If, one were to take seriously (which is admittedly hard), the left’s seriousness about reducing abortion as in Mr Clinton’s (in)famous: safe, legal, and rare … there is the problem of adoption. [note: in the following I’m going to ignore the clear conundrum raised by the question unasked or unanswered by those to whom that phrase has meaning, which is if abortion is not problematic, then why is rare valued.]

Adoption is held as an mythological sign for the pro-choice crowd. Both asking, well if you pro-lifers are so serious about saving babies why aren’t y’all adopting. But, examining the adoption procedures in this country a little more carefully the answer becomes clear. Because the largely pro-choice crowd has raised immense barriers to adopting. Getting qualified for an adoption costs close to $20k for legal fees, home studies and the like. The question is … Why?

Well, one reason one might suggest is that because the parents of the child are giving up their moral and legal responsibilities toward the child, they cannot be depended upon to insure the quality and home for the child so the state must do that instead. But, at what cost? A great number of well qualified caring parents are excluded from the process because they lack the disposable income in order to jump through the states required adoption hoops.There is another conclusion to be drawn from the existence to high barriers to adoption. That is, that orphans and children needing adoption (in this country) are in fact rare. If the problem of excess orphans was actually acute, essential moral market forces would bring the barriers down. That they haven’t and that adoption agencies and their lawyers successfully continue to charge high prices for their services is

Actually another highly likely reason is that legislators setting guidelines for abortion (often) forget TANSTAAFL when they make their laws. What cost adding one more check, after all it might just save one kid from misery? Well, there is a cost. But it’s not apparent.

There is another conundrum present. The pro-choice crowd consistently paints abortion as easy, pregnancy as difficult, adoption as freely available (and a choice rarely chosen by the pro-life side).  However, that begs a question. If the reason that the high barriers to adoption exist are in fact that in giving up their responsibilities toward the child mean that the state do due dilligence in vetting the parent then that begs the question: Why does that at the same time exclude the state from exercising due diligence when a pregnant mom wants to terminate her child. Is she not as well, yeilding her moral and legal responsibilities toward her offspring as well?

In the early 80s the hottest book to read, discuss, and ponder in the circles I traveled was the (then) recently published Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. One of the topics this popularized was the famous zen koan:

Has a dog, Buddha nature or not?

A Western perhaps mistranslation of “Buddha” nature might be “a soul”. The answer is not, “yes” or “no” but the retort by the master was “mu”? Mr Hofstadter’s intellectual answer to that puzzle is that “mu” is in essence, unasking that question. That is, a way of emphatically insisting that the very asking of the question implies horrible structural defects in your conceptual framework that leads to this question being askable at all.

This leads us to the question:

Has a fetus a soul or not?

One proposal to consider is not, the emphatic “no” by the pro-abortion rights crowd (or to be fair, the insistent “yes/maybe” by the pro-life crowd) but instead to assume that we’ve made a critical mistake in our structural worldview and conception of reality for which this question is being relevant is a sign of error, not a point to ponder. Read the rest of this entry

This post spurred some conversation which led me to further reflections.  My neighbor the Jewish Atheist (blogging here), remarked:

You don’t see it as “problematic” that person A has to work his ass off for minuscule wages, send his kids to the crappy local public school, and go without decent health care, while person B gets paid a king’s ransom to sit on a thousand-dollar office chair in a climate-controlled office for 40 hours a week? B should just count his lucky stars and live it up and not worry about A?

Consider the following:

 Examine a group of  kids in elementary school (or secondary school), compete. Our measure of merit for the day, instead of schooling, healthcare, and wages is speed in a running race. One kid will win, one kid will come in last. It is also likely that the one of the kids coming in close to last will be far greater than those who come in the top few places. Effort it seems does not necessarily grant results.

One might ask, if the winner should feel “guilty” because he won the race, perhaps even won it easily. My contention is that the answer is no. There is no “guilt” inherent in being gifted with greater talents, better circumstances (one might imagine in this second case some of those in the bottom of the race had less “opportunity” at home and had less chance to exercise, perhaps too much food, or other disadvantages).

The (correct) answer it seems to me to this question follows the Scriptural suggestion noted by Mr Carter (linked in the above linked post), to whit the Pentateuchal suggestion that we not covet that which is our neighbors. The winning kid not feeling guilty is the other side of the coin to the losing kid not coveting the winner’s athletic gifts. Neither feeling is any way to arrive at love (agape/charity) for the “Other”. Read the rest of this entry

(Dan Trabue, in a comment here to my previous post on health care, referenced a think tank paper that predicts cost reductions without a loss of effectiveness with a single-payer system, and took issue with my terming this "socialized medicine".  I decided to put my response up as a post.)

From the Wikipedia entry on health care in Canada: "Health care in Canada is funded and delivered through a publicly funded health care system, with most services provided by private entities."  So in Canada, it’s not government-run hospitals but it is a government funded system.  While the writer of this Wikipedia entry insists it’s not truly socialized medicine, the article at the link to the words "socialized medicine" does concede, "The term can refer to any system of medical care that is publicly financed, government administered, or both", I suppose depending on who you ask.

But who’s in charge of the hospitals or what you want to call it is immaterial, as the outcome is the same.  Britain has government-owned hospitals and Canada doesn’t, but the result is still that bureaucracies make medical decisions instead of doctors and patients.  HMOs were the Left’s bogeyman for years, but their solution is to institute the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, largest HMO/insurance company to make our individual health care decisions.  This makes no sense at all.

From the think tank paper cited:

[The Lewin Group, "a nationally respected nonpartisan
consulting firm"] estimates the proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. It would also save hundreds of billions over time – more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years – in national health spending, according to Lewin.

The Lewin Group is inexplicably closing its eyes to the Canadian system, blue-skying his prediction.  The Canadian system uses both government- and employer-based payment system, utilizing private insurance/doctors/hospitals, and they are in crisis.  They are not saving money (Claude Castonguay, quoted in the original post, notes that rationing and "injecting massive amounts of new money" has not helped).  They most certainly do not serve effectively (Wikipedia cites a study showing 57% of Canadians wait 4 or more week to see a specialist).  And it unfortunately affects everyone (read the Wikipedia article sections titled "Government Involvement" and "Private Sector").

Are you really going to believe predictions on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a massive government program.  No government program of such a size ever comes in under budget; not Medicare, not Social Security, not the Iraq War, nothing. 

The Lewin Group says that the government could bargain for lower costs, and yet Canada’s are skyrocketing.  They may have gone down at the beginning, but as The Acton Institute’s Dr. Donald Condit notes:

Resource consumption increases when people think someone else is shouldering the cost. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” More than 60 years of “someone else” paying for health care has led to medical expense inflation. Our predominately third-party reimbursement “system,” beginning after World War II for employees and after Medicare in 1965 for the retired, has resulted in out-of-control spending. Increasing the role of government will spur unbridled medical services consumption and further harm the underserved. Medical resources are limited. An expanded government role in health care will necessarily lead to rationing, shortages of health-care providers, delay in treatment, and deterioration in quality of care.

Medicaid is a socialized medicine microcosm. In that system, price controls and bureaucracy result in rationing by deterring provider participation and delaying treatment, with subsequent deterioration in quality of care. Affluent individuals are able to access better health care outside of any government system.

And this "Medicare model" is what the EPI plan wants to take the "best elements" of, which they only enumerate later on as the federal government administering it.  How can the Left possibly say they care more for the less-fortunate in one breath, and in the other hold up health care rationing as "caring"?  This makes no sense at all.

Canada’s system currently compares favorably to the US in terms of a couple of cherry-picked statistics, but that’s like judging a pyramid scheme based on the first few generations.  They are losing on other fronts, like a drain of doctors.  And they are now at the tipping point of that pyramid scheme, where the choice is either returning a bigger role to the private sector (what Castonguay called "radical" and what conservatives call "sensible") or sliding further down the slope to socialism.  The Left, not wishing to have their utopian vision challenged, will no doubt push for the latter.

Read the rest of this entry

As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Read the rest of this entry

Today, the Jewish Atheist noted in response to the my proposal that “death has no sting” in the context of the death penalty:

Regarding your last paragraph, I’m aghast that you are so dismissive of the possibility of error.

Errors in long term imprisonment discovered decades after the crime can’t “undo” the incarceration and loss of freedom, relationships damaged, and youth incurred.

Of course not. But it’s a thousand times better than death, right? This isn’t some hypothetical, btw. This stuff happens.

Secondly, I’m Christian, and as such have ontological freedom granted by Baptism and my Faith. Death has no sting … really.

Maybe you should think about whether Christ would be as cavalier about other people’s lives. If death has no sting, I think you’re doing something really, really wrong.

There are a few that issues that come up here. Read the rest of this entry

And let there be broccoli too.

In the hunting for a clue category, at Levellers Mr Westmoreland-White writes:

However, there is zero justification for Christians to be willing to kill other human beings (persons made in God’s image; persons for whom Christ died) “in defence of their country” or anything else. To kill is to betray the gospel.

and in a comment:

To say that, however, is not to say that Christians involved in, say, WWII were not trying to do the best they could with what seemed to them to be limited options. Most of them never heard of Christian pacifism, never mind organized nonviolent direct action.

Or in might be better said, to suppose that “Christian pacifism” or “organized nonviolent direct action” would have mollified Hitler and stopped the Nazi war machine is errant nonsense. Now in the 9th century,  Constantinople was besieged by the Rus and her army was afield resisting Islamic armies. They believed that their rescue was owed to the robe of the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) affecting a miracle to save them. Somehow I doubt a pious miracle is the solution Mr Westmorland-White depends on to replace the armed resistance against Nazi aggression. Actually, the problem is, I very much doubt there is any reasonable pacifistic non-violent suggestions on offer for how Nazi and Hitler might have been confronted or that he will suggest one. Read the rest of this entry

Two primary models of relationships between man and woman compete in our society.

On the one hand, we have the sex and encounter driven model. The hellfire club, of meeting, dalliance, of the sexual “freeing of men and women”, celebrated by the likes of Mr Sullivan just the other day. The relationship is centered on the couple and their relationship. If that relationship wanes, there is no reason over-riding reason to continue, in fact the “model” insists or suggests that the pair break off to form new “better fresher” relationships. This lifestyle produces much pleasure and works at some level. Modern technology with (relatively) reliable birth control, the mechanization of industry opening up more and more of the workplace to being “equalized” between the sexes, and the anonymity of modern society all foster this model.

The other model, is the “older” generational model. This model is the one in which one’s relationship is held in context with those between grandparents, parents, children, and grand-children in mind when one forms a relationship. The relationship is centered on family or poetically, hearth and home. If that the couples relationship wanes, there are many strong reasons for that to be re-kindled. The “model” insists on it.

To distinguish in the following I will refer to these as the relational or generational models of family.
The Shakers in the 19th century were a Christian Protestant monastic community, whose members took a vow of celibacy. When an entire faith community takes such a vow, this vow will not survive over-long, because of the lack of children and that primary means of continuing that society. So too, the relational model has a similar structural weakness. It does not sufficiently care for the children in its midst to effectively pass on the virtues necessary to pass on the mores, customs, and praxis to the next generation.

Abortion-as-birth control as is commonly practised, of course sits firmly in the camp of the relational model. Megan McCardle pointed out once, that the problem of gay marriage, abortion, and no-fault divorce so on is not how it affects or doesn’t affect the wealth and middle classes. The problems that arise disproprortionally fall on those with less margin for error. All of these issues at their core dance around the relational/generational divide over how to view marriage.

One you can build a lasting society around. The other you can’t. You can have a small (wealthy) subset of the population which dallies with relational family, but I’d suggest that there are dire consequences when that percentage rises.

Dan Trabue, liberal God-blogger at Payne Hollow, notes some Scriptural references on relations between the sexes. His conclusion:

Now, this is not a topic that I’ve studied a lot, but just from what I’ve read, I’m willing to accept that the Bible is a document of its patriarchal, pre-modern times and realize that, yes, back then, women weren’t treated right. But even in that context, we see hints of God’s more egalitarian ways shining through. In Christ, there is no “male” or “female,” we see Jesus talking to and treating women as equals, we see women leadership in OT and NT stories.

So, my answer to the larger question – is God sexist? – an absolute No. But the Bible does tell stories that reflect the mores of the day. As long as we don’t try to take those sexist/misogynistic attitudes as literally applying to how we interact as humans today (ie, women remain silent in church, the man is the “head” or master of women, selling our daughters, etc), and embrace the God-given liberty and equality for all, then I think we’re okay.

Now, I’m not going to jump on his “not a topic I’ve studied a lot, but …”  which should throw up red flags. It is a good question how the verses he quotes support his conclusions. However, it might be interesting to note some history. Read the rest of this entry

The poverty paradox present in Christian ethics is obvious to any casual onlooker, and was brought up in an earlier post. In that post I hinted that I’d offer my resolution to the paradox later, this is that later “resolution.”

Christian tradition, Scripture, and praxis all value rejection of material things and the ascetic embrace of poverty. At the same time however, the Christian virtue of charity calls the faithful to assist those in need. But why, the state of being poor is a state to value. Should the Christian not instead, envy the downtrodden and those without means? To summarize:

• In Luke’s version of the beatitudes, Jesus notes, “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.” A blessing is not to denote a bad thing. One isn’t blessed for having a condition if that condition is morally or materially thought bad.
• In Romans 5, St. Paul notes that we should “celebrate our suffering”, for suffering ties to hope of salvation and leads to endurance and character and other good things. Suffering is a thing then, that should be celebrated, in fact sought.
• Death, seen by the pagan and unbeliever as a thing to fear. But for the Christian death “has no sting” and as the Orthodox Paschal troparion (short hymn) sings, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death and to those in the tombs restoring life.” Poverty and lack of resource leads to an early death … which is a thing not to fear, and has no sting. So … why bother helping those who are in need? Why help the dying, after all it’s no big deal. Right?

In an earlier discussion on Liberation Theology and its ties to Marxism here at Stones Cry Out (a group blog which has graciously permitted me to join), I was asked in a comment thread/discussion what, if anything, was evil about Marxism. In that discussion I had tied much of the evil inherent in Marxism to Leninism, noting Zizek a prominent Leninist political theorist and philosopher crafted a syllogism. That syllogism was Lenin is to Marxism as St. Paul is to Christianity. This I took as a teaching of what Lenin means to Marxism, not the reverse.

But … there is indeed evil (or at least moral error) inherent Marxism and it is the same evil that is found in poverty and why the Christian responds vigorously against it.

For poverty is indeed a blessed thing. It is indeed a thing to which the best and greatest of our fellowship embrace, live, and dwell. From St. Antony,St. Mary of Egypt, St. John Cassian (who brought monasticism to the West), and other in the first millennial ascetics, the entire Eastern and Western monastic traditions, to the modern ascetics such as more famously the Mother Theresa of Calcutta. However there is an essential difference between their embrace of poverty and the Haitian or African child and family eating fried mud because they have no other food. The problem is one of choice. Poverty is a blessed good and a thing to aspire to if you choose it. Choice is the ultimate and crucial difference between poverty as virtue and why we aid those who are afflicted by this particular virtue when it is not of their choosing.

That too is the essential problem with Liberation theology and its embrace of Marxism. Marxism and Christian cenobitic communities both embrace renouncing private property and sharing and sharing alike. However, Christian communal communities are joined by choice. Marxism is a political system which imposes, like poverty in Zaire or today in Myanmar/Burma itself on those it afflicts with no regard to choice.

It is not for nothing that Genesis is a crucially important book. The eden stories of early Genesis teach well that God values our free will. We ignore that at our peril.

I looked at the “charitability” of conservatives and liberals when Arthur Brooks came out with his study in 2006. He noted that conservatives were more charitable with their time and money than liberals.

Today we have a piece about multiple polling groups finding a correlation between the political spectrum and the honesty spectrum. But before I get to the data, I want to address the issue I have when I say “I hate polls”, which I’ve said quite a lot.

I’ve covered this a bit before, but it bears repeating. When we poll people on topics that they have little to no experience in, the poll is meaningless; no more than, as SCO contributor Mark Olson calls them, a cricket race. “Consumer confidence” numbers are as much (or more) a measure of economic news reporting as they are about how a person feels (itself, an ephemeral measurement). “Who would you vote for”, on the other hand, is certainly something each person can know about themselves for sure. Now, that may change over time, but no one else knows you better than you at this moment. It’s not a good measure of who you’ll vote for 6 months from now, but it’s accurate enough for the here and now, much more so than deciding how the economy is going based on feelings.

With that out of the way, on to the results.

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are “very conservative.” When Pew Research asked whether it was “morally wrong” to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

(Maybe that’s why liberals are all for tax increases. They figure the conservatives will do most of the paying.)

Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: “You lose your job. Your friend’s company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?”

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

When the World Values Survey asked a similar question, the results were largely the same: Those who were very liberal were much more likely to say it was all right to get welfare benefits you didn’t deserve.

The World Values Survey found that those on the left were also much more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that you know are stolen. Studies have also found that those on the left were more likely to say it was OK to drink a can of soda in a store without paying for it and to avoid the truth while negotiating the price of a car.

And on the article goes, with more and more examples in the same vein. Buy why is this? Well, this is an opinion piece (because the MSM would never touch this with a 10-kilometer pole), so the writer, Peter Schweizer, a Hoover Institution fellow and author of a new book on this subject, actually does some analysis and gives us his take, but based on data, not just out of thin air.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all conservatives are honest and all liberals are untrustworthy. But clearly a gap exists in the data. Why? The quick answer might be that liberals are simply being more honest about their dishonesty.

However attractive this explanation might be for some, there is simply no basis for accepting this explanation. Validation studies, which attempt to figure out who misreports on academic surveys and why, has found no evidence that conservatives are less honest. Indeed, validation research indicates that Democrats tend to be less forthcoming than other groups.

The honesty gap is also not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Ideas, indeed. Post-modern deconstruction of traditional values did not originate from conservatives. And this is even more important, considering what year it is.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

[tags]honest,conservatives,liberals,polls[/tags]

Weekend Fisher at Heart, Mind, Soul, and Strength has in the last week been running a series on spiritual resources for the terminally ill and their caregivers. Now, where I’m placed in my life’s journey has not found me interacting closely with the terminally ill and I’m not naturally very emotive/empathic anyhow. However, it so happens that this Sunday afternoon our choir visited a terminally ill member of our congregation who is (had been) a member of the choir. I hadn’t gotten to know at all over the past year so we haven’t been visiting until now. But … to the point. When we visited we sang a few songs.

As our final song, our choir sang St. Simeon’s prayer (in the west the Nunc Dimittis) :

??? ???????? ??? ?????? ???, ???????, ???? ?? ???? ??? ?? ??????,

??? ????? ?? ???????? ??? ?? ???????? ???,

? ????????? ???? ???????? ?????? ??? ????,

??? ??? ?????????? ????? ??? ????? ???? ??? ??????.

or more usefully, i.e., in English (which is actually how we sang it but some Greek was sung, i.e., the Paschal Toparion)

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word:
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

This is a song well known in Orthodox liturgy as it is part of the Great Vespers service, which in the States is sung every Saturday night.

On the drive home, we were discussing in our family whether this was appropriate to sing in the presence of the dying. I think it is, for that is the precise context of St. Simeon’s urge to speak these words. He has now seen the Christ child and is, as an elderly and likely infirm man … ready to depart … life. The common usage of this song is at the end of a service, and often “now let thy servant depart” is taken as to depart from this place of worship and return to secular life. However, that is now what was meant in the original context. So in that regard, as a song for the dying … it both is appropriate and may provide some comfort.

Comments?

In chapter 19 of the first conferences of St. John Cassian, it is noted that our thoughts have three origins. That the thoughts we perceive come from God, Satan, or ourselves. Discernment is then of crucial importance. What does Abba Moses (the desert ascetic whom St. John is interviewing in the Conferences) say about discretion? Well, he says quite a bit, for he finds that one of the most important virtue for a Christian. One of the things he says is (chapter 10 of the 2nd conference):

The answer how true discretion may be gained.

THEN Moses: True discretion, said he, is only secured by true humility. And of this humility the first proof is given by reserving everything (not only what you do but also what you think), for the scrutiny of the elders, so as not to trust at all in your own judgment but to acquiesce in their decisions in all points, and to acknowledge what ought to be considered good or bad by their traditions. And this habit will not only teach a young man to walk in the right path through the true way of discretion, but will also keep him unhurt by all the crafts and deceits of the enemy. For a man cannot possibly be deceived, who lives not by his own judgment but according to the example of the elders, nor will our crafty foe be able to abuse the ignorance of one who is not accustomed from false modesty to conceal all the thoughts which rise in his heart, but either checks them or suffers them to remain, in accordance with the ripened judgment of the elders. For a wrong thought is enfeebled at the moment that it is discovered: and even before the sentence of discretion has been given, the foul serpent is by the power of confession dragged out, so to speak, from his dark under-ground cavern, and in some sense shown up and sent away in disgrace. For evil thoughts will hold sway in us just so long as they are hidden in the heart: and that you may gather still more effectually the power of this judgment I will tell you what Abbot Serapion did, and what he used often to tell to the younger brethren for their edification.

This is counter to much of protestant praxis, which relies heavily on trusting in your own personal abilities of discernment. The practice of confession, of the spiritual guide/father is one largely lost in the modern Roman church and in even more in the American protestant with the Yankee tradition of self-reliance. Even in Orthodoxy there is a lot of latitude regarding confession and spirtual guidance and traditions widely vary. For myself, I have discovered that the sacrament of confession to be a great joy and help in feeding and strengthening my spirtual life and journey.

My question for my readers is this. Take as granted that discretion is of crucial importance. Then is Abba Moses wrong in what he says about discretion? Is the virtue of humility a prerequisite for discretion? If not, where is Abba Moses error?  And if so … does how your tradition seeks and strengthen your personal virtue of true humility?

Historically, in the Christian church there were “eight grevious or deadly sins” … which Pope Gregory (the Great) the the 6th century dropped the 7th to prune the list to 7. The one dropped ironically can be translated as “self-esteem.” This is ironic in view of the public school’s emphasis on self-esteem as a virtue. It should, I would think, give us today pause to consider that what was for 600 years in the Christian tradition one of the cardinal sins is in the “wisdom”  of our age thought a virtue. Who do you think more Godly, the Coptic ascetics or the modern west?

Commenter Don Trabue had remarked earlier that he had never heard of St. John Chrysostom. It’s likely he, and many other protestant readers, are not aware of St. John Cassian either. His writings, life, and works. Wikipedia has this to say. In part it was the writings of St. John Cassian as excerpted in the Philokalia (and the pdf linked above) that cemented my sojourn from my Western Protestant roots and into Eastern Orthodoxy. Unless I am discouraged by comments or email  I will (sporadically) post entries like this in an attempt to educate and inform readers in the West of Eastern traditions and their Patristic roots.

In the discussions following my ethics post on SCO, I finally realized (comment #17):

You are not arguing for traditional conservative morality, you are arguing for Kantian (moral absolute) deontology. I don’t think Christian meta-ethics are either deontological or teleogical … or absolutist. I think, if pressed, I’d define Christian ethics is pneumatological … but that just occurred to me so I’m going to have to think that through in my next essay.

Modern ethics, wiki tells us, is divided today into deontological and teleological camps, or roughly speaking rule based ethics vs consequence based ethics with some variations. Christian ethics is neither. But then, what is it?

What does my claim that Christian ethics is pneumatological mean. That means, our ethical choices should be inspired by the Spirit (of God). St. Siluan (of St. Siluan the Athonite) suggests that this is, in part, accomplished by striving take  first choice  that springs unbidden to our mind as he believes that is, more often that not, is not from yourself but from the Spirit. Likely as well, one’s prayer life, ascetic struggle, and liturgical/sacramental participation play into that ability of the Spirit to influence you in this way. As well, Scripture and the traditions passed from the Fathers can be a guide for us … when we lack personal inspiration.

Frequent commenter Dan Trabue has several times noted with distaste the idea that he views conservatives (or neo-conservatives whatever they might be) call good, things which he terms “a lesser of evils.” I think this is not just a distinction without difference, in my view of ethics “lesser evil” is a meaningless statement.

I view the study of ethics as a study of the good. When we make a choice (practice ethics) we choose the good. Our view of what is good is defined by our choice. That is to say, my choices define my view, my understanding of what good means. The set of choices that I make in my life, therefore defines and elaborates my (perhaps evolving) view of what good means.

Mr Trabue would like to posit that killing a child is always evil/bad. If one was faced with a trinary ethical choice:

1. Press button A, one child (yours) dies.
2. Press button B, 10 children (foreign) die.
3. Do nothing, all the children and you die.

Pressing button A is not “the lesser evil”, it is a way of defining your view of good. Choice #1 -> less children dying is good), #2 my child is more valuable than those of others because of my prior responsibilities or the value placed on your family, or #3 my active choice to kill is always wrong. You can choose, but whatever you do choose will result by your choice in the death of children and at the same time defines your view of good.

The point is, the choice you make is not a lesser evil, it defines your view of what good means.