Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
So on this Sunday, 2024, I worked, contrary to God's injunction, like on so many others. As a result, I didn't really catch up with the horrific plight of Appalachia in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
It's awful.
Which makes this the worst, and best, time to note this.
We're headed into a legislative session, and an election season, in which the far right espouses a hatride of the Federal Government. If you are in Appalachia, and vote for the populists, you are voting to handle this disaster on your own. If you are in Wyoming, and voting populists, the same is true of the horrible fires we've experienced and are yet to.
If that is your view, don't ask for help, as stupid and cold as not asking for help would be.
We here are distributists, a philosophy that holds things should devolve to the lowest level possible. Here, that level is the Federal government. Distributism works up, as well as down.
Additionally, how long will we choose to ignore the signs? We've waited longer than we should have as it is. There's still time to act, no matter how much it impacts your temrporary pocket books, with you being temporary as it is.
Because I've referenced it more than one time, but apparently never posted it (cowardice at work) I'm going to post here the topic of "the four sins God hates". I'm also doing this as I'm getting to a political thread about this years elections and the candidates, in the context of the argument of "Christians must. . . " or "Christians can. . . "
First I'll note using the word "hate", in the context of the Divine, is a truncation for a much larger concept. "Condemns" might have been a better choice of words, but then making an effective delivery in about ten minutes or less is tough, and truncations probably hit home more than other things.
Additionally, and very importantly, sins and sinners are different. In Christian theology, and certainly in Catholic theology, God loves everyone, including those who have committed any one of these sins, or all of them.
This topic references a remarkably short and effective sermon I heard some time ago. The way my 61 year old brain now works, that probably means it was a few years ago. At any rate, it was a homily based on all three of the day's readings, which is remarkable in and of itself, and probably left every member of the parish squirming a bit. It should have, as people entrenched in their views politically and/or economically would have had to found something to disagree with, or rather be hit by.
The first sin was an easy one that seemingly everyone agrees is horrific, but which in fact people excuse continually, murder.
Murder is of course the unjust taking of a life, and seemingly nobody could disagree with that being a horrific sin. But in fact, we hear people excuse the taking of innocent life all the time. Abortion is the taking of an innocent life. Even "conservatives", however, and liberals as a false flag, will being up "except in the case of rape and incest".
Rape and incest are horrific sins in and of itself, but compounding it with murder doesn't really make things go away, but rather makes one horror into two. Yes, bearing a child in these circumstances would be a horrific burden. Killing the child would be too.
The second sin the Priest noted was sodomy. He noted it in the readings and in spite of what people might like to say, neither the Old or New Testaments excuse unnatural sex. They just don't. St. Paul is particularly open about this, so much so that a local female lesbian minister stated that this was just "St. Paul's opinion", which pretty much undercuts the entire Canon of Scripture.
A person can get into Natural Law from here, which used to be widely accepted, and which has been cited by a United States Supreme Court justice as recently as fifty or so years ago, and the Wyoming Supreme Court more recently than that, and both in this context, but we'll forgo that in depth here. Suffice it to say that people burdened with such desires carry a heavy burden to say the least, but that doesn't make it a natural inclination. In the modern Western World we've come to excuse most such burdens, however, so that where we now draw lines is pretty arbitrary.
Okay, those are two "conservative" items.
The next wasn't.
That was mistreating immigrants.
This sort of speaks for itself, but there it is. Scripture condemns mistreating immigrants. You can't go around, as a Christian, hating immigrants or abusing them because of their plight.
Abusing immigrants, right now, seems to be part of the Conservative "must do" list.
And the final one was failing to pay workmen a just wage. Not exactly taking the natural economy/free market approach in the homily.
Two conservatives, and two liberal.
That's because Christianity is neither liberal or conservative, but Christianity. People claiming it for teir political battles this year might well think out their overall positions.
Yesterday, I made some observations on Denver, and today I'm doing the same on Labor Day, 2024.
Of course, it's immediately notable that I'm making these the day after Labor Day, which was a day I didn't get off. I worked a full day.
I was the only one in the office.
Labor Day dates back to the mid 1800s as an alternative to the more radical observance that takes place in many countries on May 1. Still, nonetheless, early on, and for a long time, there was a fair amount of radicalism associated with it during that period when American labor organizations were on the rise. The day itself being a widely recognized day off is due to organized strikes on the day that started occurring during the 1930s, to the day as sort of a "last day of summer holiday" is fairly new.
Even now, when people think of it, they often think of the day in terms of the sort of burly industrial workers illustrated by Leyendecker and Rockwell in the 20s through the 40s. Otherwise, they sort of blandly associate it with celebrating work in general, which gets to the nature of work in general, something we sort of touched on yesterday with this entry;
Early on, Labor Day was something that acknowledged a sort of worthy heavy work. There are, in spite of what people may think, plenty of Americans that still are engaged in that sort of employment, although its s shadow of the number that once did. Wyoming has a lot of people who do, because of the extractive industries, which are in trouble. Ironically, therefore, its notable that Wyoming is an epicenter of anti union feelings, when generally those engaged in heavy labor are pro union. There's no good explanation for that.
When Labor Day became a big deal it pitted organized labor against capital, with it being acknowledged by both sides that if things went too far one way or another, it would likely result in a massive labor reaction that would veer towards socialism, or worse, communism. Real communism has never been a society wide strong movement in the United States, in spite of the current stupid commentary by those on the political far right side of the aisle accusing anyone they don't like, and any program they don't like, of being communistic. But radical economics did hae influence inside of unions, and communists were a factor in some of them, which was well known. As nobody really wanted what that might mean, compromise gave us the post war economic world of the 50s and 60s, which were sort of a golden age for American economics.
One of the unfortunate byproducts of the Cold War era, however, was the exportation of jobs overseas, which brought us the economic regime we have today, in part. The advance of technology brought us the other part. Today we find the American economy is massively dominated by capital in a way it hasn't been for a century, and its not a good thing at all. The will to do anything about it, or even understand it, seems to be wholly lacking. As a result of that, while an increasing number of Americans slave away at meaningless jobs in cubicles, and the former shopkeeper class now works at Walmart, we have the absolutely bizarre spectacle of two Titans of Capital, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, spewing out populist rhetoric. Populism, of course, always gets co-opted, but the working and middle class falling for rhetoric from the extremely wealthy is not only bizarre, its' downright dumb.
Indeed, in the modern American economy, having your own is increasingly difficult. Entire former occupations that were once local have been totally taken over by large corporations while agriculture has fallen to the rich in terms of land ownership, making entry into either field impossible. Fewer and fewer "my own" occupations exist, and those that do are under siege.
One of those is the law, of course. Lawyers, because of the nature of their work, still tend to own their practices, as to medical professionals of all types. The latter are falling into large corporate entities, however, and the move towards taking down state borders in the practice is causing the consolidation of certain types of practice in the former.
Not that "having your own" in the professions is necessarily a sort of Garden of Eden either, however.
Recently, interestingly, there's been a big movement in which young people are returning to the trades. That strikes me as a good thing, and perhaps the trades are finally getting the due they deserve. Ever since World War Two there's been the concept that absolutely everyone had to achieve white collar employment, which demeaned blue collar employment, and which put a lot of people in occupations and jobs they didn't care for. I suspect the small farm movement reflects that too.
Indeed, on my first day of practicing law as a lawyer over thirty years ago the long time office manager, who must have been having sort of a bad day, made a comment like "you might just end up wishing you had become a farmer". I remember thinking to myself even then that if that had been an option, that's exactly what I would have become. It wasn't, and it never has been for me, in the full time occupation sort of way.
Oh well.
And so we lost the garden to labor in, but we can make things better than they are. And we could do that by taking a much more distributist approach to things. Which seems nowhere near close to happening, a populist uprising notwithstanding.
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