U.S. bishops turbo-charge rote prayers

The U.S. Catholic bishops have a lot to be concerned about these days.  The Church has been closing numerous parishes.  Fewer people are going to Mass.  Catholics are struggling with the meaning of ancient Catholic doctrines.

It was with this backdrop that the bishops held their “vigorous debate” over another pressing matter.  After all the dust settled, though, the resolution could finally be announced.  Thanks to the bishops’ effort, freshly tweaked rote prayers can now be uttered at Catholic Mass.  Bishop Donald Trautman declared that these new prayers were “the most significant liturgical action to come before this body for many years.”

  • Instead of saying:  “The Lord be with you” / “And also with you,” Catholics will now say: “The Lord be with you” / “And with your spirit.”
  • At confession, instead of admitting aloud that they have sinned “through my own fault” parishioners will now add “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”
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My life as a sponge

Why do so many people fight the idea that humans evolved from simpler life forms? Perhaps, this resistance is the natural consequence of the "chain of being," the long-time teaching that God and the Angels are the most superior forms of existence, humans inferior to them, and "beasts" and plants more inferior still, with rocks at the very bottom. Great_Chain_of_Being - new.jpg [The 1579 drawing of the great chain of being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana] Even though biology does not recognize a status hierarchy among living things, the “chain of being” schematic nonetheless lingers in the minds of some people, especially among people who fail to appreciate the immense biological record uncovered by dedicated scientists, the importance of the scientific method and the elegance of evolutionary theory. Those who oppose evolution tend to be the same people who go around dissing organisms traditionally plotted lower on the chain of being diagram. A good example would be the (lack of) respect given to sponges. You can almost hear the fundamentalists spitting and hissing as they utter something like the following: "How dare those evolutionists claim that we come from sponges!" To me, however, this reasoning does not reveal a scientific dispute, but only ignorance regarding the intimate biological relationship between humans and sponges. I find the harsh anti-evolutionary rhetoric of fundamentalists to be, essentially, anti-spongist. Since one can further trace human ancestry all the way to bacteria, I find such reasoning also anti-bacterialist. It makes me want to shout: You anti-spongists! You anti-bacterialists! The remedy for this attitude problem of fundamentalists is that they need to take the time to honor and appreciate the complexity of "simpler" organisms.

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Does failure come from “fear or laziness”?

The puzzle goes like this: young student actor Wiley Wiggins, star of the trippy, philosophical film Waking Life, walks into a bar. There he finds University of Texas Professor of Philosophy Louis Mackey, who muses on two kinds of human suffering: those that suffer from an “overabundance of life”, like…

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We must do X because we’ve ALWAYS done X

We’ve recently raised a few issues regarding justifications for bigotry.  What especially rankles some of us is the often-heard argument that people should do something a particular way (recently, the issue is preventing gay marriage) because that is the way that it has been done in the past.  

What a ridiculous-sounding principle on which to base an argument! Ridiculous sounding, unless you are a lawyer arguing an important case.  In courtrooms across this country, multitudes of lawyers lawyers stand up every day with straight faces and proceed to argue to judges that a case should be decided a particular way solely because a previous and similar case was handled that same way.

In law, this principle that judges should rely on precendent is given the obscure and mysterious-sounding label “stare decisis,” from the Latin, “stand by the thing decided.” [Stare decisis et non quieta movere, meaning “to stand by the decisions and not to disturb settled points”].

There is the great power in this heuristic.  At least it’s an equal opportunity principle:  Analogizing to old cases is a technique that can be used by crafty opportunists, as well as good-hearted seekers of justice. 

Though we are tempted to scoff at this principle (of relying on precedent) when it is employed by bigots, we need to keep things in context.  That very same principle is the heartbeat of justice.  How strange, you might think, that such an amoral principle determines outcomes of important cases!  That’s the way it is, however.  I’ll …

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Exactly what does it mean to “believe” in God?

In a recent conversation with a relative of mine who is a born-again Southern Baptist Christian, we got into a discussion about the afterlife.  My relative insisted that "hell is a real place," while I pointed out that no one knows anything more about the afterlife than anyone else does. …

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