Orthodoxy

On Saturday May 14, 2005, about 100 people arrived outside Calvary Temple, an independent pentecostal church in downtown Winnipeg, to protest against a conference being held held in the church – about 400 people were expected – led by representatives of Focus on the Family. The newspaper story wasn’t clear on it, but it was a “Love Won Out” seminar. The conference animator was quoted as saying that Focus on the Family does not believe in trying to convert gays, accepts gays, but opposes gay marriage and wants to help gay people who want to walk away from the gay lifestyle. Which is not quite a denial of promoting the useless de-gay “therapies” that gay people have identified as harmful and repressive. The protesters wanted to expose what they see as the homophobic agenda of the socially conservative Christian churches, but they said they were defending freedom.

The protest was visible but peaceful, and the conference was private and peaceful. The protesters were against “homophobia” and in favour of same-sex marriage. The picture with the story showed a few of the protesters and heir hand-lettered signs, attacking Christianity (and Islam) for being repressive of sexual freedom in general and the sexual freedom of homosexuals. Staging protests outside churches and challenging right wing Christians to accept the rights of gays and lesbians is probably not useful way of changing right wing Christians. The protest was intended to shock – as the French saying has it, to épater le bourgeios. The act of shocking conventional values implies that the shocker is not only alienated from those values, but has superior values which must be taught by confrontation. The protesters were signalling that they have superior values.

There is an anti-religious sense to the idea of sexual liberation. The advocates of sexual liberation accuse Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and other practitioners of traditional religion of being intolerant and repressive. What is true is that some people disagree with other people’s moral, social, political and religious values. The rhetoric of modern liberalism is that liberal values are more enlightened, progressive, highly evolved. The modern radical is comfortably smug in accusing other people with different values of being comfortable, smug and conventional, which motivates the radical to challenge those values. The intellectual and emotional core of this kind of protest is the Romantic belief that religious beliefs repress people from finding their true sexually liberated selves while they are under the influence of a church. This protest was an act of aggression against Christians, to silence their dissenting views when they disagree with an ideology of secular liberation.

A United Church of Canada Minister (evidently a liberal member of a liberal protestant denomination) who was among the protesters – was quoted as saying “People have a right to their values and their viewpoints but when those values and viewpoints hurt other people, they need to be challenged.” She calls on a principle of social behaviour – no one can talk about other people’s social behaviour if the discussion hurts their feelings. That reasoning inverts the logic of pluralism. She is not claiming tolerance or freedom from discrimination for homosexuals. She is claiming the right to confront Christians in their churches and to challenge their morality. The more specific argument is that the gay rights community says that disagreeing with it about its ideas about gender and sexual orientation is “homophobia”, which is as bad as positive discrimination against their rights.

The protesters implied that homophobia is a psychological problem. The gay rights community is mobilized around the idea of fighting homophobia, and its members are easily motivated to get out and protest or march on that issue. It gives their community direction and cohesion. It gives them a chance to reinforce their beliefs collectively and to talk to the public about their beliefs through the media. The gay rights community has good reasons to view itself as embattled and threatened, to work to entrench its legal rights and to try to secure a less fragile standing in society than uneasy or contemptuous tolerance. Calling Christians repressed or accusing them of trying to harm gays and lesbians is conducive to respecful engagement.

Catholic in America

The title of George Weigel’s The Truth of Catholicism, Ten Controversies Explored, suggests this book will sound like a finger-wagging, lecturing apologetic in defence of Catholic orthodoxy. In fact this 2001 book, like his 2004 book “Letters to a Young Catholic” is an literate and enthusiastic presentation of orthodox Catholic teachings in an American context.

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Novel Perspectives???

Yesterday, I posted a link to The Onion’s satire about fictionology. today, a perfect example of an intelligent person who chooses a value system that lets her choose fiction over fact because it helps her to feels better about herself. Check out this essay by Martha Montello, Novel Perspectives on Bioethics at the Chronicles of Higher Education. She argues that we ought to be learning our ethics from fiction, and base our moral decisions on fairy tales and science fiction.

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After the sexual revolution

A little more light reading. The piece is by Christine Rosen writing at the Claremont Institute’s online Review of Books “What (Most) Women Want“, a book review of “Taking Sex Differences Seriously” by Steven E. Rhoads.
A web piece on a related topic, from The Edge, with streaming media, slides, or text, a nature-nurture debate about women in the sciences in University faculties. The debaters are Steven Pinker and and Elizabeth Spelke.

Useless

The headline of the article read “Crystal Meth Crackdown Urged”. The story, from the Canadian Press, was that the Premiers of the four Western Provinces (and three northern Territories), meeting in Lloydminster, had issued a communique announcing a plan to deal with the growing popularity of the highly addictive drug, crystal methamphetimine. There was a picture of the four premiers walking down the street, semi-casually attired. The plan: insist that Crown prosecutors demand higher sentences for trafficking. This announcement is entirely typical of Canadian politics. It pretends that the Premiers are taking action, but it does nothing to help addicted teens and young adults and their families, and nothing to help people to avoid fooling around with toxic and addictive mood-altering drugs.

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Atheists, Darwinists

Here are links to two stories about the irony of dogma – specifically about atheist dogmas. Atheists reject religious dogmas and criticize dogmatic reasoning. However celebrity atheists, for instance the scientist and popular writer Richard Dawkins, can present themselves as dogmatic. There are two dimensions of the word dogmatic in popular usage. There is a social and psychological dimension involving the project of presenting one person’s ideas and criticizing other people’s ideas. This involves temperament, attitude and social skills. Conservative religious believers are rigid and intolerant in public discourse. In that way, the word dogmatic starts to apply to anyone who is firm about a belief. In this sense, it applies to atheists who are aggressively anti-religious. Their confidence in their insights into the world extends to serious criticism of religion and the people who have religious systems of belief. The other dimension of the term dogmatic involves a more formally intellectual examination of what a person believes to be true on the basis of confidence in a set of principles and assumptions.

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Stylesheets

I spent several hours last week setting up the Sister Jane site, converting Word documents into text and marking up the text with html tags, and organizing the site and the pages. I decided to create a style sheet. The basic idea was to use the headers to break up text sections visually as well as logically. I used borders and background colours in the headers to turn them into visual bars. I applied a couple of levels of indentation to the text. After that, I took the same style sheet and applied it to the Sea of Flowers site with a different colour scheme. The results aren’t fancy but the sites seem to be more readable and slightly less generic.
The colour scheme on Sea of Flower site was inspired by the Dutch flags in the documentary on the Canadian Army’s fighting in Holland in 1944 and 1945 on Global last Saturday night. I like it and I have applied it to the blog too, as you can see.