The Conservative Case Against the Death Penalty

I’ve always been opposed to capital punishment, and for the most conservative of reasons:  I don’t believe government should have the authority to take human life, at least not in a society, such as ours, that has the resources to build prisons.

This is a fundamentally conservative position because it rests upon the assumption that government is, by definition, incompetent and often malicious.

Do we really want the same type of semi-literate, unionized sludges who run, say, the U.S. Postal Service or the Department of Motor Vehicles, having the power to execute people?  I don’t think so.

It’s not surprising that many liberals and Democrats support capital punishment (although many also oppose it).  (Yes, Virginia, Obama and Clinton are both supporters of capital punishment:  Obama led an effort in Illinois to restore the death penalty when numerous exonerations persuaded the Republican governor, George Ryan, to halt all executions and commute the sentences of everyone awaiting execution, giving most of them life in prison.)

Liberals and Democrats believe in government.  The more government, the better.  They teach the opposite of what Thomas Jefferson and Thoreau taught:  That government is best which governs most! But what does surprise me is that so many alleged conservatives also support capital punishment, although that is changing.  Ann Coulter, for example, who I often find hilarious and agree with at least 50 percent of the time, recently wrote a column defending the death penalty. “Fifty-nine percent of Americans now believe that an innocent man has been executed in the last five years,” Ann writes disapprovingly. “There is more credible evidence that space aliens have walked among us than that an innocent person has been executed in this country in the past 60 years, much less the past five years.”

But then again, Ann Coulter is herself a legal parasite by training.  Despite their veneer of cynicism, lawyers (even conservative ones) have a deep and abiding faith in government, at least in the court system.  How could they not?  Many of them are paid by the government!  They trust that since the court system is run by people who went to law school, it must be exempt from the mind-numbing imbecility and laziness that plagues every other form of government.

But anyone who has spent more than ten minutes in a court room soon discovers that the criminal justice system is riddled with incompetence and corruption.  It’s just the DMV with wood paneling.  It lets obvious murderers like O.J. Simpson go  free and sentences to death mentally retarded but innocent people like Earl Washington (convicted of rape and murder in 1981 but exonerated by DNA evidence in 2000).   Self-important prosecutors regularly pursue cases against innocent people, or ignore crucial exculpatory evidence,  just to make a name for themselves or because they are running for yet another overpaid, triple-pension government job.  Judges do their best, but they are overwhelmed with cases and must rely upon lying cops, ambitious prosecutors, scheming ambulance-chasing defense lawyers and, let’s be honest, criminals.  In short:  The court system is a hell hole.  Anyone caught up in it is living a nightmare.  Federal sentencing guidelines are like something out of a Victor Hugo novel:  You can get 20 years in prison for violating fishing regulations! (Best advice any lawyer can give you:  Avoid the courts at all costs!)

While reforming the corrupt criminal justice system is a task no political party wishes to take on, we could take at least one step that would ameliorate the worst aspect of it:  abolishing the death penalty.  As Pope John Paul II taught and the the Catholic Church now incorporates into its official catechesis, the death penalty is morally permissible, as an act of societal self-defense, in those societies without the resources to lock up dangerous criminals; but in modern western societies, it is ethically and legally indefensible.

Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent (CCC 2267).”

While Ann Coulter and other death penalty supporters are correct that most condemned men and women are almost certainly guilty of heinous crimes, she is dead wrong (pardon the pun) that wrongful executions are rare.  From Jesus Christ on down through the ages, literally thousands of innocent people have been wrongly executed by incompetent and malicious government authorities.   DNA evidence has exonerated and released at least 15 death row inmates in the U.S. since 1992 alone.  Another 93 people charged with murder were exonerated by DNA testing.

The formerly prolife and now pro-abortion organization Amnesty International estimates calculates that since 1973 over 130 people have been released from death rows in the U.S. due to evidence of their wrongful convictions.  In Texas, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for allegedly murdering his three daughters by burning down his house.   Despite the fact that the Texas Forensic Science Commission found that the arson claims were doubtful and Willingham’s wife disputed the claim that Willinham had killed his daughters to cover up abuse allegations, Governor Rick Perry refused to grant a pardon to Willingham. To me, that fact alone is a reason not to support Texas Governor Rick Perry for president and proof that he is still the big government Democrat he’s always been (when he supported Al Gore for president).

As the only sane candidate for president, Dr. Ron Paul, explains, the true conservative position is to oppose capital punishment:

“Over the years I’ve held pretty rigid to all my beliefs, but I’ve changed my opinion of the death penalty. For federal purposes I no longer believe in the death penalty. I believe it has been issued unjustly. If you’re rich, you get away with it; if you’re poor and you’re from the inner city you’re more likely to be prosecuted and convicted, and today, with the DNA evidence, there’ve been too many mistakes, and I am now opposed to the federal death penalty.”

Elsewhere, Paul explains that his opposition to the death penalty does not override his understanding of federalism, and thus, as president, he would not attempt to force the abolition of the death penalty on the states.  That is why he says he opposes the federal death penalty; that is the only death penalty a president has authority over.  However, in an interview with the Concord Monitor in August 2011, Dr. Paul made clear his opposition on principle:

“I don’t think it’s very good sign for civilization to still be invoking the death penalty. . . .

If you believe in the death penalty, what I really object to is the doctors participating in torture, and doctors who are there to make it smooth and sweet.

“Oh, let’s put him to sleep.” If it’s a death penalty, do it on Times Square, see ‘em get their head chopped off and see how all the people, see how much they like it, make ‘em look at it. I think it’s uncivilized. But, boy, there are some really bad people out there, makes it awfully temptin.”

 

As usual, Dr. Paul is willing to stick to his principles rather than kowtow, like most Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, to the latest public opinion poll — which tends to support capital punishment.

The Absurdity of Analytic Philosophy

Anyone who has struggled with the arcane texts of contemporary analytic philosophers will appreciate this delightful cartoon on YouTube.

The Death of a True Teacher

I just found out that an old college professor of mine, George, died in his sleep recently. He was 84. I’m sad because he was one of those people I wanted to get in contact with to say thank you, and I never did. A few years ago, I emailed his son – a former Jesuit – and he gave me George’s address. I was thinking about sending him a copy of my recent book, to show him that something of what he had taught me had stuck with me, that his lessons mattered. But I never did. I felt it would be showing off. Now I wish I had.

George taught theology at a Jesuit university but he was an inspiration for a small circle of Catholic would-be intellectuals in the city. He was a layman, father of seven, not a priest or religious, and he delighted in shocking his students with frank (often obscene) comments about sex, race relations, war and peace, and so on. In that, he was a child of his time (I studied with him in the late 1970s). But George was a lot more. He introduced his students to a whole different world, a world in which Christianity and Catholicism were vital and urgent and had important things to say to the world. He introduced us to heavy-weight thinkers like Bernard J.F. Lonergan (his hero) and Karl Rahner, to Bernard Cook and Rollo May and Erich Neumann. When I was only 18, I was being initiated into the arcane world of transcendental Thomism. More of it stuck with me that George ever realized. Just two days ago, someone asked me in a business meeting what I meant by method, and I rattled off Lonergan’s definition taken from Method in Theology: “A method is a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results.” I first read those words on a photocopied handout that George handed out in class and expected us to memorize, more than 35 years ago, and I can still repeat them verbatim. He had that effect on people.

George opened to his students his big, rambling Craftsman house on the hill … and his long suffering wife, and even children, must have had their fill of it. I remember dozens of us crowding into his living room on Friday nights. A priest friend would say Mass, and then we’d drink beer (Miller!) and listen to a recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish (one of George’s favorites) or Bernstein’s Mass. We would talk late into the evening, as George patiently answered the thousands of questions his students would put to him. George taught us that Christianity, and Catholicism, were worth fighting to understand, and that there just might be answers to our questions. He was an unabashed theological liberal, of course, as were many people in those days, but I would frequently see him at the daily noon Mass the Jesuits would celebrate in the college chapel, and, when some student would make a snide remark about “little old ladies and their rosary beads,” George would dig down deep into his pockets and pull out his own, well-worn rosary, which he kept with him always.

George was also a voracious, intense, careful reader. More than anything, he taught me to read. He always highlighted everything with yellow markers, a habit I picked up from him and continue to this day. (Ask my children: Most of my books have yellow highlight pens stuck in the middle. There are dozens of them all around the house. ) He always carried around an armload of thick books – Lonergan’s Insight (his Bible), of course, Method in Theology, Gerhard von Rad’s Old Testament Theology, Bernard Cook, Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness, but many others as well. He was the first person to introduce us to the Dutch Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx and his massive trilogy on Christology. He taught his students to read and appreciate Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations. He was a big fan of Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body and Carl Becker’s The Denial of Death. One of my prized possessions is a copy of Peter Chirico’s Infallibility: The Crossroads of Doctrine, which George recommended to me. (“You need to study infallibility,” he told me, “so you know what it is to really know something is true” – a very Lonerganian idea, of course.) George was always carrying around a dog-eared copy of R.G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History, and three or four years ago, for reasons I can’t fathom, I looked for it on Amazon and bought a copy. I had never read it, and, because I knew George thought so highly of it, I wanted to. In short, George taught hundreds of eager, enthusiastic, philosophically-inclined students what was worth reading.

Finally, George introduced his students to the world of radical Catholic politics. He was a big fan of the Berrigan brothers and Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. He told me about the lay Catholic theologian and pacifist James Douglass and his Shelley, who led anti-nuclear protests at a submarine base. Because of George, I read everything Daniel Berrigan ever wrote. Although today many of us are far from George’s left-leaning politics, and are, like most white males of our generation, increasingly anarchist in our political outlook, we are and always have been skeptical of the U.S. war machine and America’s nation-building ambitions. That is no doubt due to George’s influence and that of the anti-war circle in which he moved.

I only spent two or three years studying with George, off and on, more informally than formally. He was an easy teacher. But his influence on my life was enormous. In fact, I would say he shaped the ultimate direction it took. I remained a Catholic and became a Catholic writer mostly because of what I learned from George and his circle of friends and fellow teachers. I wanted to be like them.

George died just a few miles from where he used to teach, at home, in the same leafy, old-time neighborhood where he always lived. He was married for more than 50 years. He taught theology for two decades at the university and also worked as a director of religious education. He was a parishioner at his local parish for more than 50 years. I guess George was a role model for me about what a lay Catholic married man can be, at least intellectually. He had his rough edges, of course, and no one would ever accuse him of being a saint, but he taught me and many of us what it was like to be a passionate, engaged, politically active, intellectually rigorous, questioning yet faithful, lay Catholic. May he rest in peace and may perpetual light shine upon him.

Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy

Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy.

When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job.

Today, however, all that has changed.

There are three or four excellent “magazines” about philosophy – such as Philosophy Now and The Philospher’s Magazine – that are filled with funny, off-beat, irreverent articles about philosophical topics. A number of top-rate publishing houses, mostly in the UK, such as Routledge and Blackwell Publishing, produce books aimed at a general philosophical readership.

There are philosophy radio programs such as Philosophy Talk… coffee houses… salons… adult education classes… and literally hundreds of websites for the interested reader. There are even philosophy comic books, such as LogiComix about the life of British logician Bertrand Russell. It’s simply amazing. It’s a golden age of philosophy, I think.

The irony, however, is that there is still no solid consensus on what, precisely, philosophy actually is. In its historical and etymological sense, philosophy is literally “love (philia) of wisdom (Sophia),” and that is always how I have looked upon it. Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to reflect upon experience in order to understand more about life and how we are to live. My aims, like those of Socrates, are primarily practical: I want to understand the world and myself to live better.

Today, there are three, perhaps four major “schools” or approaches to philosophy, each with their own journals, intellectual heroes and methodologies. It is one of the scandals of contemporary philosophy that these schools are somewhat incommensurable, meaning they are so different in their approaches and ideals they are almost incapable of speaking to one another. It’s as though organic chemistry and 17th century French literature are forced to share the same offices and pretend they are the same discipline (I exaggerate but you get the point).

The first approach may be called, for lack of a better word, Traditional Philosophy: this is the approach now largely taught only in Catholic universities. It is primarily historical in orientation, a “history of philosophy” style in which students study the thought of, say, the ancient Greeks, and Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel and so on. There is very little attempt to think through how the thought of these philosophical greats can be reconciled. The idea appears to be that by working through all of these great thinkers, eventually the student will come to his or her own philosophical conclusions — although there is really no fixed “method” or approach given for doing so. I always think of this as the University of Chicago or Great Books approach. A variation of this approach is Catholic philosophy, including various schools of Thomism (such as the Transcendental Thomism of Merechal, Karl Rahner and, my guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan)

The second major approach to philosophy today is what is known as Continental Philosophy. This is the philosophy that is most commonly taught in Europe and, again, in some Catholic universities in the U.S. In practice, it means primarily the philosophical systems of phenomenology, existentialism, so-called “critical theory” and their postmodern descendants. When I was in college, this is what I studied (in addition to traditional philosophy). We read the classic texts of phenomenology as well as such trendy philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and others. Today, those names have largely been replaced by those of postmodern French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard. While classical Husserlian phenomenology does attempt to “solve” major philosophical problems and actually be a descriptive science, in practice students of Continental Philosophy, like their Traditional Philosophy counterparts, spend much of their time studying the works of individual thinkers and writing papers on aspects of their thought. (There is a greater interest in Continental Philosophy in social and political questions, however.)

The third and allegedly dominant approach to philosophy today is Analytic Philosophy. This is the philosophy most commonly taught in the UK and in major U.S. universities. Built upon the infrastructure of British empiricists such as David Hume, Analytic Philosophy appeared in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I was in college, I found Analytic Philosophy to be mostly unintelligible gibberish. The emphasis on symbolic logic and the solving of trivial intellectual “puzzles” was, to me, an absurd waste of time.

In the past few years, however, I’ve been reading more about Analytic Philosophy and I am now much more impressed. Analytic Philosophy has matured over the past few decades and is now more of a philosophical “style” than it is a collection of doctrines. The style is more like that of my hero, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, in that Analytic Philosophy is much more interested in actually solving philosophical problems than it is in clarifying the thought of past philosophers. Thus, Analytic Philosophy is characterized by a thematic, rather than a “history of philosophy,” approach. It uses or creates a specialized technical vocabulary to elucidate the various “options” available in any given philosophical issue… marshals the evidence in favor or against those options… and then attempts to actually “settle” the issue. It’s actually quite refreshing.

The only problem with Analytic Philosophy from the perspective of a traditional philosopher or “lover of wisdom” is that it’s still focused primarily on trivial problems or mere puzzles (perhaps because those are the easiest ones to “solve”). Academic analytic philosophy is often little more than “chloroform in print,” boring to the point of dispatching its readers into a catatonic stupor. The cure for this tedium has been, over the past several years, the appearance of those popular philosophy journals and publishing houses I mentioned earlier. Precisely because they are aiming at a wider audience, the popular philosophy authors have to turn their attention to the Big Issues that interest real people – and thus are forced by the market to abandon the tedium beloved by academics and use their philosophical skills to address topics people actually care about. An example of how wonderful this can be is a book I am reading right now, Michael Sandel’s magisterial Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? It’s clear, concise, lays open the various options available on contentious issues, concerns serious subjects (what is justice?) and doesn’t resort to pretentious displays of symbolic logic to make its points.

These days, I mostly read good Catholic philosophy (such as can be found in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly or Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies) and “popular” analytic books such as Justice or those produced by Routledge.  I still can’t read academic analytic philosophy journals.  I tried subscribing to Faith and Philosophy, the (mostly analytic) journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, but found it deadly dull and exhibiting the worst aspects of analytic pretentiousness.  Here’s a sample, taken from John Turri’s essay, “Practical and Epistemic Justification in Alston’s Perceiving God” (July 2008, p. 290):

“Alston’s thesis is that putative perceptions of God often justify beliefs about God.  A subject S has a putative perception of God when S has an experience e in which it seems to S that God appears to S as P.  If, based on e, S forms the “M-belief” that God is P, then S has a justified belief that God is P.  An M-belief is a belief that God is P, which is based on a putative perception of God.  (I will often substitute ‘q’ for the proposition that God is P.)

I dunno. My reaction to writing like that is the same as George Will’s: Just because life is absurd that doesn’t mean philosophy should be as well.

I don’t mean to pick on John Turri, whom I am sure is a great guy and a lot smarter than I am. But this sort of stuff is meant solely for professional philosophers in universities… and is largely what turns people off to philosophy as an academic discipline.  If Socrates had spoken like that, they probably would have forced him to drink hemlock much earlier and philosophy would never have gotten off the ground.

Why Evolution Can’t Explain Evolutionists

John Haught, a Catholic theologian, had yet another interesting but perplexing article in the December 6 issue of America, the Jesuit weekly.  It was entitled “Do We Need God to Be Good?” Haught is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University and he has spent the last decade, at least, wading in shallow tide pools of evolutionary biology, pointing out the odd creatures who live there to people like me who happen to be walking down the beach.

There are two types of evolutionary scientists scurrying about in the tide pool mud, Haught explains.  There are the regular scientists, their slide rules poking out of their pocket protectors, who accept the reality of evolution implicitly and just go about their job of figuring out the mechanisms of the natural world.  These are the real, working scientists who make actual discoveries.  Then there are the self-important writers of books, like Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins, who think evolution explains pretty much everything in the universe — from worm holes to Mozart.  They are wannabe philosophers who don’t want to bother actually studying philosophy — since, after all, evolution explains everything so why read philosophy books?  (Or history books or novels or economics or sociology or anything at all.)  Anyone who finds their simplistic reductionism a bit hard to take — a little too much like the old “Omni” Magazine — is still mired in “the God delusion.”

Haught is really good at exposing the kindergarten philosophy of the evolutionary naturalists — which isn’t really all that difficult given that most of them, like Dawkins, admit they don’t actually read books and insist that anything that can’t be measured with digital instruments probably isn’t worth thinking about.  Alas, however, a few of them do sometimes think about things like Mozart and, say, morality, and then attempt to demonstrate how evolution explains them, too.   Haught’s article was occasioned by a recent piece in The New York Times Magazine, “The Moral Life of Babies,” that attempted to show how morality is the result of evolution, not religious instruction or divine light. The journalist Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God, makes similar attempts.

Here’s an example of what passes for serious analysis among these guys.  Evolution can explain the persistence of morality, or acts of altruism, this way.  Say a man gets up from his seat on the subway and offers it to a little old lady.  Most people would see this as an example of genuine morality or altruism, the result, perhaps, of a good upbringing or an innate decency.  You don’t have to believe in God to either perform or recognize such acts of self-sacrifice.  But don’t be fooled, say the popularizing evolutionary biologists.  What’s really going on, they explain, is that men who perform such acts of seeming altruism are actually demonstrating their suitability for mating to the females who are watching in the subway car.  At bottom, offering your seat to an old lady is really just another mating strategy, another way for your “self genes” to perpetuate themselves.

See?  See how evolution explains all of reality!  Isn’t it just amazing?  The evolutionary biologists positively beam at their own brilliance.  No wonder they call themselves “brights”!

All I can say is:  Poor John Haught.  He has to spend his entire waking life reading and studying these creatures — like the crabs and sea urchins you see in tide pools.  I’m glad someone is doing it.  I’m sure it’s really interesting.  Some people just really dig sea urchins.   I’m just not sure I’d want to make a career out of it.

A Routine Near-Death Experience… and a Rumor of Angels

Two days ago, I was almost killed in an instant. I had one of those experiences that shake you to your very core – and which, to me, constitute some sort of proof of divine providence.

It was a very ordinary day. I drove my son to the beach train for his daily trip up the coast to high school. My wife had given me some money and asked me to stop at the store to pick up some sour cream. We were having chicken fajitas for dinner, and one of my kids like sour cream on them.

I pulled into the grocery store parking lot around 7:30 a.m. As I walked into the store, I noticed three very young children right outside the door. They caught my attention because they were pretty young to leave alone. There was a baby in a stroller and a boy and a girl of about four or five years of age, watching the baby. I assumed the mother left them outside and ran into the store to buy something. “That’s a bit odd,” I thought. “I hope the mom hurries up. They’re a little young to leave alone.”

I went into the store, found my sour cream, and left. I then got into my car, buckled up, and headed to the exit of the parking lot.

Now, the parking lot of this grocery store is slightly raised from main street of town that runs in front of it. The store itself, on the right, extends right out to the sidewalk. On the left, there is a brick wall that runs parallel to the sidewalk. Because the exit is a kind of ramp, the brick wall blocks your view of the street to the left. The parking lot exists onto the town’s main street, and there is a street light that lets you turn either right or left or go straight ahead.

The light was red. I was sitting in the car, waiting for the light to turn green so I could make a left-hand turn into traffic.

I looked over to my right and saw… the three little kids I had noticed before I went into the store! The mother (a young Italian woman) was pushing the baby stroller. She was wearing blue jeans and a black sweater. “Oh, good, the kids are okay,” I thought to myself, watching the mother nudge her two older children along. My attention was diverted for maybe 10, 15 seconds, as I watched them.

Then I looked up. I saw that the light had already turned green and I was holding up traffic a little. There was another car behind me, patiently waiting.

I started to move forward into the intersection when… WHOOSH! a car, traveling maybe fifty miles an hour, ran the light right in front of me! MOTHERFUCKER! The moron had just run the red light!

My heart caught a beat.

I moved into the intersection, turned left, and continued driving… but my heart was racing.

I suddenly realized that, had my attention not been diverted for those 10 to 15 seconds, had I moved into the intersection right when the light had turned green, I probably would have been directly hit (“T-boned,” as they say) by the car running the red light. At the speed the car was traveling, I could easily have been killed.

What caused me to hesitate? You can say it was just dumb luck. I had noticed those little kids going in… and their appearance, right when I was waiting for the light to change, caught my attention again. It was that moment of waiting that saved me.

A coincidence? Perhaps. But it is just these moments of so-called synchronicity… these gentle interior “nudges” that result in life-altering or, in my case, life-saving consequences… that encourage many people to see in life the hand of God (or his angels) at work.

Of course, you can also say the reverse works as well: Bizarre, unexpected coincidences… people being in the wrong place at the wrong time… that result in innocent people being killed or involved in horrible accidents.

For me, however, this strangely ordinary, almost routine brush with death was indeed a powerful wake-up call.

It reminded me once again of just how precarious life really is. Had I not noticed those young kids, I could have driven into the intersection – and died instantly in a horrible explosion of twisted steel and glass.

My wife and young daughters would have gotten a phone call from the local police. There’s been a horrible accident. You should come to the hospital.

The emergency room doctor would have told my wife that they had done all they could… but the internal injuries were too severe.

Needless to say, I now look both ways before moving into any intersection… and I pray more than usual for God to preserve my life at least until my children are fully grown.

I am grateful for whatever influence it was that caused me to hesitate before moving into that intersection.

Guardian angel indeed.

Organization “Inside Google” Runs Ads About Google CEO’s Big Brother-Like Attitude

Most parents understand that the Internet is NOT their friend. Companies like Google are making billions by tracking everything you do online… and then selling that information to the highest bidder. Worse, they are tracking everything your children are doing as well… up to and including using the GPS in their cell phones to track their movements.

Fortunately, the public is FINALLY waking up — and fighting back. The organization “Inside Google” is now running ads on the Times Square Jumbotron lampooning Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s famous comment that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Schmidt could have worked for the East German Stasi with that attitude. Between corporate sleazebags like Schmidt and Big Brother totalitarians in the U.S. government, Americans will soon have their every movement watched, online and off.

On a more practical level, Inside Google offers a number of privacy tools on its website that can help you get started taking back your life from corporate totalitarians like Schmidt. Go to…

http://insidegoogle.com/takeaction/privacy-toolbox/

It’s not just a matter of disabling “cookies.” Hundreds, even thousands of websites –especially those that use Flash Video — place tracking programs on your computer that monitor everything you do. These tracking programs — known as LSOs or Local Shared Objects — remain in place even when you delete your cookies.

To get rid of LSOs, you can add a special plugin to your Firefox browser. You can get this plugin, Better Privacy, by clicking here…

More later.

Why I Don’t Trust Doctors (or Most “Experts” for That Matter…)

In bioethics, politics and law, oftentimes we must rely upon the opinions of so-called “experts,” particularly those in the medical professions.  But as anyone who has ever dealt with doctors knows, they are frequently wrong — but almost NEVER admit it.

The problem is, their arrogance can get people killed or cause serious harm. That’s one of the reasons why you should never trust doctors or any other expert. Or rather, you should follow Reagan’s Dictum: Trust… But Verify.

Take this recent case from Australia. A woman, Kate Ogg, delivered twins and was told that, after 20 minutes of resuscitation efforts, that the male child wasn’t going to make it. The hospital staff lay the lifeless body of the premature infant on the mother’s chest so she could say goodbye.

The problem is, the baby began to stir. “Just reflexive movements,” the doctor sniffed dismissively.

The parents trusted the doctor knew what he was talking about — always a problematic assumption — and continued to nuzzle the baby as it squiggled around. They assumed he was dying.

They kept asking the doctor to re-examine the baby, but he refused. Repeatedly refused. He had decided. He had made up his (arrogant) mind. Too busy filling out his forms to bother taking another look. This attitude is rampant in medicine.

Here’s what happened next as reported on MSNBC.com:

Jamie [the baby] continued to come around as he lay across Kate’s chest. He began grabbing at his mother’s finger, as well as his father’s. And when Kate put a dab of breast milk on her finger, Jamie eagerly accepted it.

Kate finally began to believe her baby was actually alive. “We thought, ‘He’s getting stronger — he’s not dead,’ ” she said. But the family wasn’t getting any encouragement from their doctor. While the Oggs urged hospital personnel to summon him, they were repeatedly told what they were seeing was still just reflex from a baby already declared dead.

Kate Ogg told Curry they had to “fib” to get the doctor to return to her bedside. “We kept saying, ‘He’s doing things dead babies don’t do, you might want to come and see this,’ ” she told Curry.

But the skeptical doctor still didn’t return. “So David said, ‘Go and tell him we’ve come to terms with the baby’s death, can he just come and explain it.’ That made him come back.”

Kate Ogg told the London Daily Mail the doctor was in disbelief when he arrived back at the bedside. “He got a stethoscope, listened to Jamie’s chest and just kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ ”

The problem with experts is not that they don’t have expertise. It’s that their expertise blinds them to what is right in front of their eyes. Their expertise actually creates a bias.

I don’t mean to pick on doctors. My brother is a doctor. I have friends who are doctors. But I take almost everything they say with a gigantic grain of salt… especially when it’s really serious. The parents in this case now worry that the arrogance of this particular doctor may have resulting in their child suffering unnecessary brain damage. Had the doctor bothered to listen to what the parents were saying, the hospital staff might have been able to administer oxygen and take other measures to help the struggling baby.

Trust but verify indeed.

The Earthy Mysticism of William McNamara

In the late 1970s, while studying philosophy in college, I discovered the “earthy mysticism” of William McNamara. For more than 30 years, it has remained the dominant spiritual influence of my life and is partly the reason I remain, despite everything, a committed follower of Christ and a stubborn (if not very pious) Catholic.

A charismatic retreat master and former Carmelite friar, McNamara espouses a gritty, life-affirming, no-nonsense approach to Christian spirituality that is unique and, to me, exhilarating. Despite having encountered over the years a wide assortment of gurus and spiritual teachers from many different religious traditions, I have never found a spiritual synthesis quite like that of McNamara’s Earthy Mysticism.

McNamara’s approach is both very traditional and, at the same time, strangely radical. His heroes are the classic Carmelite mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, but also literary figures such as Zorba the Greek and philosophers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Abraham Joshua Heschel.

For McNamara, mysticism is not an otherworldly flight from reality but the opposite: a robust and courageous immersion in life in all its fullness and, through that immersion, an encounter with the Source of all (revealed, for Christians, in the person and work of the carpenter of Nazareth). With his long black (now grey) beard and full head of hair, McNamara looks like a wild-eyed rabbi or biblical prophet: a “disciplined wild man,” his term for a mystic.

In the 1970s and ’80s, McNamara’s message was challenging, defiantly anti-establishment: He insisted that all human beings, and certainly all followers of Christ, are called to be authentic contemplatives (mystics). Asceticism, the gradual sloughing off of pettiness and cheap thrills, is merely a way of whetting our appetites for the main meal of life.

The hustle and bustle of modern society is not such much sinful as it is deadening: or rather, it is sinful because it is deadening… or deadening because it is sinful. In his classic 1974 book, The Human Adventure: Contemplation for Everyman, written in the midst of the allegedly bohemian counter-culture, McNamara described the insipid dullness of materialistic society:

There are few towering pleasures to allure me, almost no beauty to bewitch me, nothing erotic to arouse me, no intellectual circles or positions to challenge or provoke me, no burgeoning philosophies or theologies and no new art to catch my attention or engage my mind, no rousing political, social, or religious movements to stimulate or excite me. There are no free men to lead me. No saints to inspire me. No sinners sinful enough to either impress me or share my plight. No one human enough to validate the “going” lifestyle. It is hard to linger in that dull world without being dulled.

Ultimately, Earthy Mysticism is an invitation to the radical amazement that comes with being fully, ecstatically alive. It is not a series of programs, methods or techniques but an attitude towards life, a willingness to ride the wild roller coaster of being a human being — with its rapturous joys and overwhelming sorrows.

McNamara’s brand of Earthy Mysticism seeks to reawaken in us a primordial astonishment at the real world and the God who is revealed in and through it. It seeks to help us recapture our original awe. When we pray, McNamara says, we enter the cave of a lion and do not know if we’ll come out alive. “God is not a nice or comfy thing to be possessed” through meditative techniques, he writes in his most recent book, Wild and Robust: The Adventure of Christian Humanism. “God is an earthquake.”

Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve, Part II

People often ask me why I remain a Roman Catholic – given all the scandals over homosexual pedophiles in the Church, the Peter, Paul and Mary liturgies, and so on.

They’re not asking me for the party line reason but my own, very personal reason.

And this is what I usually say: Whenever I really look into a question – an ethical, political, scientific, religious, Biblical, historical question – whatever it is – whenever I really dig deep and wrestle with all the issues involved, from abortion to Biblical studies – I find myself inevitably concluding that the “official,” even papal position ends up being correct.

I mean that very sincerely.

Over a lifetime, such independent investigations develop a certain amount of trust – the same kind of trust you might feel toward, say, your father, despite his annoying idiosyncrasies.

Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is just another example of this.

Whenever I am goaded by my Protestant friends or in-laws to, once again, really look into the controversies over evolution and creation, I find that, as usual, the Catholic position ends up not only making the most sense exegetically (in terms of the Biblical texts) but is also, amazingly enough, supported by strong scientific evidence.

And that brings us back to Adam and Eve.

For years, I believed that the world was basically covered by overgrown chimpanzees… and that, maybe 50,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon Man suddenly appeared to chase down Woolly Mammoths and drag their wives by their hair into the cave.

But we now know that isn’t the case.

Human-like (hominid) species flourished on earth up to a million years ago – and they looked a lot more like Raquel Welch in the film “One Million Years BC” (a big favorite with my classmates when I was in fourth grade) than they did like Cheetah.

Anthropologists now keep pushing the dates for proto-human groups back hundreds of thousands of years – as far back, in fact, as 800,000 years ago. The scientific evidence for these groups is overwhelming (which isn’t, by the way, the same thing as evidence for Darwinian natural selection).

Nearby is an artist reconstruction of some hominid forebears of ours, Homo heidelbergensis (“Heidelberg Man”), an extinct species of human that may have lived around 600,000 years ago. This is not the knuckle-walking semi-semian many people assume, but a genuine cave man who stood about six feet tall, walked upright and had a brain as big as that of modern humans. There is evidence that Heidelberg Man used primitive tools, buried his dead and may have possessed a language.

An even earlier species, so-called Homo antecessor, fossils of which were discovered in the 1990s in Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain, may have lived as long ago as 1.2 million years ago. This early human species also stood about six feet tall with the males weighing about 200 pounds but had a 20% smaller brain.

There weren’t a lot of these creatures roaming the world back then – as few as a few thousand, perhaps. Our genuine cave man ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, is considered by anthropologists to be the ancestor of both the extinct species of Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). Neanderthals lived in the period from 600,000 years ago until around 30,000 years ago, when they mysteriously became extinct. DNA evidence suggests that there was some, although very limited, inter-breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.

Anatomically modern humans, known as homo sapiens sapiens, first appeared around 200,000 years ago in Africa. In Europe, they are called Cro-Magnon Man

Now, with all of these various proto-human groups running around the world between 1 million and 30,000 years ago, how likely is it that we are all descended from a single historical human couple, an Adam and Eve?

After all, doesn’t it make more sense that there were many ancestors of the human race?

Well, here’s what fascinating… and what makes any effort to reconcile the Biblical account of creation with what passes for scientific anthropology even more difficult.

The DNA evidence actually does show that all human beings alive today do descend from a single mother – so-called Mitochondrial Eve. Different DNA evidence also suggests we are all descended from a single male – Y-chromosomal Adam.

What isn’t clear is whether the genetic Adam and Eve lived at the same time. It’s possible that they could have literally founded the current human race… but it’s also possible that Eve was an older woman (by tens of thousands of years!).

The bottom line is that the scientific evidence tends to support monogenism, the unity of the human family, which is what Pope Pius XII insisted upon as a key point of Catholic doctrine vis a vis any scientific theory of evolution in his encyclical humani generis.

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