1. When you looked in the mirror first thing this morning, what was the first thing you thought?
"Vanitas vanitatum"
2. How much cash do you have on you?
~$46
3. What's a word that rhymes with TEST?
Zest
4. Planet?
Mars. Often Earth.
5. Who is the fourth person on your missed calls?
My missed calls list is three people.
6. What is your favourite ring on your phone?
The only one it has.
7. What shirt are you wearing?
My residence house "hoodie" from college. I am presently well-known for wearing it in these parts.
8. What do you label yourself as?
A lazy idiot.
9. Name the brand of shoes you've recently worn.
Converse
10. Bright room or dark room?
Rather bright presently.
11. What were you doing at midnight last night?
Doing physics in the library.
12. What did the last text message on your phone say?
I've never received one.
13. Where is your nearest 7-11?
I know I've seen one within a few miles.
14. What's a saying you say a lot?
"Basically..."
15. Who told you they loved you last?
My mother.
16. Last furry thing you touched?
My face... (though it's not particularly so)
17. How many drugs have you done in the past three days?
None. Unless ice cream counts.
18. How many rolls of film do you need to get developed?
Four.
19. Favourite age you've been so far?
22
20. Your worst enemy?
Satan? I really wouldn't know.
21. What is your current desktop picture?
Some default Linux thing.
22. What was the last thing you said to someone?
Did you just go to the pool?
23. If you had to choose between a million bucks and being able to fly, which would you choose?
There has been some talk about risk of dissection, but I'd love to be able to fly.
24. Do you like someone?
Always. And yes I understood the question.
25. The last song you listened to?
I'm presently listening to an album called "Coronation of the First Elizabeth."
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Monday, January 23, 2006
Don't You Understand That Thing Inside You Is Alive?
Thanks to Al Kimel of Pontifications, J-Tron of the Propaganda Box, and the Salty Vicar (now known as Gawain de Leuw) the fire is hot on the issue of abortion and ECUSA. J-Tron is worth reading. Al Kimel is worth reading, too. Just ignore that part where he thinks being in communion with the Bishop of Rome gives him some authority to decide what the Church is. The Salty Vicar is a bit of a muddle, because he has become too incensed at the political pro-life lobby to give an objective reading of the situation.
OK, I have a confession to make. I'm pro-life. If you were to send me a petition empowering Congress to define the beginning of human life as some point between conception and birth, you would get it signed forthwith. You also might see me trying to tack on some sort of rider involving universal health care. An America with healthcare for everyone who needs it and without abortion is a dream of mine.
My other confession is that I am not particularly loud about being pro-life. My parents are pro-choice. My school leaned pro-choice. My churches generally have been pro-choice. My present church's vestry passed a resolution about it. Put that on the chalkboard as reason #1 I might have to leave ILEOS.
But I think the reason I am not particularly loud about being pro-life is that it remains a purely academic issue for me. I've never been the cause of involuntary pregnancy (I prefer this to unplanned and unwanted, because pregnancies are rather difficult to plan and can be wanted at any time, but it's only voluntary pregnancy if you really wanted to get pregnant.) I've never known anyone involuntarily pregnant. OK, that's not true. I've known a few women who have pleasantly surprised by involuntary pregnancy. But I've never known anyone who's ever told me they were going to have an abortion. Perhaps, it is written on my face, "This man will try to talk you out of it and may volunteer to be your Lamaze coach to boot." I've always liked Lamaze. The only time abortion becomes non-academic for me is at the ballot box, where it seems pretty pointless.
What is it that Creed says? "Only in America...we kill the unborn to make ends meet." John Wilkins has something right. Abortion is a sign that we don't want to spend money on children. We don't want to spend money on their food, their clothing, their healthcare, and their primary, secondary, and tertiary educations. In the latter days of the Roman Republic, there is some indication that the aristocratic birthrate declined. My usual explanation for this is that the cost of a political career had spun so out of control that the expense required to produce two consuls could cripple the family finances. And remember that infanticide was legal at Rome. This is clearly not the entirety of the explanation, since reproduction wasn't very easy in those days anyway. But when the birthrate of the most well-fed women in a society declines precipitously, something must be going on.
But mourning the dissimulation of the powers that be is not a sufficient end to one's thinking. If the kid is alive, there is no excuse to end its life. You can't kill your born children to minimize costs, why should you be able to kill your unborn children? That's the core issue. Everything else is commentary and excuse.
What Rev. Mr. Wilkins should have said is this: We live in a deeply sinful society full of racial and economic inequity and thus iniquity. Young African-American women disproportionately abort their babies, because they are the segment of our female population that is least well-educated, least well-employed, and has the least ties to family and a social support network. In some places, this only has been true for about a generation. This about the same period in which we have had legal abortion. The reduction of abortion rates in the 1990s coincides with the widespread use of long-term intravenous birth control devices, which are cheaper over the long-term and easier to obtain (in some sense) than oral birth control. You may laugh. But when I lived in Philadelphia during the 1990s, these devices were big news for young African-American women. In addition, the 1990s were a time of economic prosperity. A rising tide is a Kolgomorov cascade for all boats, which in non-science talk, implies that a rising tide lifts the higher boats to a much greater degree than the low boats.
This is not to say that all abortions are by African-American women, but it is such a great disproportion that the greatest common ground between me, Alan Keyes, Maya Keyes (his famously lesbian daughter), and her ex-girlfriend is that abortion has been involuntarily genocidal for African-Americans. Involuntary, only because the policymakers have been reading the demography for a generation (and have been doing little about it).
At the same time, our society continues to fail children, especially those with one or no suitable parents or guardians. We slash their healthcare benefits, slash their food aid, spend too little on their education (especially in this state), and keep them in a variety of unsuitable living situations. A good foster parent is a blessing from God. A good adoptive family is two. And I want to thank all of the families, Christian and otherwise, who have given temporary and permanent hospitality to the least in our midst. But there aren't enough. There is a theory, which might be the stuff of ius naturale , that infertility and homosexuality are nature's way of providing supplementary caregivers. Thus, I am especially incensed at the potential iniquity of denying partnered gay couples the ability to adopt foster children. And those who are worried about instability just can get into line with those who support legalizing civil fratrimony and sororimony. For those who are fertile, I would urge them to consider the halakhic interpretation of the command of God "to be fruitful and multiply" and limit one's childbearing to one boy and one girl (if God wills it) at the greater mitzvah . If you want more children, consider adoption. If we are to end abortion, up to one million more children a year may need homes. Christians are commanded by Christ to give food and shelter to the least among us as we would Christ. Hmm... Well, it's an idea.
Our society continues to fail parents. Throughout the country, there are workplace cultures in which parents are looked down upon or feel obligated to spend more time away from their families to establish their equal partnership in the "team." There remains something called, "the corporate mommy track." Good daycare is so hard to find. I will admit that we may have to rethink the two-income household. But I would argue that we really may have to rethink the traditional "office" workplace. With a little bit more equipment and software, I could work from home. I presently am a student, who does rather sophisticated climatological research. I'm not arguing for complete telecommuting, but I think reduction of the hours of "face time" required in white-collar professions will free up some "quantity time" for children.
In other occupations, we must continue to insist on 40 hour weeks and paid overtime at a living wage. I swear that the only thing Walmart wouldn't do to externalize its labor costs would be to require its female employees abort. The list could go on and on.
The reason Episcopalians (either pro-choice or pro-life) tend to be more reponsive to "social concerns" about abortion is that we have a strong theological commitment to seeing that no person nor moral action exists in vacuo . This is a different thing than saying all moral judgments are subjective, because being able to observe matters in context is the truest moral objectivity. I cite the authority of the Angelic Doctor on fornication, who says that the only difference between licit sex and simple fornication is the relationship and intention of the partners. And because no moral action exists in isolation, it is hard for some of us to argue for a legal ban on abortion. For in an iniquitous society, we recognize that abortion nearly always arises from a distorted act of love. Love, as the Pope hopefully will say on Wednesday, consists in seeking the good of the object of one's love. The woman who aborts almost always seems to think: how is this child going to live? It would be bad for this child to be born. Anne Lamott, for instance, only has her Sam, because when she thought about aborting again, her church community stepped in and said that they would do all in their power to support that child before and after it was born. The distortion of love occurs when we do not know the true good of our beloved. The good of a rational being is not "never to be born" as Sophocles said (the Preacher suggests similarly in a somewhat different context in Eccl. 6:3-5), but it is to seek to know and be known within the marvelous creation of Almighty God and to partake eventually in the new creation that is to come through the victory of Christ Jesus. The second requires regeneration and sanctification. But the first just requires a little caution and a bit of painful pushing.
Rev. Mr. Wilkins says that views like mine do not respect the consciences of women. I am afraid my lack of respect for the consciences of others stems from a lack of confidence in my own. Like Paul, I constantly feel and often yield to the yearning of my flesh to do ill to myself, others, and God for some momentary satisfaction. I am fortunate that God and my neighbor are so merciful to pass over most of my faults in this regard. But it is because I know my conscience is so poor that I am willing to tell women the truth of what they would be doing if they aborted. I would wish to offer them alternatives.
I also have little respect for the consciences of the men who are co-heirs of iniquity. From what I understand, they are the ones who typically first suggest abortion. Although the archetypal abortion story involves the matter being kept secret from the father, this appears to be a myth to salve the conscience. The boyfriend offers to pay. The boyfriend offers to drive. As far as I am concerned, the boyfriend should be driving to the prenatal appointments, the Lamaze classes, and the adoption agency (if necessary). The boyfriend should be paying a half-share of the costs of the baby being born. My driving instructor used to say that you should drive a car seeing all of the cars as your money and your car as fire. If we are to be so iniquitous and churlish as to reduce babies to money, I think every heterosexually active man should take a similar viewpoint. All contraception can fail, after all.
What my social conscience does recognize is that bans on abortion per se are legally and socially reprehensible legislation. They do nothing to remove the fog of the distorted love women have for their embryos. Moreover, abortion laws do not recognize the truth they supposedly acknowledge. Although the consequences of putting the old common-law principle of quickening into effect or similar efforts would be dire, I might be amenable (if my other concerns were addressed) to a crime of "statutory murder," which made it a misdemeanor to cause death to an embryo of a certain age. But unfortunately, there is one ontological problem that arises from such a definition.
On the Ensoulment of Human Creatures
First, there is no civilly objective definition to the beginning of human life. However, I do believe Congress or a state legislature has the right to set the definition of human life arbitrarily. The age of sexual consent is arbitrary. The age of suffrage is arbitrary. There are no objective ways to decide when someone is able to consent to sex or to vote. Every distinction American statutory law makes about age is arbitrary. Unlike Shariah, we do not use puberty as an indication of anything.
Second, most views on the beginning of life talk about "ensoulment." It is yet to be a settled principle of the Magisterium (I think) or of evangelical Christian theology, but the burden of opinion on "ensoulment" states that it happens at conception. I respectfully disagree along with other Anglican moral theologians (well, that's what ++Peter Carnley says).
In the interest of full disclosure, the consequences of "ensoulment" being defined at conception are rather significant. Chemical contraception would become a deadly weapon. And embryonic "stem cell" research would be illegitimate so clearly from its means that its ends would be of no consequence.
Roman Catholics would say, "Why should you care? The Fathers were against contraception." Ah, yes. The classical Fathers certainly were against contraception. Reading various Patristic texts cited by Roman Catholics on this issue, I have noticed three things. 1. Contraception was rather dangerous in the ancient world. Its use might sterilize women against their will, because their husbands insisted. I agree that a husband or wife who insists on the sterility of a marriage against the will of the partner diminishes its sacramental quality. 2. Contraception became a license for men to have sex with prostitutes or concubines more readily. From what I can tell, fornication is the problem in this case, not what makes it easier. 3. Contraception of various methods was said to kill "potential children," whereas abortion killed "active children." The Fathers were basing this assertion on Greek medical theory, in which the seed of the man essentially was the clay from which the child was built (conservation of mass being a poor consideration in medical science of the day). Thus, a man who wasted semen in any way was wasting the material from which the soul was made, too. If we held to the principles of the Fathers, even having unprotected sex would be an act of mass murder greater than Hitler and Stalin's entire careers. NFP would be as horrific as artificial methods. Let's stop the logical contradictions here.
From the time of the classical Fathers to the invention of the microscope, opinions on the beginning of human life seem to have varied. The broad consensus of the medievalists, based on evidence from the penitentials, was forty days. Although I suspect the medievalists would have had different things to say about intentionally causing a miscarriage before forty days, their line of argument would be similar to that of the classical Fathers but they would be less certain about the medicine. The invention of the microscope had interesting consequences for moral theology. Without the Jesuits discovering "homunculi," we would never have heard the wonderful song of Monty Python fame, "Every Sperm Is Sacred."
Thus, I think the question of ensoulment must be "reassessed." Take that look of abject horror of your face. We will take two approaches, since I just nixed the ontology of Tradition. We will first consider a Biblical argument for the beginning of human life. Then we will present a supplementary argument from reason.
Being pro-life at a pro-choice parish, I have to hear every once in a while that the Bible says nothing about abortion. And this is true insofar as the only directly juridical passage is Exodus 21:22-25, which mandates that anyone who strikes a woman and causes her to miscarry owes a fine to her husband. There are some very interesting property relations suggested here, but I'll pass over it. Reason tells us that the question to pose to Scripture is not directly juridical. We want to know when a human being gets a soul. In my view, the most relevant passage to this issue is not anything in the Psalms, but three passages in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament. The Old Testament passages are Genesis 2:7, Genesis 9:4, and Ezekiel 37:1-14. In the first, God breathes on the dust of the earth and Adam becomes a living creature. In the second, Noah is forbidden to eat from which blood has not been drained, because "the life of the creature is in the blood." In the third, bones are symbolically animated from the wind coming from all directions. In the New Testament, we see a similar idea in the effective chrismation of the Apostles by the Risen Lord in John 20, "Then he breathed on them, saying, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'"
The suggestion of all of these passages is life is sacred and that the medium of life is somehow located in the breath and in the blood. Medicine now knows that blood and air come to the zygote through the mother at implantation in the uterine wall. Respiration (beyond some export of wastes) is very unlikely in the first fourteen days of development. Moreover, blood exchange is impossible. The other key to these passages is that the animating quality of breath has its ultimate agency in God but is potentially communicable. Our mothers, by giving us breath, become the source of our lives. Some were arguing on Pontificator that the details of the Incarnation had some bearing on this question. The instinct seems right to me, but our ignorance is great. Jesus would have been conceived in a very interesting condition, because His body would have been animated as Adam was, by the very breath of God. Thus, one of the Gospels names both Jesus and Adam the sons of God. But the concept of synergy implies that the fullness of of His human nature was imparted by his mother, not by the provision of her seed (for the Fathers would not have agreed on this), but because she was more than a straw through which water passed. That human nature was imparted when Jesus came into contact with the circulation of her breath and her blood. From the moment, her oxygen touched His cells, He was a human being. Some Anglican moral theology comes to this position from the argument that twinning can occur at any time before implantation, thus ensuring that only implanted zygotes or blastocytes (my embryology terms aren't stellar, I'm afraid) have unique identities. The fact that the onset of cellular respiration coincides with this event is no coincidence in my mind.
From a scientific perspective, we are at a loss with regard to this issue. I tried to explain the immortality of the soul to one my colleagues recently. It's beyond the ken of our methods to detect. But let's make a quick thermodynamic argument. Life only arises because there is a potential for systemic entropy to increase in the approximated closed Earth-Sun system while life acts to minimize entropy. This allowance for a large production of negative entropy by life on Earth arises from the large difference in temperature between the Sun and the Earth. Hence, the most objective definition for life anyone can come up with is that it resists entropy or produces negative entropy. Before the concept of entropy was discovered, Joseph Priestley, the English chemist and Nonconformist preacher, noted that the reversibility of reactions, which the existence of entropy limits, was a foretaste of the resurrection of the body. From a thermodynamic perspective, the immediate result of conception and its sources do not differ substantially in entropy production. The blastocyte depends on the stored nutrients of the sperm and ovum to live until implantation. Now, it could be argued that the embryo is dependent on the negative entropy production of its mother during most of gestation, since it cannot breathe independently. However, the implanted zygote's cells do have the ability to export waste and obtain oxygen from the environment (its mother). Although its dependence does not cease, it is hard to find any other moment when it can be said to be producing negative entropy by its own will. Michael Liccione might call such an argument sophistical, but it addresses the issues I think are important.
QEDC
With these matters addressed, let us consider a couple of other important matters. First, J-Tron complains that the only Episcopal pro-life group is anti-homosexual. wb+ insists that homosexuality and abortion are somehow connected. Such a view depends on an uncritical reading of the Fathers, which I have rejected. Even if homosexual acts were objectively immoral, they would not be a form of abortion. Life doesn't work that way. Even Al Kimel says that it is one thing to bless same-sex unions and another thing for ECUSA to associate with abortion rights groups. But if you read the relevant classical Fathers literally, there is no difference whatsoever. And let's not talk about NFP...
Furthermore, I would like to strenuously disagree with Al Kimel's continued insistence that ECUSA is no longer a Church. If supporting distorted love unto death could remove such status in the eyes of her Head, the Roman Catholic Church and every other ecclesial body on Earth would be in trouble. Converting people at the point of the sword, for instance, is as objectively immoral.
But like the famous Karen B., I can't help to feel ashamed by ECUSA's joining of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights. I can't help to feel ashamed by the pro-choice stand of ILEOS' vestry. I really expect better from the heirs of a richly nuanced Anglican moral theology. Ours ought to be a strange witness that is foolishness to all. For "choice" does not stem from Christian liberty but from the larger immorality of our society. This immorality does not merely consist of the worship of one's own genitals, as an Orthodox friend of mine puts it, but in the entire ordering of American socioeconomic life. Rev. Mr. Wilkins seems to know this. But he can't go any further. I'm afraid to say that abortion is not merely personal but systemic evil. And by our countless little negligences to the ill of children, we have become the abortionists.
Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that the altars of Mammon and Moloch will be smitten from the earth and all those who are most like the citizenry of heaven may see the light of the Sun.
OK, I have a confession to make. I'm pro-life. If you were to send me a petition empowering Congress to define the beginning of human life as some point between conception and birth, you would get it signed forthwith. You also might see me trying to tack on some sort of rider involving universal health care. An America with healthcare for everyone who needs it and without abortion is a dream of mine.
My other confession is that I am not particularly loud about being pro-life. My parents are pro-choice. My school leaned pro-choice. My churches generally have been pro-choice. My present church's vestry passed a resolution about it. Put that on the chalkboard as reason #1 I might have to leave ILEOS.
But I think the reason I am not particularly loud about being pro-life is that it remains a purely academic issue for me. I've never been the cause of involuntary pregnancy (I prefer this to unplanned and unwanted, because pregnancies are rather difficult to plan and can be wanted at any time, but it's only voluntary pregnancy if you really wanted to get pregnant.) I've never known anyone involuntarily pregnant. OK, that's not true. I've known a few women who have pleasantly surprised by involuntary pregnancy. But I've never known anyone who's ever told me they were going to have an abortion. Perhaps, it is written on my face, "This man will try to talk you out of it and may volunteer to be your Lamaze coach to boot." I've always liked Lamaze. The only time abortion becomes non-academic for me is at the ballot box, where it seems pretty pointless.
What is it that Creed says? "Only in America...we kill the unborn to make ends meet." John Wilkins has something right. Abortion is a sign that we don't want to spend money on children. We don't want to spend money on their food, their clothing, their healthcare, and their primary, secondary, and tertiary educations. In the latter days of the Roman Republic, there is some indication that the aristocratic birthrate declined. My usual explanation for this is that the cost of a political career had spun so out of control that the expense required to produce two consuls could cripple the family finances. And remember that infanticide was legal at Rome. This is clearly not the entirety of the explanation, since reproduction wasn't very easy in those days anyway. But when the birthrate of the most well-fed women in a society declines precipitously, something must be going on.
But mourning the dissimulation of the powers that be is not a sufficient end to one's thinking. If the kid is alive, there is no excuse to end its life. You can't kill your born children to minimize costs, why should you be able to kill your unborn children? That's the core issue. Everything else is commentary and excuse.
What Rev. Mr. Wilkins should have said is this: We live in a deeply sinful society full of racial and economic inequity and thus iniquity. Young African-American women disproportionately abort their babies, because they are the segment of our female population that is least well-educated, least well-employed, and has the least ties to family and a social support network. In some places, this only has been true for about a generation. This about the same period in which we have had legal abortion. The reduction of abortion rates in the 1990s coincides with the widespread use of long-term intravenous birth control devices, which are cheaper over the long-term and easier to obtain (in some sense) than oral birth control. You may laugh. But when I lived in Philadelphia during the 1990s, these devices were big news for young African-American women. In addition, the 1990s were a time of economic prosperity. A rising tide is a Kolgomorov cascade for all boats, which in non-science talk, implies that a rising tide lifts the higher boats to a much greater degree than the low boats.
This is not to say that all abortions are by African-American women, but it is such a great disproportion that the greatest common ground between me, Alan Keyes, Maya Keyes (his famously lesbian daughter), and her ex-girlfriend is that abortion has been involuntarily genocidal for African-Americans. Involuntary, only because the policymakers have been reading the demography for a generation (and have been doing little about it).
At the same time, our society continues to fail children, especially those with one or no suitable parents or guardians. We slash their healthcare benefits, slash their food aid, spend too little on their education (especially in this state), and keep them in a variety of unsuitable living situations. A good foster parent is a blessing from God. A good adoptive family is two. And I want to thank all of the families, Christian and otherwise, who have given temporary and permanent hospitality to the least in our midst. But there aren't enough. There is a theory, which might be the stuff of ius naturale , that infertility and homosexuality are nature's way of providing supplementary caregivers. Thus, I am especially incensed at the potential iniquity of denying partnered gay couples the ability to adopt foster children. And those who are worried about instability just can get into line with those who support legalizing civil fratrimony and sororimony. For those who are fertile, I would urge them to consider the halakhic interpretation of the command of God "to be fruitful and multiply" and limit one's childbearing to one boy and one girl (if God wills it) at the greater mitzvah . If you want more children, consider adoption. If we are to end abortion, up to one million more children a year may need homes. Christians are commanded by Christ to give food and shelter to the least among us as we would Christ. Hmm... Well, it's an idea.
Our society continues to fail parents. Throughout the country, there are workplace cultures in which parents are looked down upon or feel obligated to spend more time away from their families to establish their equal partnership in the "team." There remains something called, "the corporate mommy track." Good daycare is so hard to find. I will admit that we may have to rethink the two-income household. But I would argue that we really may have to rethink the traditional "office" workplace. With a little bit more equipment and software, I could work from home. I presently am a student, who does rather sophisticated climatological research. I'm not arguing for complete telecommuting, but I think reduction of the hours of "face time" required in white-collar professions will free up some "quantity time" for children.
In other occupations, we must continue to insist on 40 hour weeks and paid overtime at a living wage. I swear that the only thing Walmart wouldn't do to externalize its labor costs would be to require its female employees abort. The list could go on and on.
The reason Episcopalians (either pro-choice or pro-life) tend to be more reponsive to "social concerns" about abortion is that we have a strong theological commitment to seeing that no person nor moral action exists in vacuo . This is a different thing than saying all moral judgments are subjective, because being able to observe matters in context is the truest moral objectivity. I cite the authority of the Angelic Doctor on fornication, who says that the only difference between licit sex and simple fornication is the relationship and intention of the partners. And because no moral action exists in isolation, it is hard for some of us to argue for a legal ban on abortion. For in an iniquitous society, we recognize that abortion nearly always arises from a distorted act of love. Love, as the Pope hopefully will say on Wednesday, consists in seeking the good of the object of one's love. The woman who aborts almost always seems to think: how is this child going to live? It would be bad for this child to be born. Anne Lamott, for instance, only has her Sam, because when she thought about aborting again, her church community stepped in and said that they would do all in their power to support that child before and after it was born. The distortion of love occurs when we do not know the true good of our beloved. The good of a rational being is not "never to be born" as Sophocles said (the Preacher suggests similarly in a somewhat different context in Eccl. 6:3-5), but it is to seek to know and be known within the marvelous creation of Almighty God and to partake eventually in the new creation that is to come through the victory of Christ Jesus. The second requires regeneration and sanctification. But the first just requires a little caution and a bit of painful pushing.
Rev. Mr. Wilkins says that views like mine do not respect the consciences of women. I am afraid my lack of respect for the consciences of others stems from a lack of confidence in my own. Like Paul, I constantly feel and often yield to the yearning of my flesh to do ill to myself, others, and God for some momentary satisfaction. I am fortunate that God and my neighbor are so merciful to pass over most of my faults in this regard. But it is because I know my conscience is so poor that I am willing to tell women the truth of what they would be doing if they aborted. I would wish to offer them alternatives.
I also have little respect for the consciences of the men who are co-heirs of iniquity. From what I understand, they are the ones who typically first suggest abortion. Although the archetypal abortion story involves the matter being kept secret from the father, this appears to be a myth to salve the conscience. The boyfriend offers to pay. The boyfriend offers to drive. As far as I am concerned, the boyfriend should be driving to the prenatal appointments, the Lamaze classes, and the adoption agency (if necessary). The boyfriend should be paying a half-share of the costs of the baby being born. My driving instructor used to say that you should drive a car seeing all of the cars as your money and your car as fire. If we are to be so iniquitous and churlish as to reduce babies to money, I think every heterosexually active man should take a similar viewpoint. All contraception can fail, after all.
What my social conscience does recognize is that bans on abortion per se are legally and socially reprehensible legislation. They do nothing to remove the fog of the distorted love women have for their embryos. Moreover, abortion laws do not recognize the truth they supposedly acknowledge. Although the consequences of putting the old common-law principle of quickening into effect or similar efforts would be dire, I might be amenable (if my other concerns were addressed) to a crime of "statutory murder," which made it a misdemeanor to cause death to an embryo of a certain age. But unfortunately, there is one ontological problem that arises from such a definition.
On the Ensoulment of Human Creatures
First, there is no civilly objective definition to the beginning of human life. However, I do believe Congress or a state legislature has the right to set the definition of human life arbitrarily. The age of sexual consent is arbitrary. The age of suffrage is arbitrary. There are no objective ways to decide when someone is able to consent to sex or to vote. Every distinction American statutory law makes about age is arbitrary. Unlike Shariah, we do not use puberty as an indication of anything.
Second, most views on the beginning of life talk about "ensoulment." It is yet to be a settled principle of the Magisterium (I think) or of evangelical Christian theology, but the burden of opinion on "ensoulment" states that it happens at conception. I respectfully disagree along with other Anglican moral theologians (well, that's what ++Peter Carnley says).
In the interest of full disclosure, the consequences of "ensoulment" being defined at conception are rather significant. Chemical contraception would become a deadly weapon. And embryonic "stem cell" research would be illegitimate so clearly from its means that its ends would be of no consequence.
Roman Catholics would say, "Why should you care? The Fathers were against contraception." Ah, yes. The classical Fathers certainly were against contraception. Reading various Patristic texts cited by Roman Catholics on this issue, I have noticed three things. 1. Contraception was rather dangerous in the ancient world. Its use might sterilize women against their will, because their husbands insisted. I agree that a husband or wife who insists on the sterility of a marriage against the will of the partner diminishes its sacramental quality. 2. Contraception became a license for men to have sex with prostitutes or concubines more readily. From what I can tell, fornication is the problem in this case, not what makes it easier. 3. Contraception of various methods was said to kill "potential children," whereas abortion killed "active children." The Fathers were basing this assertion on Greek medical theory, in which the seed of the man essentially was the clay from which the child was built (conservation of mass being a poor consideration in medical science of the day). Thus, a man who wasted semen in any way was wasting the material from which the soul was made, too. If we held to the principles of the Fathers, even having unprotected sex would be an act of mass murder greater than Hitler and Stalin's entire careers. NFP would be as horrific as artificial methods. Let's stop the logical contradictions here.
From the time of the classical Fathers to the invention of the microscope, opinions on the beginning of human life seem to have varied. The broad consensus of the medievalists, based on evidence from the penitentials, was forty days. Although I suspect the medievalists would have had different things to say about intentionally causing a miscarriage before forty days, their line of argument would be similar to that of the classical Fathers but they would be less certain about the medicine. The invention of the microscope had interesting consequences for moral theology. Without the Jesuits discovering "homunculi," we would never have heard the wonderful song of Monty Python fame, "Every Sperm Is Sacred."
Thus, I think the question of ensoulment must be "reassessed." Take that look of abject horror of your face. We will take two approaches, since I just nixed the ontology of Tradition. We will first consider a Biblical argument for the beginning of human life. Then we will present a supplementary argument from reason.
Being pro-life at a pro-choice parish, I have to hear every once in a while that the Bible says nothing about abortion. And this is true insofar as the only directly juridical passage is Exodus 21:22-25, which mandates that anyone who strikes a woman and causes her to miscarry owes a fine to her husband. There are some very interesting property relations suggested here, but I'll pass over it. Reason tells us that the question to pose to Scripture is not directly juridical. We want to know when a human being gets a soul. In my view, the most relevant passage to this issue is not anything in the Psalms, but three passages in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament. The Old Testament passages are Genesis 2:7, Genesis 9:4, and Ezekiel 37:1-14. In the first, God breathes on the dust of the earth and Adam becomes a living creature. In the second, Noah is forbidden to eat from which blood has not been drained, because "the life of the creature is in the blood." In the third, bones are symbolically animated from the wind coming from all directions. In the New Testament, we see a similar idea in the effective chrismation of the Apostles by the Risen Lord in John 20, "Then he breathed on them, saying, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'"
The suggestion of all of these passages is life is sacred and that the medium of life is somehow located in the breath and in the blood. Medicine now knows that blood and air come to the zygote through the mother at implantation in the uterine wall. Respiration (beyond some export of wastes) is very unlikely in the first fourteen days of development. Moreover, blood exchange is impossible. The other key to these passages is that the animating quality of breath has its ultimate agency in God but is potentially communicable. Our mothers, by giving us breath, become the source of our lives. Some were arguing on Pontificator that the details of the Incarnation had some bearing on this question. The instinct seems right to me, but our ignorance is great. Jesus would have been conceived in a very interesting condition, because His body would have been animated as Adam was, by the very breath of God. Thus, one of the Gospels names both Jesus and Adam the sons of God. But the concept of synergy implies that the fullness of of His human nature was imparted by his mother, not by the provision of her seed (for the Fathers would not have agreed on this), but because she was more than a straw through which water passed. That human nature was imparted when Jesus came into contact with the circulation of her breath and her blood. From the moment, her oxygen touched His cells, He was a human being. Some Anglican moral theology comes to this position from the argument that twinning can occur at any time before implantation, thus ensuring that only implanted zygotes or blastocytes (my embryology terms aren't stellar, I'm afraid) have unique identities. The fact that the onset of cellular respiration coincides with this event is no coincidence in my mind.
From a scientific perspective, we are at a loss with regard to this issue. I tried to explain the immortality of the soul to one my colleagues recently. It's beyond the ken of our methods to detect. But let's make a quick thermodynamic argument. Life only arises because there is a potential for systemic entropy to increase in the approximated closed Earth-Sun system while life acts to minimize entropy. This allowance for a large production of negative entropy by life on Earth arises from the large difference in temperature between the Sun and the Earth. Hence, the most objective definition for life anyone can come up with is that it resists entropy or produces negative entropy. Before the concept of entropy was discovered, Joseph Priestley, the English chemist and Nonconformist preacher, noted that the reversibility of reactions, which the existence of entropy limits, was a foretaste of the resurrection of the body. From a thermodynamic perspective, the immediate result of conception and its sources do not differ substantially in entropy production. The blastocyte depends on the stored nutrients of the sperm and ovum to live until implantation. Now, it could be argued that the embryo is dependent on the negative entropy production of its mother during most of gestation, since it cannot breathe independently. However, the implanted zygote's cells do have the ability to export waste and obtain oxygen from the environment (its mother). Although its dependence does not cease, it is hard to find any other moment when it can be said to be producing negative entropy by its own will. Michael Liccione might call such an argument sophistical, but it addresses the issues I think are important.
QEDC
With these matters addressed, let us consider a couple of other important matters. First, J-Tron complains that the only Episcopal pro-life group is anti-homosexual. wb+ insists that homosexuality and abortion are somehow connected. Such a view depends on an uncritical reading of the Fathers, which I have rejected. Even if homosexual acts were objectively immoral, they would not be a form of abortion. Life doesn't work that way. Even Al Kimel says that it is one thing to bless same-sex unions and another thing for ECUSA to associate with abortion rights groups. But if you read the relevant classical Fathers literally, there is no difference whatsoever. And let's not talk about NFP...
Furthermore, I would like to strenuously disagree with Al Kimel's continued insistence that ECUSA is no longer a Church. If supporting distorted love unto death could remove such status in the eyes of her Head, the Roman Catholic Church and every other ecclesial body on Earth would be in trouble. Converting people at the point of the sword, for instance, is as objectively immoral.
But like the famous Karen B., I can't help to feel ashamed by ECUSA's joining of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights. I can't help to feel ashamed by the pro-choice stand of ILEOS' vestry. I really expect better from the heirs of a richly nuanced Anglican moral theology. Ours ought to be a strange witness that is foolishness to all. For "choice" does not stem from Christian liberty but from the larger immorality of our society. This immorality does not merely consist of the worship of one's own genitals, as an Orthodox friend of mine puts it, but in the entire ordering of American socioeconomic life. Rev. Mr. Wilkins seems to know this. But he can't go any further. I'm afraid to say that abortion is not merely personal but systemic evil. And by our countless little negligences to the ill of children, we have become the abortionists.
Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that the altars of Mammon and Moloch will be smitten from the earth and all those who are most like the citizenry of heaven may see the light of the Sun.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
The World Written
This is a world written, do you understand? You, who were trained
To read worlds but never to write them have expunged your God’s Word
(As you clearly see it) from the surfaces of the northern wastes
And the pen marks will not last long in the mighty rains you have loosed.
This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokrator , or Universal Ruler; for God [Deus] is a relative word, and has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants. The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say, my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of Gods; we do not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have no respect to servants. The word God [here marks a note] usually signifies Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes duration and space. Since every particle of space is always, and every indivisible moment of duration is every where, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no where. Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given successive parts in duration, co-existent puts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, or his thinking principle; and much less can they be found in the thinking substance of God. Every man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense. God is the same God, always and every where. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God. It is allowed by all that the Supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always, and every where. Whence also he is all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colours, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, or touched; nor ought he to be worshipped under the representation of any corporeal thing. We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of any thing is we know not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds: much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final cause: we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. But, by way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work, to build; for all our notions of God are taken from. the ways of mankind by a certain similitude, which, though not perfect, has some likeness, however. And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy. ( Newton, General Scholium to Book III of Principia Mathematica , tr. Andrew Motte with some emendations of my own in brackets)
Marginal note: Our Pocock derives the name of deus from an Arabic word diz (and in oblique case di which signifies "lord." It in this sense that princes are called gods (Psalm 84:6 and John 10:45). And Moses is called god of his brother Aaron and the god of the king Pharaoh (Exodus 4:16 and 7:1). And in the same sense, the spirits of dead princes once were called gods by the Gentiles, but falsely because they lacked the knowledge of the Lord [lit. on account of the lack of lord]
I'll give you a chance to read the Newton. Anastasia recently (Dec 31 last) has posed to scientists some questions. Gaunilo has had some things to say about the Book of Nature, which he is convinced is out of print. So I thought I would give you some hints about how the professional and believing scientist might read the Book of Nature. The Newton passage is very interesting in that it may have been tremendously influential in mediating the relationship between science and Christianity among the English-speaking peoples. The key point is that the essence of the question of God, existence, is removed from inquiry by an appeal to immeasurability. God is infinite and eternal, spanning all space and time, and thus cannot be measured in finite times or finite spaces. From a couple of important perspectives, Newton's view is problematic.
1. It seems to be a restatement of the ontological argument. And it is to formulations like Newton's to which Kant may have responding a couple of generations after Newton's death.
2. Newton is an Arian. His account omits the fullness of the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation, in which God the Son, a full and equal participant in the immeasurable infinities, becomes measurable in the person of Jesus Christ.
Also noteworthy is Newton's discussion of the epistemological limits of the natural sciences. He effectively claims that we do not know "the inner substance" of bodies themselves but only their secondary characteristics. Admittedly, 21st century science is much closer to the inner substance of things than mere secondary characteristics. For instance, we understand color to a depth at which Newton would be astounded (and he understood color better than any scientist of his day). Although the influence of the Cambridge Platonists on Newton is debatable, the influence of alchemy remained. To some, alchemy concerns mutability and focuses on transmutation: the manipulation of secondary characteristics. But the true alchemist seeks not to manipulate but to bring order to substance: to match the secondary characteristics of bodies to their inmost order or to give the base metals of this sphere the aethereal grace of the celestial spheres to which they are related. Alchemy thus seeks not lead changed into gold but lead and gold made better. The world closes the immeasurable distance to the Form. And the natural philosopher-king stands above as servant of the God who is natural philosopher-king above all. The measure of it all is still the same: we cannot know anything fully but much in part.
Newton's discourse on God in the General Scholium often is considered the foundational text of Deism. This may be true. But in order to become such a text, it needed to be slightly misinterpreted. By implying the immeasurability of God and that our knowledge of Him was limited except through the investigation of His secondary characteristics, i.e. His works, Newton could be read as proposing a God of entirely natural religion. Such a great God surely would not need to reveal such twisted Scriptures as the ones we contemplate. But this is a leap Newton never makes. He is an Arian and so will not venerate the Son as God. There will be no crucifixes and no icons in Newton's laboratory. But his theological epistemology is tricky (as one would expect from a man who woke Locke in the night to correct his hermeneutical views.) He suggests God is known only from nature. But yet he says, "a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature." So wondrous is Creation to Newton that God at least must have a plan and likely a good one (and so be good). Thus, Newton can discard the Demiurge.
But Newton also tells us of how God is similar to man by way of allegory. We seek God in ourselves. While this was highly unorthodox in his own day and a view of Scripture I would reject, Newton is clear that the Scriptures are not silly. By referring to the usage of "god" as Lord God of Israel and Eternal, Newton recognizes the Scriptures as attempts to seek God. They are readings in themselves of the Book of Nature. They are Tradition in the sense of the scientific literature. They are to be built upon. And this is where Deism lost its weak moorings. Western notions of the God at the root of being are grounded in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The most fundamental opinions of the Holy Scriptures cannot be so easily replaced by private judgment. Newton's convictions about providence, dominion, and final causes assume something. It assumes that order does not arise of itself. (And by the way, entropy does not necessarily imply decrease in order as we understand it, only the increase in the diversity of ordering. So order just might arise of itself as time advances.)
Reading Earth History Providentially
And thus the scientist always postulates God (or no God) while reading the Book of Nature. One of the key consequences of postulating God (especially a reasonably traditional Christian view of God) is to see Earth history in terms of anthropocentric providentialism. The latest in the series is the Discovery Institute's The Privileged Planet . There are a couple of problems with this reading from a scientific perspective:
1. Our ancestors pretty much suffered during the Mesozoic. A few different turns and dinosaurs might have become sentient.
2. We have no way of knowing whether "privilege" is exclusive to this planet.
Also recall that nature doesn't act providentially on the microscale:
Darwin’s discoveries, however, were a threat to both schools of American moral philosophy. Daniel Walker Howe’s short treatment of Harvard’s problems with it says that the Unitarians thought that it meant reason no longer was in harmony with revelation. However, the Harvard moral philosophers were clever enough Biblical readers to deal with the apparent chronological problems at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. Their problem indeed stemmed from their belief in harmony, but the harmony in question was that of the world itself. For the Harvard Unitarians, nature was in balance, God had made perfect provision for every creature, and predation was a natural part of existence. They could open their Bibles and from the very beginning they could see, “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.” Darwin’s views increased the possibility of an unharmonious world that had neither enough food nor enough other resources for the creatures of the Earth. It suggested an imperfection in God’s moral government and that was more disturbing than a few rewordings in the Book of Genesis. (Caelius, "The Rejection, Subversion, and Replacement of Calvin and Hobbes: Moral Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the United States during the 19th century.")
Thus, let me warn those who read the Book of Nature that they must proceed from sacred history to natural history but not vice versa . It is sacred history that tells us we are special. Natural history is still ambiguous on the question. However, we still must allow nature to challenge our readings of sacred history. That is the role of the Book of Nature. Such a view allows me to read Genesis in the light of evolution in new and fascinating ways. But let me give you another example:
My Barber and SETI
Recently, I flew to the other side of the country to visit the rest of my immediate family. I also decided to get a haircut, because I prefer the barbers on that side of the country. Let me tell you that I really like my present haircut. My usual barber is a retired Army barber (my former barber was USMC) and a member of a local nondenominational church, which I think was founded by the late Carl McIntire. So we were engaging in the usual banter about what I did for a living, and he asked whether I wanted to work for SETI. I said that I wasn't really interested in looking for aliens that way. He said, "Well, aliens are unBiblical anyway. I know some people say they find aliens in the bible, "wheels within wheels." I replied, "Elijah" and let discourse die down to something else. Now I always wonder what would happen if aliens came to Earth. It's one thing to say the Earth was created in 4004 BC. It's another thing to deal with something clearly not of this world (or in the Scriptures). Would the aliens be deemed nephilim? Would the aliens be evangelized? Baptized? Such an encounter might affect our reading of the Creation, the Fall, and the Incarnation radically. Our current struggles with the Book of Nature only differ in degree. Sacred history is strongest when it brings the universe into its own reference frame. There is often a difficult transformation in that process, but sacred history without natural history (i.e., sacred history that rejects natural history) loses the force of sacred history ("The heavens declare the glory of God.") And likewise with sacred doctrine.
Until the next time, the Holy Brothers pray that you may seek the mind of Him who became like us, little less than the angels; that you may adore Him with the all of the angels of God, the shepherds, and the Kings of the East; that you may experience the refulgent glory of His Grace that shines on everything with a radiance of which the stars are but shadows; and that your reading of the Book of Nature may incline you to give thanksgiving to God in all things.
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