Briefly on Burying the Hatchet in 2019...

As I have grown older, I have been more conscious of the need in many spheres of life to be a bridge builder not a bridge destroyer. I have always prided myself on being generally pretty good in this area but on those cases when I have gone astray, it is usually not by a small amount. Sin and weakness have played a part in this but I believe through properly conducted dialogue that obstacles can be overcome for those who are of good will.

During Lent, I will make more than the normal degree of effort in this area as befitting the season in question.

Briefly...

Lent is upon us and while there are issues of far greater importance than what I am about to say, I will simply note very briefly that it is profoundly shameful before we start the Lenten season for certain serial provocateurs to try and rekindle old animosities instead of focusing on their own spiritual improvement. But enough on that distasteful stuff.

As far as my preparation for the season goes, among the things I am giving up and the things I will be taking up for this season{1}, one of the latter is that I am actually considering doing some apologetics during Lent. Why? Because I have for so long had a low opinion of most of what passes for apologetics on the web over the years. While ignoring it most of the time has long been what I have done, this Lent I will don a proverbial digital hairshirt and wade into this matter from time to time during the Lenten season as a form of penance.

Note:

{1} As there is more to Lent than just giving stuff up of course.

Points to Ponder:

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief…and unspeakable love. [Washington Irving]

Today would have been the 78th birthday of my father Richard Dunn McElhinney. If readers could offer some prayers for the eternal repose of his soul, I would appreciate it. For those who do not believe in this ancient custom, then prayers for my mother (who still has difficulties on anniversaries such as this) and the rest of the family would be appreciated.



Eternal rest grant unto his soul oh Lord and may thy perpetual light shine upon him...May his soul and all the souls of the faithfully departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

Briefly on the Emerging New Site Formatting:

In the fiddling around with the template, I have decided to include as labels almost all the primary tags for the various archive postings. As I have explained before, all posts to this site have been tagged with primary and secondary tags, the primary is the main classification tag of sorts. There are some primary tags which either are not used anymore or which because of their nature, I simply do not want to include but out of the ones so included you can readily access 3221 of the 3284 published postings in one form or another. Make that 3222 of the 3285 if we include this posting.

Points to Ponder:

Smoking cigars is like falling in love. First, you are attracted by its shape; you stay for its flavor, and you must always remember never, never to let the flame go out!  [Winston Churchill]

Let Children Get Bored Again

Roberts again sides with liberal Supreme Court justices in disagreeing with lower court interpretations

To summarize this situation in sequence courtesy of SCOTUS Blog:

• The Supreme Court had previously ruled 5-4 that the Texas state court needed to revisit the death sentence of an inmate who had been argued had intellectual disabilities which they claimed was not in line with the most recent medical guide on these matters.

• The Texas state court retried the case and again sentenced him to death even after the local district attorney agreed the man was intellectually disabled.

• The case returned to the Supreme Court where the justices were asked to take up the case once again. The claim made was that despite the court's prior rebuke of the Texas lower court that the state basically carbon copied their prior analysis and rubberstamped the same verdict. 

• The local district attorney refused to defend the court decision so the Texas AG office sought to do so.

• The Supreme Court reversed the state court with a second rebuke.

• The Court in reversing the Texas lower court argued that the state court basically ignored their prior rebuke and sent the case back for further proceedings consistent with the opinion rendered by SCOTUS.

• Though he had voted with the minority in 2017, Roberts recognized the scam the state court attempted to pull and wrote a separate opinion concurring with those who voted in the majority last time (sans Kennedy who is retired now) to throw out the death sentence in this case because though he had problems with the prior ruling, it was evident that the lower court here misapplied the prior court ruling from 2017. In short, he was recognizing what is flatly obvious in this case no matter what one thinks of the prior ruling.

• Alito along with Thomas and Gorsuch dissented from the ruling mainly to bitch that the 2017 ruling was not clear enough the first time and to uphold the death penalty sentence. In short, it was a sour grapes dissent from them for not winning on the first go around not an fair accounting of how the Texas lower court thumbed their nose at the Supreme Court's prior ruling in their retrying of the case. In short, Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch were engaging in judicial activism here whereas Roberts (who agreed with their position in principle) was not.

• Kavanaugh did not join either ruling on this one. 

In short, Roberts was right on this where the particulars of this case go after what the Texas lower court did in response to the prior SCOTUS ruling and Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch were wrong.

9-0: SCOTUS Rules That Eighth Amendment’s “Excessive Fines” Clause Applies To The State

I have written on civil asset forfeiture before{1} and it is a major issue with me. I am pleased to see the above unanimous decision of the Supreme Court which will serve as a good foundation for being able to go after civil asset forfeiture abuse at the state level.

Note:

{1} Here is one example from recent years:

Briefly on Civil Asset Forfeiture (circa June 3, 2017)

Points to Ponder:

“We should not have an 'open mind' because that means we grant plausibility to anything, however, we should have a discerning mind." [Mike Mentzer]

Tim Eyman has sponsored a number of good initiatives in Washington state over the years. However, what he did here sullies his reputation as far as I am concerned. The chair stealing is bad enough but lying about it when you are so plainly caught on camera? You are not fooling anyone Timmy boy and your credibility is now shot!

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends. [Shel Silverstein]

Points to Ponder:

"Ninety five percent of what is published on all subjects is hogwash." [Arthur Jones]

Alabama newspaper editor calls for KKK 'to night ride again'

Some parts of Alabama struggle to come into 1970...in 2019!

Points to Ponder:

"Not everything is fit to print. There is to be regard for at least probable factual accuracy, for danger to innocent lives, for human decencies, and even, if cautiously, for nonpartisan considerations of the national interest." [Alexander Bickel]

In perusing some ways to update this website in terms of general theme and other factors, the site may look odd from time to time over the next two weeks. The reason is because I am going to be making changes to this website. There have been site template additions, revisions, etc. throughout the history of this website{1} of course since I settled on a basic outline which I spent no small amount of time on getting the way I wanted it to look.{2} Even then there would be updates from time to time as needed or desired{3} but they were usually additions or omissions to existing structure.{4} In terms of substantial updates, there has been only one since the massive archive tagging project of 2007{5} and one aborted revision attempt in 2008{6} that was ultimately (if memory serves) abandoned and that took place last year. However, even that one did not affect the structure of the website.

The purpose of what is being worked on now will retain some of the more useful elements of the past updates but dramatically alter the appearance of the website. This is being done for at least two reasons:

I have long wanted to change the existing structure appearance as what is there is to my eyes far too dated. However, I have had neither the time nor the requisite knowledge to do it.

The growth of social media since my early Rerum Novarum days has resulted in changes which were not being accounted for in the current structure and a new structure would be needed to better handle that. While I have no intention of starting a new website{7}; at the same time, these realities eventually needed to be faced squarely and I have decided at the present time to do that.

I could probably think of more reasons if I bothered to sit down and do so but what is noted there is sufficient.

So with these notes in mind, this place may become a bit messier before the launch of the new look which I expect will be finalized on or before March 4, 2019.

All things to the contrary notwithstanding.


Notes:

{1} For a recent example, see here.

{2} If memory serves, once I finally got it set up, it took a couple of weeks to get some semblance of a template that I liked.

{3} Though Rerum Novarum has gone through many permutations in its twenty months of existence, major structural adjustments have been rare.[...] Indeed, it is usually only when the previous format no longer succeeds in coping with the expansion of this weblog into various kinds of subject matter that adjustments of this kind are undertaken...

To note a few examples in recent months:
---The disclaimer was revised in April of 2003 in its first paragraph making what was once an ironclad policy into a more general one admitting of exceptions. (And of course the current disclaimer is applicable retroactively in case anyone wondered.) 

...

---At various times searching the archives for particular subject matter (usually to link to a post being written), this writer will find a post in the past where the paragraphs are cluttered or too long. In cases like that, the post will be spread out a bit by making more paragraphs of the original material. (Sometimes moving original material from the body of the text to footnotes.)

---Back in early February of this year, the author of this weblog sought to make the footnoting procedures in the post archives more uniform. This was done by going backwards through the archives and checking for inconsistencies in this area which were corrected...

---A major paradigm shift took place roughly around March of last year when the weblog writer moved to numbers in footnoting and away from astrisk markings. In uniformizing the weblog, this meant changing those notations to the number format that had evolved over the course of time and working backward until everything but roughly the first month or so was altered. (Time constraints preventing that from being tended to at the time.)

---The occasional misspelling being corrected or the occasional phrasing where either (i) a word was found missing or (ii) which read a bit convoluted -usually due to being typed in haste- have of course been corrected as they have been discovered either by this writer or by others. Unlike some weblog personages, this writer never sees a reason to revise previous texts from the archives viz. the arguments advanced. [Excerpts from Rerum Novarum (circa April 12, 2004)]

{4} For example, see footnote one as well as the update from 2017 and and the
four updates from 2018.

{5} See the links located here and here for details.

{6} See the links located here and here for details.

{7} I already did that in 2017 with the Jaded project material. However, for the moment that project is on a defacto haitus.

AOC wants to return to FDR roots of the Democratic Party and WHOA NELLY, this goes badly

I made several deletions from the side margin today including the graph outlining deaths since 9/11, various syndication buttons that were either no longer in existence or obsolete, and removed the St Blogs Webring since that webring is nothing but a ghost town now and has apparently been so for a long time.

More will be forthcoming in soon but I do not have time to go into it right now. 

Revisiting the Subject of Private Revelations:

Though I have written more completely on the subject in years past, the following was occasioned by the words in dark green below. Without further ado...

One often hears it said today that, "Fatima is [merely] a private revelation."  While many subjects who make such statements are well-meaning, and while the assertion is even true in a limited sense, often they are made with the purpose of minimizing the revelations at Fatima to the point of insignificance, by way of suggesting they may be ignored by any Catholic who wishes to do so.

Actually, no one is obligated to believe in any apparition, period. You would be wise to not take this beyond what the Catholic Church teaches on private revelation.

Someone is not more or less Catholic for accepting or rejecting any apparition. If anything, apparitions (even approved ones) can be a pathway to schism or worse when those who are devoted to them in any way place said devotions above their required assent to the Church's Magisterium. (Which is nor optional.)

Apparitions are not to be used as deciding questions of history, natural philosophy, philosophy, or theology and those that do engage in no small amount of abuse of them. (For example, the person on your thread criticizing Pius [XI] and Pius XII for not avoiding WWII and its aftermath because of not "obeying Fatima" or some nonsense like that.) Apparitions can actually do more harm than good unless those that follow them use them correctly. If they are used in any way for more than helping the person renew their own faith through repentance then they are being abused. If they are used as requirements of the Faith by anyone, they are being abused.

Yes, Fatima is merely a private revelation. If you personally find the arguments for it convincing, then you can give it the assent of human faith but that is all. This is what the Church since the time of Benedict XIV has taught on private revelations. It would be advisable not to go beyond that.

Briefly on the Christian Faith:

The words that occasioned this were ones directed at Rod Dreher who was accused of being an apostate. I responded originally as follows:

Apostasy is the repudiation of the Christian faith. Dreher did not do that by swimming the Bosphorus.

As for the rest, my words are in regular font.

Do the "orthodox" churches retain the Christian faith despite their numerous heresies? :)

A better question is, do the so-called "traditionalists"? :o

The answer to your question is yes because the Catholic Church has always recognized the Christian faith in the Orthodox Churches. There is 95+% concurrence in faith albeit often explained differently (as western and eastern theological approaches differ) and the differences boil down oftentimes to interpretations.

For example, the Orthodox believe usually in papal primacy but not in the manner that the west conceives of it, they believe by theological default in the immaculate conception as doctrine not dogma (long story here), they believe in prayers for the dead but not many of the medieval western accredations that are often attached to the dogma of purgatory, etc.

They retain the Christian faith albeit imperfectly. That also applies to the Protestants who though varying from group to group all are far more deficient in the Christian faith than the Orthodox. But the Church recognizes those of good will who profess a belief in the basic Trinitarian doctrines as Christians with varying degrees of deficiencies of course. Heck, she even recognizes the "traditionists" as Christians despite their varying degrees of deficiency too :)