LinkDump

"A group proposes to build a religious establishment on their own property near a site associated with great pain and significance for some people. These people, rightly or wrongly, associate that religion with the many deaths that were caused and so raise a great ruckus in protest against the said establishment. For their part, the religious establishment pleas that they intend to pray for all who died there, including their own co-religionists. But this plea is dismissed," writes philosopher, statistician, physicist, historian, SF author extraordinaire, and all-around cool guy Mike Flynn.

"I pause while you assume the proper attitude," he continues.

"I write, of course, of the Polish sisters who wanted to establish a convent near Auschwitz, which created a great outcry that it was insensitive to Jewish concerns. The Pope intervened and told the sisters to place their convent elsewhere, since if they remained intransigent they would do more harm than good. That they had a right to do what they planned did not mean it was right to do it."

We haven't discussed the ground-zero mosque in this space, and I am curious what my readers think. Me, personally? I am in favor of it, so long as they build a chapel to Our Lady of Victory right next door.

Mike Flynn continues:

"A pastor of a sect of 50 people announces that he will burn copies of the Qur'an, sending the entire world into a tizzy. The POTUS intervenes personally to beg him not to do so as such a burning will deeply offend many people. (Unlike, say, the burning of a US flag.) Curiously, in a TV shot, all the copied stacked up appear to be in English and thus not legitimately Qur'ans. (The true Qur'an is written only in Arabic.)

"OTOH, Charles Merrill, cousin to Merrill Lynch co-founder, burned a Qur'an valued at $60,000 (in the apparently magick belief that it would 'eliminate homophobic hate.' This book was not only a genuine Qur'an (in Arabic) but was a rare manuscript given to his late wife, Evangeline Johnson Merrill of Johnson & Johnson, by the late king of Jordan during a UN mission in the 1950s. So not only was it a real Qur'an, but a precious antique, and a diplomatic gift by the King of Jordan, and he actually did burn it. Not a peep."

For those of you who didn't click through the link on my previous post, I will re-link the blog of Jennifer Fulwiler, a Catholic convert from atheism, whose blog I discovered by following a link from a link from a link from my Google reader (it sometimes gives me interesting things, though for some reason it's convinced I like Andrew Sullivan). She has an audio link to a talk she gave about her conversion which is really quite remarkable. I think my favorite part was when she finally saw the "fingerprints of God" on the Church. It really is amazing that She's still around, 2000 years later, i'n'it?

Anyways, her article on her pro-life conversion is, simply, a-mazing. I'm not a particularly eloquent or insightful person, and when a thought enters my head, I have a very hard time forming it into something meaningful and expressing it. For this reason, I rely on other people to express my thoughts in fully-formed ways. Usually, reading John C. Wright sufficiently tells me what I'm thinking, but Mrs. Fulwiler hit on something that had been smoldering in the back of my mind for a while but I had been unable to express, namely that abortion comes from society's understanding of sex. She even put a name to it: the "contraceptive mentality". I will plagiarize that term heavily from now on. (That is the idea I was working up to here and here, but was not completely able to develop.) It's for this reason that I'm becoming increasingly dubious that the abortion holocaust will be ended by laws or judges, but instead by conversion, one heart at a time. I feel more and more that the pre-born will only finally be treated as equal under the law once society, as a whole, no longer feels it needs abortion. Only then will it wither away.

I always find conversion stories to be fascinating. As a cradle Catholic, I always doubt whether I believe what I believe because it is truth, or merely because I was taught to believe it. Do I defend it because it is right or because it is reflex? That's why I always find it interesting when someone who started with opposite beliefs to my own, through a slow and gradual process of philosophical inquiry and open-minded questioning, climbs the mountain of Truth and finds the Church built atop it, where she has been waiting for 2000 years. There is something reassuring about knowing other people reasoned their way to the Truth I've known since childhood.

Lastly, this is simply a-mazing:

"If abortion is merely about women's rights, ladies and gentlemen, then what were mine?"