Category: The Dish

The Plight of the Moderate Christian

A reader vents:

I believe I fit your definition of a moderate Christian, but not by choice. You see, proving God’s existence via the glory of a sunset is not enough for me. I want to know his will. Like you, I am intellectually and spiritually attracted to Catholicism (age, apostolic succession, ‘Into Great Silence,’ etc…). What’s holding me back is a few pet issues like contraception.

My wife has type one diabetes with complications. According to her doctor, becoming pregnant could be life threatening (BTW: She is pro-life and would not abort). Therefore, I am faced with a choice: Either accept that God makes his will known through the Magisterium of the Catholic Church (i.e contraception is always bad.), or trust what feels right (i.e. God permits contraception in our case). I can’t be intellectually honest and do both.

I respect your decision to stay in the Catholic church despite your objections. However, the reason for believing that only a Catholic priest can create the Eucharist is the same reason for believing that contraception and homosexual acts are "intrinsically evil." It’s all about church authority/tradition. If I reject the authority of the church on contraception, then I must reject its authority everywhere else. Thus, moderation actually reduces my faith. A fundamentalist has faith that God’s promises will be kept. A moderate desperately hopes that the promises exist in the first place.

Currently, I have no church in which to practice, or justify, my faith. Essentially, I’m a wannabe fundamentalist forced into moderation. This leaves me intellectually stripped of any argument about why my “faith” is more attuned to God’s will than a your average Mormon/Muslim/Amish. Sometimes, when the wind blows just right, I smell the distinct odor of oblivion. There was a time when it blew by unnoticed.

I miss fundamentalism.

I do at times as well. Fundamentalism is much easier in many ways. But rejecting the teachings of the church hierarchy on a minor matter like contraception does not, it seems to me, merit abandoning all confidence in that authority on everything. It’s possible to separate out the core and peripheral teachings of the Church. My test is the Nicene Creed. If I can say that and believe it, the small matter of a few celibates’ view of my sexual orientation is a petty one.

Death Erections And Bayeux

A reader writes:

Regarding your reader’s corrective comment about the nature of the "porn" on the tapestry: I am not a historian, much less a historian of the period and location involved here.  Nor have I actually seen the tapestry in person.  Still, his characterization of the depictions of erections on dead corpses as simply an act of criticism by the female creators of the tapestry strikes me as possibly raw conjecture.  There is a more obvious explanation, which is that the tapestry is depicting some part of the reality of a battle field.  It is a well known fact that violent deaths are often associated with priapism.

An erect penis on a battle field is full of symbolism to both men and women, war mongers and war haters; as much or more so to a people that was unaware of the medical causes.  It is equally possible to me that it was meant as a tribute to the masculinity of the soldiers.  Perhaps mockery or criticism was part of the intention of the tapestry’s creators, but it seems that we are far distant from the event to know what motivated the creators of the tapestry to portray a battle in such a way.

Re-Thinking The War I, Ctd

A reader writes:

You begin your post by writing the following:

"I take as a premise that there is a group of religiously-motivated terrorists attempting to inflict massive damage on the West with minimal resources and maximal impact. I consider this, after 9/11, to be the pre-eminent challenge of the time. And the danger of their acquisition of very seriously destructive weapons is easily the most pressing threat we face."

Perhaps re-thinking the war begins with a more careful examination of this very premise. For instance, there are those who believe that 9/11 was a "perfect storm," a confluence of events that included incompetent airline security on the ground and in the air, an administration who was warned of an impending attack and ignored it, and a number of "what could go wrong, did go wrong" scenarios.  Some would suggest pulling something off of that scale is immensely difficult and unlikely to happen again..

Then there have been numerous intelligence reports that suggest that, within the U.S. borders at least, the threat by religiously-motivated terrorists is surprisingly small. Any cells that have been disrupted turned out not to be anything of much seriousness (remember those who stated as an "aspiration" that they’d like to blow up the Sears Tower?).

Now, as an American-Israeli whose entire families live in Israel and New York, I’m in no way discounting the threat of terror. It is real. It is dangerous. My family and I are all too familiar with it, we’ve been living with since long before 9/11.

What I am suggesting is that where you’ve gone wrong is that you haven’t done enough to examine the PREMISE of your question. Is it a real danger that terrorists can get ahold of seriously destructive weapons? If so, what is the evidence for that? Where would they get these weapons? And how would they use them? What are your sources of information that confirm, based on real evidence, that this is an impending possibility?