A lot of folks have commented on my previous post, Commemorating a Major U.S. War Crime. In the course of the discussion, a number of issues have been raised that I would like to address.

Foremost among them is a foundational principle of Christian morality that quite a number of commenters do not appear to fully appreciate. It is this: One can never do something that is intrinsically evil, period. No circumstances whatsoever can make it morally licit.

That, in fact, is the difference between things that are intrinsically evil and those that are only extrinsically evil. Intrinsically evil things are evil by their own nature, regardless of circumstance, and so they can never be done (per...READ MORE

Friday was the anniversary of the U.S. Bombing of Hiroshima during World War II. Monday is the anniversary of its bombing of Nagasaki.

The explosion of the Fat Man atomic device over Nagasaki is pictured. It rose eleven miles into the sky over Ground Zero.

The important thing, though, is that it—together with the Little Boy device that was deployed over Hiroshima—killed approximately 200,000 human beings. And it ended the war with Japan.

It is understandable that many Americans at the time were relieved that the long burden of the bloodiest war in human history could finally be laid down. Many then, as now, saw the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a necessary step...READ MORE

Proposition 8, the California Marriage Protection Act which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, has been ruled unconstitutional by a judge in California.

And the judge happened to be homosexual.

Big shock, right?

Oh, and the governor of the state of California—Arnold Schwarzenegger—and its attorney general—Jerry Brown—who are tasked with upholding the law of the state of California and who were the original defendants in the case . . . failed to failed to defend the measure in court.

You could knock me over with a feather.

As it’s been said, “The fix was in.”

The outrageous thing here—or one of them—is that biology itself tells you that there is a fundamental difference...READ MORE

Remember how President Obama promised that his health care legislation wouldn’t cover abortion?

Remember all that stuff with the Stupak amendment, which was later abandoned?

Remember how the deal in abandoning the Stupak amendment involved a presidential order that would keep federal dollars from going to abortion?

Remember how pro-life legal experts said the presidential order wasn’t worth the paper it was written on?

Remember all that?

Well, now comes this news:

The Obama administration has officially approved the first instance of taxpayer funded abortions under the new national government-run health care program. This is the kind of abortion funding the pro-life movement warned...READ MORE

A few months ago, during the height of the latest abuse scandal, the Holy See created a new page on its website offering resources documenting the Church’s response to the problem over the last number of years.

HERE’S THE PAGE.

One of the things they put on it was a brief, layman’s guide to the procedures the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith uses in evaluating cases of priestly sexual abusers.

HERE’S THAT DOCUMENT.

One of the things that document did was say that there is a revision underway of the current regulations, which are set forth in a motu proprio called Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela. Specifically, the document said:

For some time the CDF has undertaken a revision...READ MORE

It’s true!!!

Because they were programmed to!

Okay, I know that I normally blog about heavier subjects, but please indulge me in a moment of whimsy.

Recently on my personal blog I did an entry featuring a bit of computer animation I had discovered that offers a fascinating presentation of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (it’s really cool).

But this was not the only animation in the series. There are a lot of them, and one that caught my eye was titled “Bach, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, from Cantata 147 (sung by alien robots).”

Alien robots singing a favorite like Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”? That’s worth checking out.

BTW, here is what the alien robots are singing in...READ MORE

The odds that it is being infringed went down this week when, among other things, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision (.pdf) in which it held that the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms applies not only to the federal government but to state and local governments as well.

Because this isn’t a legal blog, I’m going to pass over the legal intricacies and arguments that the case involved (though they are fascinating) and go to the moral issue in question: Is it a good idea for people to have the right to own guns?

Of course, we are not talking about all people without exception. As the decision in this Supreme Court case as well as the previous one noted, lawmakers...READ MORE

In our previous post on this subject, we looked at the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory currently occupied by the modern state of Israel because they were promised it in the Bible.

We saw that reasonable people could take different views of this subject, especially concerning how such a promise might apply to the present age.

Now let’s look at the question from an ethical rather than a revelatory perspective. That is to say, apart from the revelation claim that we have already examined, what grounds might be offered for the claim.

Before we do that, though, I’d like to clear something up that I think has resulted in some folks spinning their wheels: the term...READ MORE