Veritas Forum

Hat tip to Jimmy Akin for highlighting this story about scientists working to create sperm out of women's bone marrow.

"British scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life.

The breakthrough paves the way for lesbian couples to have children that are biologically their own.

Gay men could follow suit by using the technique to make eggs from male bone marrow."

"Greg Aharonian, a U.S. analyst who is trying to patent the technologies behind female sperm and male eggs, said he wants to undermine the argument that heterosexual marriage is superior because it is aimed at procreation. "I'm a troublemaker," he said."

Here's an interesting item, "Is There Anything Good About Men?" Psychologist Roy F. Baumeister delivered this speech at the American Psychological Association meeting this year. While he comes from a naturalist perspective I think he largely makes accurate observations and gives a compelling case for the existence of and benefits of sex differences. Of course I think Christian ontological understandings, namely the doctrine of the Imago Dei, offer a better explanation for the existence of such differences. But that's a longer discussion.

Tony Woodlief had a great article in last Friday's Opinion Journal, "Boys to Men: Raising Three Sons Has Helped Me Appreciate the Masculine Virtues." He considers the challenges of his experience raising three boys still under the age of ten and the wonders of their wildness. While manliness cannot be reduced to manly skills, those skills are often necessary to the accomplishment of manly enterprises. Despite the many books he read on the cruelty of manliness he has been left unconvinced.

I can't shake the sense that boys are supposed to become manly. Rather than neutering their aggression, confidence and desire for danger, we should channel these instincts into honor, gentlemanliness and courage. Instead of inculcating timidity in our sons, it seems wiser to train them to face down bullies, which by necessity means teaching them how to throw a good uppercut. In his book "Manliness," Harvey Mansfield writes that a person manifesting this quality "not only knows what justice requires, but he acts on his knowledge, making and executing the decision that the rest of us trembled even to define." You can't build a civilization and defend it against barbarians, fascists and playground bullies, in other words, with a nation of Phil Donahues.

Maybe the problem isn't that boys are aggressive, but that we've neglected their moral education. As Teddy Roosevelt wrote to one of his sons: "I would rather have a boy of mine stand high in his studies than high in athletics, but I would a great deal rather have him show true manliness of character than show either intellectual or physical prowess." Manliness, then, is not the ability to survive in the wilderness, or wield a rifle. But having such skills increases the odds that one's manly actions--which Roosevelt and others believed flow from a moral quality--will be successful.

The good father, then, needs to nurture his son's moral and spiritual core, and equip him with the skills he'll need to act on the moral impulse that we call courage. A real man, in other words, is someone who doesn't run from an Osama bin Laden. But he may also need the ability to hit a target from three miles out with a .50 caliber M88 if he wants to finish the job.

...

The trick is not to squash the essence of boys, but to channel their natural wildness into manliness.

Manly assertion is the quality that controls and directs manly aggression. But manly assertion must be groomed and nurtured and it must be grown in the right direction, toward a moral end. Mr. Woodlief is spot on.

I've got a column up today, on a subject I've been mulling over a bit of late.

I found this NYT article encouraging, “My First Lesson in Motherhood.” The author, a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter and her husband set to adopt a child from China. When they receive the child in China, they find that she has severe medical problems that the adoption agency failed to mention, including spinal damage. The adoption agency offers to exchange that baby for another. The couple refuses and takes the child back to America. Within a few days the child goes into seizures and is rushed to the hospital where doctors discover what they believe to be an atrophic brain.

Upon further examination over the next day doctors find that all is well, there is no brain damage and no spinal problems. That was two years ago and the little girl is as healthy as could be. The author sums up the fiaso well:

Sometimes when I’m rocking her to sleep, I lean down and breathe in her breath, which now smells of bubble-gum toothpaste and the dinner I cooked for her while she sat in her highchair singing to the dog. And I am amazed that this little girl is mine.

It’s tempting to think that our decision was validated by the fact that everything turned out O.K. But for me that’s not the point. Our decision was right because she was our daughter and we loved her. We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.

One factor that's shaped my ponderings on contraception is that of all the people who have thought about it seem to be on the anti-contraception side. I haven't seen any deep theological considerations from the pro-contraception folks, just the assumption that it's common, convenient, and not specifically condemned in scripture. Does anyone know of an orthodox theologian who's put together a defense of contraception?

Well, BB Mckee says if I "knew what the h**l" I'm talking about, I should be able to explain the soul in terms a redneck could understand. I may not know what I'm talking about, but I give you "A Filosofikal Treetees on the Soul" by Billy Bob.

Peoples talk about us havin’ body and soul. Some think the soul is somethin different--somethin invisible like. But some folks think the soul and the body are the same thing. Now myself I think the soul is different, but very very closely related. Ya see, the soul and the body go together like stink on poop.

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Never ceases to be a point of contention. I managed to get myself into a minor skirmish on my friend's blog.

Jeff Jacoby has a great column today pointing out the little-noted fact the lawful incest is coming (sorry that the link doesn't go directly to his column, but it's blocked by our anti-spam software and I don't want to do the digging needed to unblock it). Indeed, it's already here in parts of Europe. The legal problem goes back to Griswold and substantive due process.

Griswold was about contraception, of course, but the decision reached set the foundation for the view that the bedroom cannot be regulated. Bestiality? Questions about its morality and legality are now acceptable discussion fare in The Washington Post and the New York Times.

Also, evangelical protestants need to rethink their acceptance of contraception. If it isn't intrinsically immoral (the Catholic position), it is nonetheless harmful, both to the individual and society.

Discontent with only raising the ire of the campus paper, our very own Nathanael Blake has gathered criticism on national TV! He's a written a couple of commentaries on the VT shooting incident here and here. This prompted Kieth Olbermann to give him the silver medal in his Worst Person Awards.

Hey Shawn, I’ve been mulling over your comments.

What really interests me are what our sensations will actually “feel” like. Thomas Nagel wrote a very famous philosophical paper “What is it like to be a bat?” His primary point was the difficulty in reducing first person experiences to third person knowledge (i.e. physically observable states). And that’s not the point of the article that relates to this discussion

Instead, I want to focus on the difference in qualia between our fallen sensations and our risen heavenly sensations. Just as there is a radical difference between our sensations and a bat’s sensations, there is a certain difference between our bodies now and what they will be. It is hard to imagine how a bat feels. similarly it is hard to imagine how a Heavenly human will feel.

When you speculate that our sense of “pain” may only be “minor discomfort” you may very well be correct. Or maybe we won’t actually experience “pain” in any way that we are accustomed to. Maybe Homer Simpson is right, when he hits himself on the head with a bat while in Heaven, “Woah, up here that feel good!”

While fighting in the trenches, Walter Hooper was first introduced to C.S. Lewis through two elderly women who kindly mailed books to him. He devoured every word. “If a book can keep your attention above all that racket, it must be a very good book,” He said. Later when Bob Jones (yes that Bob Jones) visited their base chapel, Hooper couldn’t resist asking his opinion of Lewis. “That man,” replied Jones, “smokes a pipe. That man drinks liquor. But, I do believe he is a Christian.”

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This, from our good buddy Shawn

Excellent post Andrew,
I too have thought along these lines. Not only can pleasure and happiness only be truly felt in contrast to pain, so too love is shown as light against the darkness of hate or indifference.

In Revelation 21:4 we are told "and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away."

To me, the pain he speaks of is pain resulting from sin. This can be emotional, spiritual, mental or physical. So in a sinless eternity I can look forward to not having such pain. However, it is within my comprehension, and my interpretation of the verse, to see that we could still experience pain that does not result from sin, such as pain from a long run or exercise, pain from stubbing my toe on accident or from going too long to eat. Now I use pain in a broad sense, in a world without death these feelings would be more of discomfort. Nothing in all God's word leads me to believe these feelings have to be excluded form eternity.

In fact, what I believe in God leads me to believe we will still get hunger pains, if for no more reasons than to remind us we are still eternally dependant (lest we grow proud after millenia) and to more fully feel the joy of excellent heavenly food (and alcohol) :-). And thus I could also conclude feeling a sensation of being tired or worn out, for surely even in a perfect state God could see fit to require me to rest as He did on the seventh day of creation.

As you excellently point out, we will have bodies. We will be gods, but certainly not Gods, and thus constantly still in dependence on the Creator. It is true our bodies will never fail, but surely God could design them such that they still need to be recharged. The cycle of rain upon this earth has not failed from the flood until now, and neither shall it fail until the day of God, but yet it still needs to be constantly recharged with vapor. A perfect system can still need recharging and thus stimuli that demands recharging without us concluding falt or sin in the system.
-Shawn

Last month, J.C. and I attended a presentation Dr. J. Budziszewski gave to the Catholic Longhorns for Life. He mentioned hydraulic logic gates in the context of social change, but lately I’ve begun to think of their applicability to the individual. When reflecting on the amazing power of our mental, spiritual, and subconscious world, I started realizing that we are basically hydraulic logic gates. After all, we are 70% water, right? He he, ok seriously though...

Me with Dr. J. Budziszewski

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I offer this, not as something I have well thought out, but merely as some thoughts off the top of my head. In a recent discussion with a friend, we talked about the unfathomable mysteries of the after life--heaven and everlasting existence.

I can imagine always being. However, I can't imagine having always been since I, at one time, never was But the thought of continuing to age doesn't seem to require reflection beyond our everyday experience. What astounds me, is that in the here after we will still be human.

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Harold Meyerson, the little creeping venomed thing that slithers about the Washington Post's op-ed pages, has a particularly loathsome column today. He argues that since it seems likely that there is a biological component to homosexual inclination, religious prohibitions against homosexuality are contradictory.

how to reconcile a God who creates homosexuals with a God who condemns practicing homosexuals to hell? A mysterious God may be well and good, but a capricious or contradictory God can inspire so much doubt that He threatens the credibility of the entire religious enterprise.

This is ridiculous, and I suspect Meyerson knows it (if he doesn’t, he’s far too stupid to be an op-ed columnist for a leading paper like the Washington Post, and ought to write for some rag without standards, like The New York Times). Theologians dealt with his sort of objection centuries ago. The fact that someone’s physical and spiritual natures tend toward sin hardly means that God created us so. There’s a doctrine in Christianity that Meyerson may have heard of, generally known as “the Fall,” that addresses this. It turns out that because of sin (resulting from the free will that allows men to choose ill), and the consequences of sin continuing throughout the ages, none of us are as God meant us to be.

Meyerson may be a creeping venomed thing with a penchant for intellectually dishonest columns, but God didn’t make him that way, sin did. And sin made me pretty wretched too (I’ll let someone else choose the Shakespearian insult they think best suits me). Meyerson’s problem is not that he finds the theology unconvincing, but that he won’t repent. He’s angry at the idea of sin, that humans need redemption by God, that we have to admit fault and can’t save ourselves.

My friends and I down here in Tejas have started a philosophy club If anyone would like to follow along with our program, our first month's reading is W.K.C. Guthrie's The Sophists.

Touchstone Magazine has a good article on the temptation of the "Third Way" in politics and why it is often the road to hell.

My latest Liberty piece has drawn some fire in the Barometer. What's facinating is just how much of an intellectual idiot this fellow is; despite (or perhaps because of) being a senior in poli sci, he can't even keep his philosophical categories straight.

Enjoy.

Update: I see that Andrew has also joined the fray on my side. Good times, good times. And if anyone links back from the Baro, welcome to our (very) humble blog.

Update 2: I'm done with this piece, but Sullivan still doesn't get it, and keeps wasting his typing energy (it's painfully funny to watch). He just can't understand why his decision that familiar philosophical terms suddenly mean something entirely different from what everyone else thinks they mean would make conversation with him impossible, or at least difficult and annoying enough that I'm not wasting any more time on it.

A long and painfully true post over on First Things, discussing Friends of God, the documentary by Alexandra Pelosi (daughter of Nancy Pelosi).

"Although incomplete, it’s a fair picture. Pelosi simply drives around with her camcorder and asks us questions, letting us speak for ourselves. And the portrait she assembles is put together kindly and without malice. I think her documentary is a gift. We all need to see it. It’s a gift from the Lord. But it’s a deeply painful gift."

"We, “us,” the Evangelicals with the capital E, have become thoughtless, sensualistic braggarts. For some time, we’ve been accused of being simply thoughtless–an unfair charge (Jonathan Edwards was an evangelical after all) but a charge with some truth to it. But what doctrinal rigor we might have had has been progressively smothered by sensuality draped with arrogant irresponsibility. We don’t think; we feel. If it feels right, it’s the Lord’s working, and if it’s the Lord’s working, we can be proud of it. Pelosi lays it all out for us to see."

Read it all.