Stones Cry Out

In the In the First Circle: The First Uncensored Edition, there is a striking scene that I’d like to highlight. Most of the characters in the book inhabit one of the Moscow Sharaskas in the early 50s. A Sharaska was a special prison camp, unlike the work camps, the conditions of these camps were not so lethal. The conditions, while far far better than in the work camps, was liveable. These camps were primarily for those individuals who had skills, glass-blowing, engineering, electronics, mathematics, and so on that the regime decided to put them to forced work conditions in their speciality in order to further the regime. One of the major projects ongoing in the book was developing a working scrambler/descrambler system for their analog phones.

In the sharaska, the hours were long each day … and the work has very closely supervised by non-prison workers because the prisoners could not be trusted. Yet, apparently the guards and watchers could not be compelled to work the long hours every day and Sunday evening at 6pm until early in the morning Monday the prisoners were locked in and left to their own devices.

For the prisoners a day off meant that the heavy iron doors were locked from the outside, after which no one came in to summon a prisoner or haul him out. For those few short hours not a sound, not a word, not an image could filter through from the outside world to trouble a man’s mind. That was what their day of rest meant — the whole world outside, the universe with all its stars, the planet with its continents, capital cities with their blazing lights, the whole state with some at their banquets and others working voluntary extra shifts, sank into oblivion, turned into an ocean of darkness barely discernible through the barred windows by the dead yellow half-light from the lights on the prison grounds.
[…]
Those who sailed on in the ark were weightless and had only weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor full. They knew no happiness and so felt no anxiety about losing it. Their heads were not busy with trivial professional concerns, intrigues, the struggle for promotion; their shoulders were not burdened with worries about places to live, fuel, bread, and clothing for their children. Love, which has brought man delight and torment from the beginning of time, could neither thrill nor distress them. Their sentences were so long that not one of them as yet gave any thought to the years after his release. Men of remarkable intelligence, education, and experience of life, they had nonetheless been too devoted to their families to leave much of themselves for their friends, but here they belonged only to their friends.
[…]
During those Sunday evening hours, matter and body could be forgotten. The spirit of masculine friendship and philosophy hovvered beneath the canvas vault of the ceiling.
Perhaps this was the bliss all the philosophers of antiquity had striven in vain to identify.

It seems that the prison experience of Solzhenitsyn (not accidentally) reinforces that learned from early Christian experience that ascetic suffering has its own particular rewards.

One final thought to add, from another section. “You have but one life to live” spurred some of the characters (not in the prisons) to seek pleasures, riches, and to enjoy life to the fullest.

We are people who behave naturally,” Dotnara used to say. “We don’t pretend; we wear no disguise. Whatever we want we go all out for!” As they saw it, “We are given only one life” — and so must take from life all that it has to offer.

This is countered …

The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.
Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law; that we are given only one conscience too.

She didn’t just quit her job…

Planned Parenthood has been a part of Abby Johnson’s life for the past eight years; that is until last month, when Abby resigned. Johnson said she realized she wanted to leave, after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure.

"I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it," said Jonhson.

She handed in her resignation October 6. Johnson worked as the Bryan Planned Parenthood Director for two years.

According to Johnson, the non-profit was struggling under the weight of a tough economy, and changing it’s business model from one that pushed prevention, to one that focused on abortion.

"It seemed like maybe that’s not what a lot of people were believing any more because that’s not where the money was. The money wasn’t in family planning, the money wasn’t in prevention, the money was in abortion and so I had a problem with that," said Johnson.

Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions, something the Episcopalian church goer recently became convicted about.

"I feel so pure in heart (since leaving). I don’t have this guilt, I don’t have this burden on me anymore that’s how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion."

…she joined the other side.

Johnson now supports the Coalition For Life, the pro-life group with a building down the street from Planned Parenthood. Coalition volunteers can regularly be seen praying on the sidewalk in front of Planned Parenthood. Johnson has been meeting with the coalition’s executive director, Shawn Carney, and has prayed with volunteers outside Planned Parenthood.

Johnson’s description of the follow-the-money emphasis at PP these days woke her up to the real reason behind the group; not so much pro-choice as actually pro-abortion.  Would that others see it as clearly. 

1. Voting advice.
2. On women’s ordination.
3. Heh.
4. Reformation day, here too.
5. Criticism of IPCC by IPCC.
6. Sharia law in the Maldives.
7. Twitter and the government.
8. Power and threat.
9. Anger and the tongue.
10. Comparisons made.
11. On reading Scripture.
12. Call for a recall.
13. A Jew lauding Christians.
14. On the broken elite.

A couple of recent articles demonstrate just how off-track this august body has become.

First, an opinion article from USA Today that speaks out against UN efforts to criminalize the criticism of religion.  This is as clear-cut a free speech issue as you can get, and the cure is worse than the disease.

Thinly disguised blasphemy laws are often defended as necessary to protect the ideals of tolerance and pluralism. They ignore the fact that the laws achieve tolerance through the ultimate act of intolerance: criminalizing the ability of some individuals to denounce sacred or sensitive values. We do not need free speech to protect popular thoughts or popular people. It is designed to protect those who challenge the majority and its institutions. Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech — the literal sacred institution of society.

You don’t destroy free speech in order to save it.  There are clear exceptions to this rule, but "offense" isn’t one of them.  Thank you, UN

Second is a special report submitted to the UN by its Human Rights Council that has in it a definition of gender that the UN itself has been trying to get enough nations to agree with.  In a report entitled, “Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism” (which clearly involves genders, right?), we find this:

Gender is not synonymous with women but rather encompasses the social constructions that underlie how women’s and men’s roles, functions and responsibilities, including in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity, are defined and understood. This report will therefore identify the gendered impact of counter-terrorism measures both on women and men, as well as the rights of persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. As a social construct, gender is also informed by, and intersects with, various other means by which roles, functions and responsibilities are perceived and practiced, such as race, ethnicity, culture, religion and class. Consequently, gender is not static; it is changeable over time and across contexts. Understanding gender as a social and shifting construct rather than as a biological and fixed category is important because it helps to identify the complex and inter-related gender-based human rights violations caused by counter- terrorism measures; to understand the underlying causes of these violations; and to design strategies for countering terrorism that are truly non-discriminatory and inclusive of all actors.

Emphasis mine.  Is the UN really unaware of biology?  No, they’re just trying to bend it to their will in order to mainstream behaviors that they deem okey dokey.

This is way beyond a big diplomatic table where nations can work out their differences.  As with any political body, they expand to fill any area they wish, not being otherwise constrained.  This is a body badly in need of remaking from the ground up.

1. Advertising humor.
2. On judging others.
3. Something I need to read … but haven’t had time.
4. Wooonderful climate news.
5. Is the White House innumerate … or are they just hoping we are?  (and related from the same source … good stimulus ideas NOT!).
6. The right applauds Mr Obama here and here.
7. A false distinction on presidential fibbery.
8. Strauss and Toqueville.
9. On domestic violence.
10. More on Ms Dunn’s Mao kerfuffle.
11. The UK continues to not get the whole parent thing.
12. Today’s economy and theory.
13. Psychopath and fear.
14. The next big (stupid) health care bill noted. Here too. And here.
15. Now there’s a stupid cricket race. How many people outside the beltway have any clue about the lobby in question?
16. Scuttling Mr Obama.

Well, one benefit of excess time in airports and planes … is I’m getting some sleeping and a lot of reading done. I’ve finished the new uncensored In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and  The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century by Chantal Delsol. The latter of these books pointedly demonstrates that the political and moral philosophies which led to the great human tragedies of the 20th century have not been abandoned. The former highlights life in the maw of one of those tragedies, that being life the “first circle” in Stalin’s gulag hell. Ms Delsol writes (pg 165-6):

The equality of collectivism was a fetish, and now hman rights have been reinvented as a fetish. The twenty-first century wil have to destroy idolized images of the Good just as the ancient iconoclasts destroyed images of God — not that they stopped believing, but they rightly saw these descriptions of God as diminishments that threatened his transcendence. The idolaters in the book of Exodus (20:4-5) prefigure the modern ideologies in the sacralization of the immanent. The texts in the Old Testament on the prohibition of idols, and Kant’s writings on the human ignorance of the Good, stigmatize certain permanent temptations of human thinking, ones that returned in full force in the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. We have yet to call them into question.

[…]

It is, however, difficult to see how the destruction of idols could be accomplished without openness toward the spiritual. The suppression of spiritual referents is precisely what conferred on secular referents their abusive status as absolutes. The return of spiritual referents alone would make possible the destruction of idols: idolatry cannot be avoided except through the recognition of transcendence.

It might be noted, that while Ms Delsol’s essay certainly indicates she is friendly to and appreciative of the Christian religious tradition, to my reading she does not present herself as a member of it. It is also interesting that I flagged this page to note … and with myself being an iconodule.

From Chuck Asay (click for full size):

Does old Europe really want to start really paying for their own defense?  They’ve played with socialism with the money they saved outsourcing their defense to us.  I’m guessing they can’t afford it.

Good morning. Well, I missed a links post … due to spending an inordinate amount of time in transit. Anyhow, here we go.

1. Gender, the president and exercise … as much ado about very little.
2. History and repetition.
3. Being reviled for His name’s sake … is not exactly a bad thing, no?
4. Monasticism and Pharisaism (that is legalism). 
5. For that discussion of virtual church … liturgy and cell phones.
6. The forgotten people.
7. Brides doing weird things.
8. The climate media machine not working so well.
9. Incentives and working.
10. Morals and the olfactory senses … I wonder how Lubyanka smelled.
11. Accountability and US jurisprudence … a question.
12. Terror networking.
13. The administration and education.
14. Asian super-powers.
15. Money for the walking dead.
16. Work and faith.
17. Home and heart.
18. On elections.
19. Hmm … it seems to me Mr Biden’s popularity fades in proportion to how much he is noticed.

A number of posts at Evangel have been touching on the subject of e-Church or having a virtual parish community.

Virtual worship services lack the following features:

• Sacrifice —  A the fundamental aspect of liturgy is sacrifice. The service is our offering to God and part of that sacrifice to God is of our time and our presence. Reducing that sacrifice to sitting before your computer screen in your proverbial pajamas certainly severely diminishes if not eliminates the sacrifice involved. There is also an aspect of “standing to be counted” especially in an increasingly secular world to worship … which when done anonymously and virtually causes that aspect to be eliminates as well. Moses travelled up the mountain to write the tablets. He did not have God “wire” him his message because he could not be bothered to go to God himself.
• Holiness — “Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Liturgy is (or should be) a participation in the Holy. For myself, I fail to see how participation and contact with the Holy can be done by wire.
• Contact with the liturgy and with the community. We have 5 senses. A virtual service may serve, poorly, two (hearing and sight). Touch, taste and smell are sensory channels missing in form the virtual sensory pallet. Humans remain more primitive and essential in our connection with these other senses. Hugging, kissing, touching, even smelling the presence of our neighbour remain an essential part of the human community experience. If the human essence could be reduced to a purely rational floating intellect then virtual community and church might work. Yet man, created in the image of God is not purely rational and the organism and the meat of us is part of that image.
• Isolation in modernity is exacerbated by virtual contact. It is a bug not a feature of the modern world. Moving church to the virtual realm does nothing to reverse this.

How does the concept of virtual church confront these aspects of worship? Why or how do these aspects become inessential?

The latest war between the White House and Fox News has come to a truce, with the Press Secretary of the Nobel laureate for Peace and a senior VP for the news organization (I think I can still call it that) meeting together to call a cease-fire.  The website The Wrap notes, "No word whether the White House will backpedal on its pledge to keep Barack Obama from appearing on the News Corp. network until 2010."

Can’t face Fox, but claims to be able to face off against terrorists.  Indeed.

Heard this thought on right-wing talk radio today (Hugh Hewitt, to be exact):  The polls don’t show that most people are for a public option, it shows that they’re for a public option that doesn’t cost anything. 

I’m for a bigger house.  Doesn’t mean I’m going to (or should) get it.  The polls (or "cricket races" to our own Mark Olsen" show what people think about what they’ve been sold, not necessarily what they’re going to get.  Liberal blogs proclaim that the public wants the public option, when the public has been lied to about that option. 

Just more bread and circuses given away in order to coax the people to give government more power. 

Good morning.

1. In the catalogue of 20th century horror, “the” 1971 genocide is one I missed.
2. Bloggers hoping for release (from prison).
3. Climate change … some time ago (of course caused by early medieval industrial gases).
4. Monetary conflict.
5. A question (or a remark about) the left.
6. faith and knowledge.
7. Of democracy and the world.
8. Looking at cricket races. That particular “race” noted here too. (for those coming late to the party, cricket race is my term for an opinion poll).
9. The end of the (dead tree) press.
10. Mr Chavez.
11. Healthcare and a key question.
12. On All Hallow’s eve.
13. Joe Carter has a question.

Nancy Pelosi called them "immoral".  But by what standard is she measuring them?  Certainly not based on the numbers.

Health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries. As is typical, other health sectors did much better – drugs and medical products and services were both in the top 10.

The railroads brought in a 12.6 percent profit margin. Leading the list: network and other communications equipment, at 20.4 percent.

HealthSpring, the best performer in the health insurance industry, posted 5.4 percent. That’s a less profitable margin than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach and Molson and Coors beers.

The star among the health insurance companies did, however, nose out Jack in the Box restaurants, which only achieved a 4 percent margin.

UnitedHealth Group, reporting third quarter results last week, saw fortunes improve. It managed a 5 percent profit margin on an 8 percent growth in revenue.

It’s been higher in the past, but comparatively speaking, not as big a deal as Democrats have been making them out.

Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.

Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.

Trim those profits, by undercutting them with a public option subsidised by you and me, and help put them out of business.  Quite the Big Government way.

And Obama et. al. know this.  They have all the same data the Associated Press has.  And they’re trying to pull one over on an unsuspecting public.

What we really need, based on the numbers, is socialized Tupperware!  I mean, shouldn’t fresh food and leftovers that last longer be the right of all Americans?  Isn’t fresh food more necessary than health care?  And please, they’re raking in 7.5% profit. The time is now to put all those evil Tupperware parties out of business.

Good morning.

1. Being old fashioned and all.
2. Art.
3. Another prize awarded for freedom of thought.
4. Of Children in the world.
5. The “public’s opinion is irrelevant” … somebody is forgetting the election process.
6. If anybody has links to argument defending the White House on this, I’d be interested.
7. Linked without comment. 😀
8. On TARP, will there be an apology?
9. On Heidigger.
10. Change is hard to do.
11. The canon.
12. Mohler on the ELCA.
13. Connecting contraception and abortion.
14. Logic and abortion.

From CNN, Obama declares H1N1 emergency.

President Obama has declared a national emergency to deal with the “rapid increase in illness” from the H1N1 influenza virus.

“The 2009 H1N1 pandemic continues to evolve. The rates of illness continue to rise rapidly within many communities across the nation, and the potential exists for the pandemic to overburden health care resources in some localities,” Obama said in a statement.

Later, the article states,

Since the H1N1 flu pandemic began in April, millions of people in the United States have been infected, at least 20,000 have been hospitalized and more than 1,000 have died, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Yet, Michael Fumento writes, in Swine Flu Piglet ‘Pandemic’,

…total deaths since Aug. 30 from “Influenza and Pneumonia-Associated” illness are 2,029 reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Web site FluView. But only 292 of those have been laboratory-confirmed as flu of any type. (And yes, people die of pneumonia from many causes other than flu.) By comparison, the CDC estimates about 260 Americans die each day from “regular” flu during each season.

While our first inclination might be to ask, “What’s going on here?”, perhaps we should, instead, be concerned with what might happen in the future if we come face to face with a genuine wolf.