Indulgences and Carbon Credits

In the middle ages, the Catholic Church developed the  practice of granting indulgences.  The idea of an indulgence was this, you had committed a really bad sin ( i. e. a mortal sin) like cheating on your wife or stealing money, not something trivial.  You had confessed your sin and received absolution.  But the priest thinks that now you need to do penance.  Penance can be something small, like saying the rosary 50 times or something big like walking on your knees to the nearest saint's grave.  Penance is imposed for the good of your soul not just punishment.  You are supposed to develop a change of heart because of the penance.  The thing was that penances could be pretty rough, so the church began to allow people who were old or disabled or otherwise unable to pay someone else to do the penance.  This system rapidly degenerated into the indulgence system where you just paid your way out of the penance.  As so often happens with  well meant penalties (think cigarette tax) the stream of money generated by the penalty (which penalty is meant to discourage the bad behavior)  becomes so attractive that the original purpose is lost.  The church began to depend on the money generated by the indulgences.  The whole system came to a halt when Martin Luther objected.  His trenchant observations about the pope, the pope's jurisdiction over purgatory, and the primacy of the Gospel to Christian belief spread like wildfire, igniting the reformation.

Carbon credits are really just like indulgences.  In the new religion of global warming, exhaling too much carbon dioxide is sinful.  But you can buy your way out of an anemic electric car and living in the dark by buying carbon credits.  Carbon credits are like indulgences.  They allow you to pretend to care about your new creed of low carbon emissions while simultaneously creating enormously more carbon dioxide than anyone else.  Even left leaning Snopes.com admits, for example, that Al and Tipper Gore use about 12 times as much electricity as the average American home.

Those of us who are not devotees of the new environmental religion see the whole thing as ridiculous.  Because it is.

GCB:ABC attacks the idea of Goodness

First, no, I have never seen the series and I don't intend to watch it ever.  The whole idea of the series is not just an attack on Christianity.  It is an attack on the idea of goodness.  The first proposed name of the series, Good Christian Bitches, says it all.  People who call themselves "good" are, in reality, nasty mean and evil.  The purpose of the name, and of the series, is to blur the differences between good and evil.  Whether the series creator has this goal specifically in mind is irrelevant, it is a social meme which he has picked up and is carrying out.  Sort of like when rappers call women "hoes"  they do not think gee, how can I belittle women.  They just do it.  

We have several generations in our society who live in almost complete ignorance of the true history of Christianity.  They have absorbed so many false memes from an anti-Christian popular culture that they believe them without even thinking about them.  They think, for example, that it was the church that brought on the so-called "dark ages".  In fact, the so-called "dark ages", i. e. the medieval period after the fall of the Roman Empire, were brought on by non-Christian hordes from the North who  invaded and physically destroyed Rome. The keepers of the intellectual flame during the medieval period were, largely, church related institutions, including monasteries and the Vatican.  Oxford University's motto reflects its religious origins.

The anti-Christian left is, in truth, against all religion, but it attacks Christianity first and foremost because Christianity is the world's largest religion.  Leftists claim to be moral relativists, but really, what that means, is no morality at all.  What is moral, to a relativist, is that which benefits him or her most.  So killing a baby is okay because it makes the mother feel better.  The baby might inconvenience the mother.  Old people might inconvenience younger people so kill them.  

An Open Letter toSandra Fluke, Nancy Pelosi and their Friends at NOW

Dear Ms. Fluke et. al.

Last week presented what some might call a teachable moment.  That is, there was a lot of debate about the cost of contraception.  Ms. Fluke, unfortunately, you and your friends assumed that women should have to pay for contraception.  That is just plain wrong Ms. Fluke.  I can understand how a young woman in high school might fall for that argument, but you are a law student at a highly regarded law school, Ms. Fluke, and I had hoped for better from people who have made it to that elevated status in society.

Here's the thing, Ms. Fluke.  Condoms not only prevent conception, they also prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.  Okay, they don't completely prevent such transmission, but they cut the risk very significantly.  And I hope you will pardon my old fashioned attitude Ms. Fluke.  Men should pay for condoms.  Now I can already hear the young women moaning and complaining that some of the men they sleep with don't like to wear condoms, much less pay for them.  As a woman who has had a few years to mature, Ms. Fluke, you had the opportunity to tell other women and particularly young women who have not yet learned this lesson, if he doesn't even want to pay for the condom, really, don't have sex with him.  He doesn't care about you.

Even if you are in to sex without commitment, surely you want to restrict your sexual partners to that group of men who actually have the decent regard for your well-being that a friend would have.  Don't you.  I mean, would you even voluntarily have lunch with someone who made his or her disdain for your welfare as clear as a cold, still lake in the morning?  To put it crudely, if he won't have sex with you if you require that he wears a condom, you're just a vessel for his penis to him.  Such a relationship cannot be classified as friends with benefits, because, really, he's not your friend.  I know what I am talking about.  I won't get specific, but I have a known more than one or two men.

Save yourself from a broken heart.  Don't even be involved with a guy who refuses to wear a condom when he has sex with you.  If he won't even wear a condom, where do you think he will be when you have gonorrhea or chlamydia or, God forbid, get pregnant out of wedlock?   Gone with the Wind.

So this is a teachable moment for young women.  Don't trust men who won't wear a condom, because they are not trustworthy.  They will treat you like kleenex and throw you away when they are done.  This leads to feelings of low self esteem, shame and failure to make the phone call the next day.  Trust me, if he didn't respect you enough to wear a condom, he sure as heck isn't going to respect you in the morning.  This doesn't mean anything at all about your value as an individual.  Men who have that attitude toward women are jerks and other things I am too polite to put on this web page.  The person whose personality is stunted in that situation is the guy who refuses to wear a condom so as to protect you.   Instead of the litmus test, it's the condom test.

Follow my advice and you will see that this simple test will screen out  at least some of the loathsome gigolos and losers who have been befouling your lives.  And, in the long term, you will feel better about yourself because you will be acting like a girl who is not so desperate for male companionship that she will allow some man to endanger her health or change her life completely.

Sandra Fluke is an anti-Catholic Bigot

Sandra Fluke KNEW that Georgetown University did not provide for contraceptives when she enrolled there.  For a little background, Georgetown University is a very expensive private lawschool.  The tuition alone at Georgetown Law is $47,000 per year.  It is also a top tier law school.  If you can get in to Georgetown, you have many options for attending law school.  Sandra Fluke says, in the cited article, that she chose Georgetown law knowing that it didn't provide for contraception services and intending to "challenge" that policy.  She surely knew that Georgetown is a Catholic university.  It is not a public school.  It is a private school.  In my book that makes her an anti-Catholic bigot.  And let me just say that I am not a Roman Catholic.  But her intent, all along, apparently, has been to impose her views on an instrument of the Catholic church.  And to make it perfectly clear, we are not talking about a lot of money for birth control.  Ms. Fluke and her fellow students can purchase generic birth control pills from Target pharmacy, inter alia, for $4.00 per month (yes four dollars.).  If you can afford the tuition at Georgetown, you can afford $4.00.  No one is telling Ms. Fluke that she cannot take birth control pills.  This very Catholic university is not imposing its views on her.  They are just saying they won't pay for it.  It is Ms. Fluke and the feminists who are trying to impose their views on Georgetown by using the Courts and the power of the Health and Human Services administration.

The First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits government from interfering with the free exercise of religion.  Isn't Georgetown's decision not to include contraception services part of its free exercise of religion?  Ms. Fluke's view is that free exercise does not include anything that has to do with how you act.  The right to  control of your actions, in Ms. Fluke's view is reserved to the state.

Somehow, I don't like that.

The War is On

Every day when I read the news I feel like I am under assault.  The liberal media and Obama really are out to get me.  Oh, I know they will laugh and call me paranoid.  Because, of course, they don't even know my name.  That is the horror of it.  I am nothing but dust to be ground under their feet.  I don't even count as a human being in their lexicon.  They have arranged my life and the lives of millions of others like me as if we were nothing but a bunch of boxes in a warehouse.  To be kept and used when useful and dumped when past our expiration date.  We are not humans to them.  We should have no more rights to make decisions about our lives than boxes in a warehouse do.

These are people who think that the strategy and tactics  of the states described by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley in those author's anti-utopian fantasies are a guide to how states should work.  Lie when telling the truth won't work.  Call something by its exact opposite name.  So "good death" becomes the new description for euthanasia which was a word invented to hide the murder of people who are a burden.  Love and loyalty mean nothing to these people except as emotions to be used to control people. So women's choice is NEVER to have the baby.  It must ALWAYS be exercised to kill the baby.  And, oh by the way, it isn't a baby.  That is far too human a word.  It is fetus.  Because, somehow, a fetus sounds less like a person who can breathe and see and feel and cry and, yes, smile.

So while they pursue their strategies my taxes go up and my income goes down and my pension stays the same.  I have pretty much outlived my usefulness so I should plan on another couple of years before the state administers its good death to me in a comforting cocktail which will save Obamacare a lot of money.

On Birth Control, Rush Limbaugh ETC.

The whole contraception issue is a phony issue created and pursued by the liberal press in an effort to re-elect Obama. But, for the record. Birth control pills can be purchased in their generic form from Target Pharmacy, among others, for $4.00 per month. These are facts the liberals don't want you to know. So Sandra Fluke is a less than honorable person. She is an Anti-Catholic bigot being helped by the liberal press to impose her views on the Catholic Church. And why? The statists believe in the First Commandment even more than Jews and Christians do. For the religiously illiterate, the first commandment is "thou shalt have no other Gods before me". The statists believe that no other institution than the State may be allowed to have any claim on your behavior. Not the church, not your family, not any religious belief. That state must be all and rule all in their view. They will permit you to express your religious belief in private behind closed doors while they freely mock you in public. How do they square their fawning over Islam with this view on religion? They erroneously believe in their elitist fantasies that the Muslims are such primitive people that when properly educated, Muslims will stop believing in Islam. These are the sort of people who learn nothing from history. Chechyn rebels anyone?