautionary tales of employee horror.  Because the utter cluelessness of mankind knows no bounds. Go read. Be warned.  Amend your ways.  Find yourself rocketing to Employee of the Year.  It’s all good.

Lent-o-rama and other quick notes

I made the Aggie Catholic Guide to Lent (thank you Mark Shea) it’s own special category in the sidebar.  Am going to maybe build the category up a bit.  Send suggestions.  Thanks.

And yes,  yes, I know I am behind on updating the sidebar with other great blogs I’ve recently started reading and recommending.  Pester me if yours isn’t up on the list by Monday.

***

Please pray for a special intention for some missionaries in difficulty.  Thanks.

***

Brad Warthen posts Clark Whelton’s What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness.  Let it be a warning to us all.

Mr. Magundi on Beggars.

***

And how to cut to the chase with your friendly but inexperienced evangelical door-to-door missionary:

Kind and earnest missionary asks, “If you died tomorrow, where would you go?”

Reflect.  Give honest answer: “Purgatory.”

Silence.  “Um, here, have one of these.”  Hands over tract, quickly retreats to next door.

Perfectly nice kids, by the way, and nothing anti-catholic in the tract.  Basic model plan-of-salvation, baptist version.   Refreshing, really.  Catholics could learn a thing or two.

 

 

The Trouble with Double Effect

[Update for those who didn’t find this from Siris: Brandon Watson adds more and explains things better over there. ]

I’ve wanted to hit this one for a week or so now, what with the excitement of late.  Honest inquirers have proposed that in the lying-in-serious-situations question, perhaps double effect applies?  It is a reasonable suggestion, what with there being situations where, for example, the principle of double effect permits killing.  And killing people is a really big deal.

But I don’t think we can invoke double effect in the case of lying, and my reasoning is simple: Double effect requires two effects.

***

Some background to get us started. We mostly only hear about “double effect” in such thorny and famous situations as just warfare or legitimate self-defense, so we might get the idea that it’s just this handy trump card moral theologians keep up their sleeve for when they really, really wanna kill somebody.  Nope.  Not that.

Double effect (also called “parallel effect”) is actually one of the two principles that work together to keep our moral system sane.  The other is ‘ends don’t justify the means’, but that isn’t our topic today until way down below where I go out on a limb and guess things.  Back to Double Effect:

#1 Reason to love Double Effect: It lets you take a shower.

Because here’s what: Showers and bathtubs are super dangerous.  You could slip and crack your head open. And if the bathroom weren’t bad enough, you probably keep a stove and a water heater around the house, and perhaps even some kind of Vehicle of Death in your garage.  (Or, if you are a Luddite, a Pack Animal of Death for your transportation needs.)

Double effect says that you are allowed to have all this and more!  Because you aren’t actually trying to drown, scald or maim anybody.  Those are unintended consequences of your perfectly reasonable efforts to stay clean, fed, mobile, and so forth.   You’ll try to avoid those bad effects if you possibly can.

[What you can’t do: If your enemy fails to drown in his bath, you can’t hold him under.  In fact you can’t even lay out the bath things and light a scented candle in an effort to lure him to his death.  You may only lead him to the tub for a legitimately good reason, such as to reduce the general stinkiness and discourage the spread of impetigo.  Or perhaps so that he might unwind after a long day driving. you. crazy.  But not to kill him. Barring circumstances we’ll get to down the page.]

So that’s the use of double effect.  It lets us do something good, even if there is a some risk of something bad happening in the process.

Now unless you suffer from deep scruples, you probable don’t lay awake nights wondering if your really did the right thing, caving in and buying a water heater.  So where double effect gets famous is because it permits seriously dangerous action if there’s a genuine need for it.

You may not, for example, throw yourself in front of a bus in order to get that drat fly at last. (Even though the fly is germy and annoying, and you only want to give your beloved a peaceful picnic.  Good cause, good action, but the risks are disproportionate.  It’s a no-go.  Hope the bus gets the fly, and live to swat another day.)  But if it is to push your hapless child out of harm’s way, yes you may take the risk of your likely death in order to save the child.  You aren’t trying to die.  You hope to avoid dying.  Everyone will be much happier if a guardian angel steps up and takes care of things.

And that’s the clincher of double effect — there are two effects: There is one thing good you are trying to achieve, and one bad bad you hope to avoid. Even if the bad effect is 100% likely barring supernatural intervention, you can’t be trying to achieve the bad effect.

In our bathtub-as-weapon scenario, it looks like this: You are peacefully getting ready to hop in the tub, when your enemy bursts in and thrusts his knife at your chest.  So you avail yourself of the only way to save your own life, pushing him into the tub and holding him under until he quits struggling.  The clincher is in the ending.  Suppose you get yourself to safety, and the guy somehow lives.  Maybe the plug was dislodged in the struggle, and in fact he’d only fainted from lack of air but not yet drowned, and when you go back to the bathroom with the police officer to show him the corpse, the man is gasping and confused, but not dead.  And you are no longer in danger.  You don’t get to refill the tub and see if you can do him in.  The whole “killing” thing was not the desired effect at all, remember?  You just wanted to save your own life.  If you could have done it some other way that didn’t risk killing the guy, you would have.  That mission accomplished, the tub goes back to its peacetime use.

So that’s double effect.

[To clarify here: You don’t have to defend yourself with household appliances only.  If you had a .45 in your bathrobe, you could have used that.  But you’d have to stop shooting as soon as you knew you were safe.  And if the guy lived, you’d have to let him live.  You weren’t trying to kill him, remember?  Only trying to save your own life.  Only.  That’s the clincher.]

***

So why can’t lying be just another weapon under the principle of double effect?  I think it can’t, because I don’t see that the “double” applies.  There aren’t two separate effects going on.

If I lie, I have a single purpose: To hope you will be deceived.  I’m not saying something false, but hoping that you will somehow figure out the truth anyway.  I’m saying something false, and hoping you’ll fall for it.  If the lie doesn’t deceive, it doesn’t do the very thing I wanted it to do.

In contrast: I hop in the car hoping to get to the store.  I hope I don’t die in a fiery crash on the way, even though I take that risk.    I use lethal force to defend my own life; if the force turns out not to be lethal, so long as my life is saved, my mission is accomplished.  The goal was not to kill another, it was to save myself.

But in the case of lying, my very mission is to lie.  I may be using it to try to achieve a good end, but there’s no way for me to separate out my end from my means.  Because the end I’m trying to achieve is to deceive somebody.  If the lie doesn’t work, the deception won’t occur.

I just don’t see how we can say there is a ‘double’ or ‘parallel’ effect going on.  There aren’t two effects.  There’s just one.

So if there were a principle that permitted lying in some serious situation, I think double effect would not be that principle.

And that’s all I really wanted to say.

********************************************************

Now I start some additional related ideas:

But remember it is acceptable — desirable even — to withhold the truth from those who have no right to have it. And I think this is where things get confusing.  Because it is perfectly okay for me to not let you know how much I weigh, what I had for breakfast, or whether I am sheltering a woman fleeing from her crazed and murderous ex-husband.  These things aren’t your business.  You have no right to know.  So I don’t have to tell you.

Now we’ve been through a whole list of non-lying ways to withhold the truth back on my other post.  But here’s where the confusing thing comes in:  In my resorting to any of those tactics, you might end up deceived.

You might, for example, ask me if I ate all the Krispy Kreme donuts.  And when I say nothing, or say some true thing that does not answer that question, you might infer that either a) I did in fact eat all the donuts, or b)  I gave them to the woman you are now quite sure I am hiding in my closet.  [And depending on which you assume, you might make a further speculation on whether I weigh too much or too little.]

So an unquestionably innocent action might have the result of causing you to believe something that is not true.  It is a double effect.  What I wanted was for you not to know.  What happened is that you were deceived by my answer — you took me to be asserting something I was not.

THIS ENDS THE PART WHERE I’M FAIRLY SURE OF WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.

***

THIS STARTS THE PART WHERE I REALLY NEED SOMEONE TO CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG.

Complicating things further, I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to intentionally cause you to be deceived. That is, say you are stalking me at Krispy Kreme because you think I’m sheltering the fleeing woman, and you want to find out.  And I know this, and there are serious reasons you should not be given this information.

–>  So as I buy all three dozen Hot Donuts Now, I say something to the clerk like, “Boy Scouts sure love donuts!”  Entirely true, yes, but I said it just to throw you off the trail. To cause you to believe, erroneously, that the Boy Scouts were going to get these particular donuts (which I never said).  I intended to deceive you with my truthful statement.  I could even walk with donuts in hand into the building where scouts meet, and then secretly send the donuts back to my vehicle in some concealed way, before going home to give them to the woman in my closet.  (Probably giving the Scouts two dozen, so they can honestly say that yes, I gave them donuts.)  An elaborate deception designed to protect an innocent person in hiding.

So assuming this deception is morally acceptable, how could lying be wrong?

It comes back to the bathtub and bus.  I can use the bathtub, or a gun, to save my own life, even if it means using mortal force to do so.  I can jump in front of the bus to save my child’s life, even if it means certain death for myself.  But there are limits:  What if, say, my enemy required me to drown his other enemy (who was no threat to me) in that tub, and if I did so, I could go free? What if throwing some innocent bystander in front of the bus would knock my child out of harm’s way?

Those things would be murder.  So I can’t do them.  Even though some kinds of deadly actions are morally acceptable for proportionately serious reasons, not every kind is therefore allowed.

In the same way, it seems that even if some kinds of intentional deception are morally acceptable for proportionally serious reasons, it does not follow that every kind of deception is therefore allowed.

———– I’d be most grateful if some person who is knowledgeable on these matters could tell me if this last bit makes any sense, or if I’m wrong wrong wrong.  Thanks.—————-