Who Are You When I'm Not Looking?

My oh my, you're so good looking
Hold yourself together like a pair of bookends
But I've not tasted all you're cooking
Who are you when I'm not looking

Do you pour a little something on the rocks
Slide down the hallway in your socks
When you undress, do you leave a path
Then sink to your nose in a bubble bath

My oh my, you're so good looking
Hold yourself together like a pair of bookends
But I've not tasted all you're cooking
Who are you when I'm not looking

I wanna know, I wanna know, I wanna know

Do you break things when you get mad
Eat a box of chocolate cause you're feeling bad
Do you paint your toes 'cause you bite your nails
And call up mama when all else fails

Who are you when I'm not around
When the door is locked and the shades are down
Do you listen to your music quietly
And when it feels just right are you thinking of me

I wanna know, I wanna know, I wanna know

My oh my, you're so good looking
But who are you when I'm not looking

New URL

I plan on changing the URL of my blog sometime in the near future, but I wanted to give you guys a fair warning ahead of time.

The new, but as of yet non-existent, URL will be www.butterfliesandmemories.blogspot.com.

The House That Built Me

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it, this brokenness inside me might start healing. Out here it's like I'm someone else. I thought that I might find myself. If I could just come in, I swear I'll leave. I won't take nothing but a memory, from the house that built me.

Me-Shirts

This week, I happened upon many, many t-shirts which I would be proud to wear. As a college student, I feel it my right, née my duty, to display such fashion brain-children for the world to see. This one ------>
needs no explanation.














We move on to the band section, with Adam Young and his alter genius Owl City representing.
Note that this is indeed the last pressing of this shirt. However, I trust the majority of you can manipulate a iron effectively and will therefore not become downheartened.







That WAS a joke.

And for the grand finale, everyone's favorite, the dashing (fake) literary hero, Fitzwilliam
!!!!!!!

*wild applause*

The end.

Meredith Schlabach Photography

Look

Love:

Hollywood - Michael Buble

The Eternal Flame of Muslim Outrage

by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

Shhhhhhh, we’re told. Don’t protest the Ground Zero mosque. Don’t burn a Koran. It’ll imperil the troops. It’ll inflame tensions. The “Muslim world” will “explode” if it does not get its way, warns sharia-peddling imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Pardon my national security-threatening impudence, but when is the “Muslim world” not ready to “explode”?

At the risk of provoking the ever-volatile Religion of Perpetual Outrage, let us count the little-noticed and forgotten ways.

Just a few months ago in Kashmir, faithful Muslims rioted over what they thought was a mosque depicted on underwear sold by street vendors. The mob shut down businesses and clashed with police over the blasphemous skivvies. But it turned out there was no need for Allah’s avengers to get their holy knickers in a bunch. The alleged mosque was actually a building resembling London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. A Kashmiri law enforcement official later concluded the protests were “premeditated and organized to vitiate the atmosphere.”

Indeed, art and graphics have an uncanny way of vitiating the Muslim world’s atmosphere. In 1994, Muslims threatened German supermodel Claudia Schiffer with death after she wore a Karl Lagerfeld-designed dress printed with a saying from the Koran. In 1997, outraged Muslims forced Nike to recall 800,000 shoes because they claimed the company’s “Air” logo looked like the Arabic script for “Allah.” In 1998, another conflagration spread over Unilever’s ice cream logo — which Muslims claimed looked like “Allah” if read upside-down and backward (can’t recall what they said it resembled if you viewed it with 3D glasses).

Even more explosively, in 2002, an al-Qaida-linked jihadist cell plotted to blow up Bologna, Italy’s Church of San Petronio because it displayed a 15th century fresco depicting Mohammed being tormented in the ninth circle of Hell. For years, Muslims had demanded that the art come down. Counterterrorism officials in Europe caught the would-be bombers on tape scouting out the church and exclaiming, “May Allah bring it all down. It will all come down.”

That same year, Nigerian Muslims stabbed, bludgeoned or burned to death 200 people in protest of the Miss World beauty pageant — which they considered an affront to Allah. They shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” And “Down with beauty!” And “Miss World is sin!” Contest organizers fled out of fear of inflaming further destruction. When Nigerian journalist Isioma Daniel joked that Mohammed would have approved of the pageant and that “in all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from among them,” her newspaper rushed to print three retractions and apologies in a row. It didn’t stop Muslim vigilantes from torching the newspaper’s offices. A fatwa was issued on Daniel’s life by a Nigerian official in the sharia-ruled state of Zamfara, who declared that “the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed. It is abiding on all Muslims wherever they are to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty.” Daniel fled to Norway.

In 2005, British Muslims got all hot and bothered over a Burger King ice cream cone container whose swirly-texted label resembled, you guessed it, the Arabic script for “Allah.” The restaurant chain yanked the product in a panic and prostrated itself before the Muslim world. But the fast-food dessert had already become a handy radical Islamic recruiting tool. Rashad Akhtar, a young British Muslim, told Harper’s Magazine how the ice cream caper had inspired him: “Even though it means nothing to some people and may mean nothing to some Muslims in this country, this is my jihad. I’m not going to rest until I find the person who is responsible. I’m going to bring this country down.”

In 2007, Muslims combusted again in Sudan after an infidel elementary school teacher innocently named a classroom teddy bear “Mohammed.” Protesters chanted, “Kill her, kill her by firing squad!” and “No tolerance — execution!” She was arrested, jailed and faced 40 lashes for blasphemy before being freed after eight days. Not wanting to cause further inflammation, the teacher rushed to apologize: “I have great respect for the Islamic religion and would not knowingly offend anyone, and I am sorry if I caused any distress.”

And who could forget the global Danish cartoon riots of 2006 (instigated by imams who toured Egypt stoking hysteria with faked anti-Islam comic strips)? From Afghanistan to Egypt to Lebanon to Libya, Pakistan, Turkey and in between, hundreds died under the pretext of protecting Mohammed from Western slight, and brave journalists who stood up to the madness were threatened with beheading. It wasn’t really about the cartoons at all, of course. Little-remembered is the fact that Muslim bullies were attempting to pressure Denmark over the International Atomic Energy Agency’s decision to report Iran to the UN Security Council for continuing with its nuclear research program. The chairmanship of the council was passing to Denmark at the time. Yes, it was just another in a long line of manufactured Muslim explosions that were, to borrow a useful phrase, “premeditated and organized to vitiate the atmosphere.”

When everything from sneakers to stuffed animals to comics to frescos to beauty queens to fast-food packaging to undies serves as dry tinder for Allah’s avengers, it’s a grand farce to feign concern about the recruitment effect of a few burnt Korans in the hands of a two-bit attention-seeker in Florida. The eternal flame of Muslim outrage was lit a long, long time ago.

The Art of Howard David Johnson

"Brigit, Gaelic Goddess of Poetry"

"Queen Cinderella"

"The Lady of Shallott"

"If I Die Young"

Sopapilla Cheesecake

Ingredients:
8 oz Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese (Softened)
1 cup sugar
1 Tbsp vanilla
2 cans Pillsbury Crescent Rolls
1 stick butter
2 Tbsp sugar combined with 1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla in a bowl with a mixer. Set aside. Unroll and press 1 can of crescent roll dough in bottom of 13x9" glass baking dish. Spread cream cheese mixture on top evenly. Arrange second can of crescent roll dough on top of mixture to cover cream cheese. Melt stick of butter in microwave. Pour butter on top of crescent rolls. Sprinkle cinnamon-sugar mixture over all. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes in preheated oven.

It's best warm, but I have eaten it cold (for breakfast) as well. The cream cheese, sguar, and vanilla mixture also works well as a fruit dip.

Like We Used To

Recipe for Catharsis

Problem: Anger with one or more parties

Solution: Take 1 best friend (preferably male) and have him describe in excruciating, thrilling detail how he will proceed to beat up and render penitent the object of said anger.

It works.

Mirror-Touch Synesthesia

http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/synesthesia.htm

Perhaps you've seen someone bump their head or stub a toe and thought, "That had to hurt." Well, for some people, watching such an event actually does hurt. An unknown number of people have mirror-touch synesthesia, a condition that causes them to feel the touches that they see others receive. For example, if a mirror-touch synesthete sees someone touched on the cheek, she will feel as if her own cheek has been touched.

Photographer: Geotrac/Agency: Dreamstime ­A mirror-touch synesthete could feel pain from watching someone receive a shot.

Like the name implies, there is a mirror effect involved. Say a mirror-touch synesthete is standing opposite someone. If the non-synesthete is hit in the right arm, the synesthete will feel it in her left arm. If the two are standing next to each other, contact with the non-synesthete's right arm will be felt in the synesthete's right arm.

Mirror-touch synesthesia is believed to be caused in part by mirror neurons, which produce an extremely developed sense of emotional empathy. Mirror neurons activate when an individual is performing an activity or, to a lesser extent, when an individual is watching someone perform an activity. People who have mirror-touch synesthesia have very active mirror neurons, meaning that the effect is greatly enhanced. They not only empathize with the pain of others -- often it feels to synesthetes as if the pain is also being applied to them as well.

Besides feeling the pain and touches of others, mirror-touch synesthetes often are very in touch with the feelings of others. Many claim no understanding of how people can laugh at others' misfortune, and action and horror movies are too unbearable to watch.

In 2003, Sarah Jane-Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at­ University College London, was giving a lecture during which she mentioned that she had heard that some people could feel contact, such as a pinch, that they only observed. A 39-year-old woman at the event responded that she thought all people experienced that. For her entire life, this woman hadn't known that her mirror-touch synesthesia was unusual. Researchers later discovered that 11 of the woman's relatives had another type of synesthesia known as color-grapheme synesthesia.

Recent studies have shed more light on the phenomenon, including one published in the June 2007 issue of the journal "Nature Neuroscience." The study, performed by UCL researchers Jamie Ward and Michael Banissy, used brain scans, touch tests and questionnaires to detect mirror-touch synesthesia in 10 subjects. Brain scans showed hyperactivity in certain areas of the brain when mirror-touch synesthetes saw someone being touched. In touch tests, supposed mirror-touch synesthetes more often mistook observed touch for having the touch applied to themselves.

Further research about mirror-touch synesthesia could lead to discoveries about other empathy-related conditions such as schizophrenia, Asperger's syndrome and autism. For example, one symptom of autism is difficulty understanding the emotions of others. Learning why some people are highly sensitive to others' emotions could teach us more about those who aren't.

At its most basic level, synesthesia is a mixing of the senses. The term derives from the Greek words "syn" (together) and "aesthesia" (sensation). There are four main types of synesthesia, but even these can be difficult to separate or may be found together in one person.

• Color-grapheme synesthesia - colors are associated with numbers, words or letters
• Sound-color synesthesia - sounds are associated with colors
• Word-taste synesthesia - words are associated with tastes
• Taste-touch synesthesia - tastes are associated with physical sensations

In some cases, people also associate letters or words with colors and qualities. For example, the letter 'E' could be red, jagged and powerful. Some synesthetes also cite letters, months or days of the week as having three-dimensional qualities.

©2007 HowStuffWorks Someone with color-grapheme synesthesia may associate a color with each letter of the alphabet.

Despite various hypotheses, the causes of synesthesia are still unknown, though it's believed to have a hereditary association. Researchers believe that it's found in one out of every 100 or 200 people and is more common in women and left-handed people.

Like the mirror-touch synesthete who thought everyone was like her or people who go years without knowing that they are color-blind, some synesthetes may not even think they're different at all. That may especially be true for developmental synesthetes, those who have had synesthesia all their lives. Others can develop what's known as acquired synesthesia, which can be caused by drug use or brain injuries.

Learn More Science Channel: Famous Synesthetes

­For those who have it, synesthesia can be useful. Synesthetic associations can boost memory abilities, and numerous artists, musicians, writers and other creative types have cited their synesthesia as an important component in their work. While some famous suspected synesthetes haven't been confirmed, here are some prominent people who have or had synesthesia:

• Duke Ellington (jazz musician)
• Richard Feynman (physicist, Nobel Prize winner)
• David Hockney (painter)
• Wassily Kandinsky (painter)
• Franz Liszt (composer, conductor, pianist)
• Vladimir Nabokov (writer, lepidopterist)
• Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (composer)
• Pharrell Williams (musician, producer)

All the Faint Lights

The Thirteenth Tale

(Summary from the inside cover)

"All children mythologize their birth...So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist.

The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself -- all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission.

As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire.

Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life."

This is the second time I've read this book, and the intrigue was just as mesmerizing the second time around. It's strange, but the best, most interesting strange I've ever read.

Why Victoria Cries on Mondays

People can be divided into two categories: those are responsible, and those who aren't. We all know who the responsible ones are: they get a doctor's check-up once a year, their trash is always at the end of the drive on trash day, and they never miss a single birthday (even those in the extended family, both sides). They are the ones everyone points to and says "Your life should be like theirs." We shall refer to the responsible ones as "Cousin Victoria".

Then there are the ones who are not responsible (also known as the irresponsible ones). These are given to fits of randomness in the most epic proportions, and very rarely keep a planner anywhere close by. We shall refer to the irresponsible ones as Cousin Joe. No one is going to call up Cousin Joe when Grandma gets sick and needs someone to live with her. Cousin Joe can be further broken up into two persona: the alcoholic, good-for-nothing, dies-at-31 Joe, and lovable, free spirit, always-has-a-friend-just-down-the-block Joe.

Young adults, I have noticed, are strongly urged to model their lives after sainted Cousin Victoria. I have yet to hear any teenager being encouraged to follow in the footsteps of Cousin Joe. Either one.

While I am not encouraging anyone to imitate the first Cousin Joe, it seems the second Cousin Joe has discovered the solutions to a few life mysteries.

Have you ever noticed that Cousin Joe (the Second) is generally a very happy soul? Yes, he has no money. Yes, he is unmarried. Yes, he is labeled as a hippie (and not in a good way). But! Joe is happy, and Joe loves life.

See, the common misconception is that Joe (the Second) has no responsibilities (I think we all agree that Joe the First does not). But Joe actually does. Hence, 'misconception'. His responsibilities are just different from Victoria's.

Victoria is working her butt off to make her life as long and happy as possible. But the emphasis is on the 'long'. Joe, on the other hand, is working his butt off to make his life happy. Period. Victoria might be the one with no cavities, but Joe is the one who gets to enjoy that perfect creamy cheesecake. After all, we don't need our teeth a whole lot in the after-life.

The moral of this story? Too often, we are responsible for the wrong things. We are so worried about 401Ks and the effects of good old sunshine on our skin that we forget why we're working so hard in the first place. We forget to enjoy the life we're striving to preserve.

It comes down to this: If enjoying life means spending the summer dancing in the rain and talking with my best friend for three hours about that wonderful book in Starbucks, as opposed to stressing over the perfect college and finding the perfect job, so be it. I want to create memories, not migraines.

The Language that Rose from the Dead

The Language that Rose from the Dead
by Rev. Randall Paine

"A language must die to be immortal"

When it comes to expressing the eternal and immutable truths of the Christian faith, the only good language is a dead language.
Chesterton once made a disarming retort to the customary detraction of Latin as a "dead" language. He simply remarked that to say this is not a detraction at all, for quite in contrast to the detractor's intentions, it throws into profile the clear ascendancy of Latin over all the "living" languages of today. "It is the question of a dead language and a dying language. Every living language is a dying language, even if it does not die. Parts of it are perpetually perishing or changing their sense; there is only one escape from that flux; and a language must die to be immortal."

Yes, indeed, pagan Latin eventually bit the dust, and the Western mind turned with relish to the new throng of spawning tongues which began to mottle the linguistic map of Europe. Among them, the intense lucidity of French, the irresistible bounce of Italian, the vehement velocity of Spanish, and the nasal sincerity of Portuguese entered upon their long evolutions, each of them drawing a thousand voices of secular discourse into their new constellations of emphases. But the golden tongue of Cicero was on its way out, and along with the Empire whose body was dismembered and put to seed for a new garden of nations, that ancient tongue was almost buried too.

But then came one of those bizarre turns in human history that makes us wonder just how human it really is. After Rome had lost its imperial dignity to Byzantium, and furthermore taken the moral nosedive of soaking its arenas in Christian blood, it would have surprised no one had the last dying syllables of the Empire's language remained inaudible to history. But at the opening of the 5th Century, the idiom that once vibrated on the tongue of Cato was strongly and brilliantly ringing out again and in the very midst of the collapsing walls of the Empire. The Vandals had moved into northern Africa from Spain, and in twenty years time would sally northwards and sack the imperial capital itself. Meanwhile, within the African walls of Hippo, St. Augustine was penning the last chapters of The City of God and must have looked up from his desk every few minutes or so, wondering if Genseric's hordes were going to bring his episcopal residence down on his head. With the grace of God, he finally brought his book to an end, but in the interim, the Vandals had also brought Hippo to an end.

Latin died to the world This was in 430. Just years before, St. Jerome had completed his Latin translation of the Bible, destined to become the most influential Biblical text ever. St. Jerome did his work largely in Palestine, as St. Augustine had in Africa. But in Rome itself, where the Hellenized Jewish converts had arrived with the Good News from Palestine, many of them turned their energies to the translation of the Greek Gospel and liturgy into a Latin the waning Romans could understand. The language was dying, but the souls of those who still spoke it were nonetheless in need of salvation.

Roman civilization went on and died; the last emperor unceremoniously left the scene in 476. But paradoxically, the heart of Latin was still beating strongly, and its conjugations and declinations were carried on the breath of a new host of talkers.

To everyone's surprise, there rose upon the field of this purely instrumental effort something like a linguistic renaissance, as a host of prefaces, collects, orations, secrets, and post-communions grew into what is known to us today as the Leonine Sacramentary. Roman civilization went on and died; the last emperor unceremoniously left the scene in 476. But paradoxically, the heart of the Latin language was still beating strongly, and its conjugations and declinations were carried on the breath of a new host of talkers. But there was a difference: for what these men were talking about was something hitherto unheard of on the street corners of history, and statements were being made that no period of Cicero's had even remotely embraced.

This is Chesterton's point. The Latin language died, indeed, but the death it died it died to the world. In the small enclave of the Christian Church, the same language experienced nothing less than a miraculous resurrection; and the analogy can be pursued to the end. The bloodless carcass of the language, filled to the skin with the earthbound schemes of the ancients, could no longer respond to the soul of paganism; like every merely natural body, the life that had sustained it was merely mortal. So history slowly drug it off to the grave, that one more might be added to the thousand withered tongues of time.

But then came Latin's Easter sunrise; for after the Gospel of Christ had been rejected by the Jews, the Prince of the Apostles sealed his witness to the Master by reddening a hill in Rome we now call the Vatican. And then, like a hurricane abruptly changing course, the full fury of Christ's message turned itself suddenly and excitedly upon this prostrate language of the Romans, and, lifting a hand over its lifeless heap of words--all of them tongue-tied by centuries of unanswered questions--it cried out, "Ephphatha!"--and the tongue was loosed, and Christian Latin began to speak to the world.

We will never appreciate the enormous importance of the Latin language for our Church and our faith until we grasp the supernatural character of what I have just described. We grow so limp and woolly in our use of intellect when anyone scares us with slogans like "historical conditions" or "cultural coordinates"; we vaguely agree with we know not what and overlook the most obvious features in the Church's past, such as this one: in Christ, history itself was conditioned by God, and nothing, including language, has looked the same since.

And then, like a hurricane abruptly changing course, the full fury of Christ's message turned itself suddenly and excitedly upon this prostrate language of the Romans.

The Church did not adopt Latin just because it was a ready-made tool which historical conditions furnished and which she then appreciatively picked up. It would be as big a lie as saying that Bach took up the fugue because everyone else was taking it up, when, in fact, everyone else was dropping it. The fact that fugues loom so large in the history of music is in no small way because Bach did pick it up when everyone else was tired of it; ignoring the "winds of change," he breathed his own storm of genius into the old form, while the others, red in the face and with throbbing temples, turned at last to the tamer challenges of novelty. In the same way, the Church picked up the discarded morphemes of Latin.

We labor under a particular handicap when we try to grasp this point today. The churchmen of the Renaissance, and to a greater extent, the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation, were both anxious not to play second fiddle to the humanists; so they began dragging the paradigms of classical Latin into the ecclesiastical academies and reluctantly nodded when the Christian language of St. Augustine and St. Bernard was demoted beneath the flaunted standards of the ancients.

Not a little of the increasing disaffection of modern clergy with Latin has to do with their being terrorized by the tortuous Latin of many Church documents, including the modern encyclicals, and being made to study Cicero and Virgil when all they wanted to do was offer Mass. Rather than enjoying the more accessible prose of many of the Fathers and the simple Latin of St. Thomas's Summa, the drilling of the mind in the complexities and subtleties of ancient Latin was taken as the unavoidable baptism of fire in the Church's native tongue. And many got predictably burnt out.

Dorothy Sayers thought this was all wrong, even for grammar school students:

I do not think it either wise or necessary to cramp the ordinary pupil upon the Procrustean bed of the Augustan Age, with its highly elaborate and artificial verse forms and oratory. Post-classical and medieval Latin, which was a living language down to the end of the Renaissance, is easier and in some ways livelier; and a study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that learning the literature came to a full stop when Christ was born and only woke up again at the dissolution of the Monasteries.²

Those who have read long and deeply into the works of St. Augustine, St. Bernard, or St. Bonaventure, who have memorized a number of Vulgate Psalms, or perhaps a Pauline passage or two, and who have learned to appreciate the unique beauty and technical appropriateness of the old collects and prefaces will know what Miss Sayers means, and why she means it so energetically.

Classical Latin is indisputably grand, undeniably majestic, and irrevocably dead; for the Renaissance did not resurrect it, but only drug the skeletons out of the tombs and taught us to marvel over the intensely interesting way the bones are joined together. The classical scholars may get more or less close to imagining the meat and feeling the pulse of the language in its true Sitz im leben, and a few men like Erasmus can certainly make this sort of thing engaging. But the language is not living again, neither as it did in antiquity, nor through the infusion of a new life; for the humanist has no new life to give. When framed in this unnatural medium, the simple, sublime assertions and quasi-inspired neologisms of Christian theology seem to bang about clumsily amidst all the flourish and measured earnestness of Ciceronian constructions.

Classical Latin is indisputably grand, undeniably majestic, and irrevocably dead; for the Renaissance did not resurrect it, but only drug the skeletons out of the tombs and taught us to marvel over the intensely interesting way the bones are joined together ... but the language is not living again ... because the humanists have no new life to give.

Moreover, all this is so time-wasting, for the Christian mysteries have already forged their own language, and there, as nowhere else, they unfold their truths not only accurately, but also naturally. This was St. Augustine's great discovery about the Latin Bible; for after first turning to it after years of Cicero, he found the style cropped and barbaric, making him wonder what crude doctrines were lurking behind such ingenuousness. Indeed, the Scriptures "seemed to me unworthy of comparison with the grand style of Cicero." But once he was touched by the mysteries behind the style, he discovered the reason for the plainness:

. . . what I saw was something that is not discovered by the proud and is not laid open to children; the way in is low and humble, but inside the vault is high and veiled in mysteries ... these Scriptures would grow up together with a little child; I, however, thought too highly of myself to become a little child; I, swollen with pride, I was, in my own eyes, grown-up.³

Or in the familiar poetic paraphrase of Herbert:

Humble we must be, if to heaven we go!
The roof is high there, but the gate is low.

The Christian Latin which we find in the Vulgate, in St. Augustine and the Latin Fathers, and in the early Sacramentaries is not just a salvaged Latin, shaken, dusted off, and clumsily recycled in an age that had lost the inspiration of the days of Virgil and Horace (which is the Renaissance view of the matter). It is rather a language reborn through obstetrics irreducible to ordinary linguistic evolution; and what the literati mistake for barbaric unsophistication is rather the dignified simplicity demanded by the mysteries of a God who is Simplicity Itself. The anointment of the Spirit seems to force this Latin to move about more modestly, with a kind of self-forgetful gait, but for all this it moves far closer to the hushed world of God's most intimate secrets.

This is the first claim I should like to make for Christian Latin, namely that it was the same language that had "known" the wisdom of Greco-Roman antiquity, but had died a natural death as that wisdom exhausted its resources. It then was resurrected from the dead by the supernatural Truth of Christ. After much malignment, academic opinion has come to acknowledge this quasi-miracle, especially after the 19th century researches of Ozanam, Roensch, Goelzer, and others.

...Though Christian Latin was not born with Christianity itself, it was nonetheless born with Christian theology.

The second claim I raise is the first of two consequences of the first claim, and it is this: though Christian Latin was not born with Christianity itself, it was nonetheless born with Christian theology, and thus, not only its characteristic simplicity (at least when compared with classical Latin), but also its new world of meanings grew apace with the new understanding of the faith. Here, certainly, Christian Latin was deeply beholden to Christian Greek, at least in the early centuries. Still, the unique powers of Western speculation, starting with Augustine and one day to climax in the overwhelming Latin edifice of Aquinas, were fruits borne in the language in which Christian thought first moved and matured. Within the grammar and vocabulary of Latin, pious reflections on Christ's revelation had taken their inaugural steps, fashioned their first conceptual tools, and demanded of syntax and morphology that they yield to the sovereign exigencies of the WORD's own Word. All this made Christian theology and Christian Latin into correlative realities--each, in turn, a mother to the other.

The third claim I raise is the most pertinent of all, at least for us who ride on the stampede of 20th century progress. Chesterton had observed that the only way for a language to be truly living is to die and to resurrect by the agency of a higher, life-giving force (such as the Church). The common, vernacular tongues of everyday life are immersed in the contingencies of time and subject to the vagaries of the world's currents of change. Words are dying almost every day, with new ones rising to take their place. Through the king-of-the-mountain flurries of technological change, one on the heels of the other, many of our words lose their targets on the very tip of our tongue.

This has come home to me in a worrisome way during the last 15 years. Although I am an American, I have lived all this time overseas and spent most of these years speaking European languages. Still, I have kept in touch with my very American, monoglot brother. Very soon I noticed that he was using new words I had never heard of before. It even got out of hand when I made my visits; I almost needed an interpreter. How is it that "bad" can, in some cases, mean "good," and that today one can only keep up with a contemporary conversation by hopping onto the carousel of dizzily evolving computer technology and memorizing its witless reworkings of dozens of words like "soft," "bit," "floppy," "bootstrap," to mention just a few? The new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language documents this overhaul the English tongue has undergone in the last 20 years; and it does not document increasing profundity or clarity, let alone consistency.

So--I repeat in a funereal tone--the English

If the truths of the faith are forever new (as they most definitely are), then we should keep them well nested within a language that has already been lifted above this linguistic mortuary we inhabit, invested with some share in the unchanging status of eternity, and thus made dead to this world and alive to another.

language is dying and with it, all the other "living" languages of the world. And sometimes they are even splitting in the middle. What is happening to Brazilian Portuguese when compared with continental Portuguese (as I recently experienced firsthand) is an even more dramatic case than American English compared with British. All the spoken languages of the world are undergoing slow deaths, and parts of them are being draped every day in black. But the only reason I bring all this up is the effect it has on our ability to think and talk about immutable doctrines.

If it is true that we are in possession of a supernatural revelation regarding truths that are not dying, that is, that are rooted in eternity and not subject to clocks and calendars, then it stands to reason that they will be imperfectly preserved if the only receptacles we have are the leaky "old" wineskins of contemporary idioms. If the truths of the faith are forever new (as they most definitely are), then we should keep them well nested within a language that has already been lifted above this linguistic mortuary we inhabit, invested with some share in the unchanging status of eternity, and thus made dead to this world and alive to another. For us in the Western Church, the forever new wineskin ... has always been Latin, and if this beverage is to refresh us all the way to eternity, we had better turn a skeptical eye to all the "new, improved" wineskins being offered us today.

...Certainly we need to speak supernatural truths in the vernacular as well, but I am afraid we will have to drink the doctrine fast, for these old wineskins are hardly better than paper sacks, and the weakness of our fickle contemporary tongues is tearing leaks in the fabric of the language almost as fast as we utter our words. Sometimes it is impossible to find words whose bottoms do not fall right out of them when you try to put truth into them.

Try, for instance, to put the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation into modern, American English without feeling the need of a page of paraphrasing to bring something close to theological content to the words "person" and "nature" as we use them today. And when trying to speak of the substance of the Eucharist, the need will be even more acute. Without at least a substantial body of Latin in the background of our memory, all three of these fundamental notions (and with them, the burden of our faith) will be lost to the English words they originally generated. The words will be tossed around by history, and, unable to signify anything beyond history, they will race out of the past and hasten into the future; a rendezvous with the present will remain a rare and puzzling accident.

Latin Lives in Eternity
The whole glory of Christian Latin is that it abides in the greatest present tense of all: the "now" of eternity. Never needing to be up-to-date, it stands free of the danger of ever getting out-of-date. And we who spend our hours speaking interminably about the things that pass, must be able to turn in theological reflection on God's unchanging mysteries, still inspired by a Breath from the land of the living.

¹ G. K. Chesterton, "Some of Our Errors," The Thing (New York: Dodd, Mead &Co., 1930), p. 193.
² Dorothy Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning," National Review, 19 Jan. 1979, p. 94.
³ The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans., Rex Warner (New York: Mentor-Omega, 1963), p. 57. Fr. Randall Paine is a priest of the Archdiocese of Brasilia, Brazil, and professor of philosophy at the University of Brasilia. He is the author of The Universe and Mr. Chesterton, a study of G.K. Chesterton's philosophical thought (Sherwood Sugden, 1999). This article is taken from the July, 1990 edition of Homiletic and Pastoral Review.

Trust

Relationships are something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

And I've come to a few realizations. I already knew these things, but now I can state them with the surety of experience.

Relationships are built on trust, either the presence or lack of it. Your real best friends are the ones you can trust explicitly.

What is trust built on? Honesty. You can only begin to trust someone after they have proven themselves to be honest with you. But true trust only comes after they have proven themselves to be honest with EVERYONE. Because if they can be dishonest with other people, what is stopping them from being dishonest with you?

A relationship can also be judged by the honesty it inspires in your other relationships. If you have to lie to others about the relationship, then not only is that relationship harming those relationships, but it is building a foundation of dishonesty.

"This Time" - Jonathan Rhys Meyers

Thanks to Andrew for sending me the soundtrack to August Rush.

Song of the Week

"Grace" - Kate Havnevik
(Grey's Anatomy is such a great source for amazing music)



I'm on my knees
only memories
are left for me to hold

Dont know how
but Ill get by
Slowly pull myself together

Theres no escape
So keep me safe
This feels so unreal

Nothing comes easily
Fill this empty space
Nothing is like it seems
Turn my grief to grace

I feel the cold
Loneliness unfold
Like from another world

Come what may
I wont fade away
But I know I might change

Nothing comes easily
Fill this empty space
Nothing is like it was
Turn my grief to grace

Nothing comes easily
Where do I begin?
Nothing can bring me peace
Ive lost everything
I just want to feel your embrace

Breathe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klyh-w8MhZo

Harness your heart, and be still now.
Quiet that mind that will wander,
All sorts of dark alleys.

Tragedy strikes your self esteem,
Constantly waiting for an ending,
To all of this.

She opens her eyes,
Suddenly she cries.
Can we help her, can we help her?
And she replies.
You know, I fake it oh so well,
That God himself can’t tell.
What I mean and why my words are,
Less than parallel.
With my feet,
You ask me what I need.
And all I really need,
Is to breathe.

Oooohh.
Ahhaah.

People, they seem so interested.
Only a few get invested,
With all the aches and pains.

Doctor oh, doctor,
Please help her.
I fear she may not be breathing.
Blue lips, and doe eyes,
That’s her disguise.

You know, I fake it oh so well,
That God himself can’t tell.
What I mean and why my words are,
Less than parallel.
With my feet,
You ask me what I need.
And all I really need,
Is to breathe.

Oooooh
Ooooh, oh
Oooooh
Oooooh

(Oooooh)
Give me some space to breathe,
(Ooooh, oh)
I need a little room to breathe.
Give me some space to breathe,
All I need is a little room to breathe.
I fake it oh so well,
That God can’t tell.

You know, I fake it oh so well,
That God himself can’t tell.
What I mean and why my words are,
Less than parallel.
With my feet,
You ask me what I need.
And all I really need,
Is to breathe.

Let me breathe.

Falling

Haven't you seen me sleep walking?
Cause I've been holding your hand.
Haven't you noticed me drifting?
Oh, let me tell you I am.

Tell me it's nothing.
Try to convince me
That I'm not drowning.
Oh, let me tell you I am.

Please, please tell me you know
I've got to let you go.
I can't help falling
Out of love with you.

Why I am feeling so guilty?
Why I am holding my breath?
Worry about everyone but me
I just keep losing myself.

Tell me it's nothing.
Try to convince me
That I'm not drowning
Oh let me tell you I am.

Please, please tell me you know
I've got to let you go.
I can't help falling
Out of love with you.

Oh, won't you read my mind?
Don't you make me like you.
I hear
Please, Please tell me you know
I've got to let you go.
I can't help falling
Out of love with you.

It's Funny...

It's funny how you find yourself in the exact situations you always promised yourself you'd never get in.

Actually, it's not funny. Not at all.

And I'm stuck. Because, as much as it hurts right now, it would hurt worse to end it altogether.

I was never going to be 'that girl'.

But I am. Now.

And I can't bring myself to regret a single choice I made along the path to this place.

Somehow it's worth it. Somehow.

The Apple Argument Against Abortion

Source: December 2000 issue of Crisis Magazine

by Peter Kreeft

I doubt there are many readers of this magazine who are pro-choice. Why, then, do I write an argument against abortion for its readers? Why preach to the choir?

Preaching to the choir is a legitimate enterprise. Scripture calls it "edification," or "building up." It is what priests, ministers, rabbis, and mullahs try to do once every week. We all need to clean and improve our apologetic weapons periodically; and this argument is the most effective one I know for actual use in dialogue with intelligent pro-choicers.I will be as upfront as possible.

I will try to prove the simple, common-sensical reasonableness of the pro-life case by a sort of Socratic logic. My conclusion is that Roe v. Wade must be overturned, and my fundamental reason for this is not only because of what abortion is but because we all know what abortion is.

This is obviously a controversial conclusion, and initially unacceptable to all pro-choicers. So, my starting point must be noncontroversial. It is this: We know what an apple is. I will try to persuade you that if we know what an apple is, Roe v. Wade must be overthrown, and that if you want to defend Roe, you will probably want to deny that we know what an apple is.

1. We Know What an Apple Is

Our first principle should be as undeniable as possible, for arguments usually go back to their first principles. If we find our first premise to be a stone wall that cannot be knocked down when we back up against it, our argument will be strong. Tradition states and common sense dictates our premise that we know what an apple is. Almost no one doubted this, until quite recently. Even now, only philosophers, scholars, "experts," media mavens, professors, journalists, and mind-molders dare to claim that we do not know what an apple is.

2. We Really Know What an Apple Really Is

From the premise that "we know what an apple is," I move to a second principle that is only an explication of the meaning of the first: that we really know what an apple really is. If this is denied, our first principle is refuted. It becomes, "We know, but not really, what an apple is, but not really." Step 2 says only, "Let us not 'nuance' Step 1 out of existence!"

3. We Really Know What Some Things Really Are

From Step 2, I deduce the third principle, also as an immediate logical corollary, that we really know what some things (other things than apples) really are. This follows if we only add the minor premise that an apple is another thing.

This third principle, of course, is the repudiation of skepticism. The secret has been out since Socrates that skepticism is logically self-contradictory. To say "I do not know" is to say "I know I do not know." Socrates's wisdom was not skepticism. He was not the only man in the world who knew that he did not know. He had knowledge; he did not claim to have wisdom. He knew he was not wise. That is a wholly different affair and is not self-contradictory. All forms of skepticism are logically self-contradictory, nuance as we will.

All talk about rights, about right and wrong, about justice, presupposes this principle that we really know what some things really are. We cannot argue about anything at all—anything real, as distinct from arguing about arguing, and about words, and attitudes—unless we accept this principle. We can talk about feelings without it, but we cannot talk about justice. We can have a reign of feelings—or a reign of terror—without it, but we cannot have a reign of law.

4. We Know What Human Beings Are

Our fourth principle is that we know what we are. If we know what an apple is, surely we know what a human being is. For we aren't apples; we don't live as apples, we don't feel what apples feel (if anything). We don't experience the existence or growth or life of apples, yet we know what apples are. A fortiori, we know what we are, for we have "inside information," privileged information, more and better information.

We obviously do not have total, or even adequate, knowledge of ourselves, or of apples, or (if we listen to Aquinas) of even a flea. There is obviously more mystery in a human than in an apple, but there is also more knowledge. I repeat this point because I know it is often not understood: To claim that "we know what we are" is not to claim that we know all that we are, or even that we know adequately or completely or with full understanding anything at all of what we are. We are a living mystery, but we also know much of this mystery. Knowledge and mystery are no more incompatible than eating and hungering for more.

5. We Have Human Rights Because We Are Human

The fifth principle is the indispensable, common-sensical basis for human rights: We have human rights because we are human beings.

We have not yet said what human beings are (e.g., do we have souls?), or what human rights are (e.g., do we have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"?), only the simple point that we have whatever human rights we have because we are whatever it is that makes us human.

This certainly sounds innocent enough, but it implies a general principle. Let's call that our sixth principle.

6. Morality Is Based on Metaphysics

Metaphysics means simply philosophizing about reality. The sixth principle means that rights depend on reality, and our knowledge of rights depends on our knowledge of reality.

By this point in our argument, some are probably feeling impatient. These impatient ones are common-sensical people, uncorrupted by the chattering classes. They will say, "Of course. We know all this. Get on with it. Get to the controversial stuff." Ah, but I suspect we began with the controversial stuff. For not all are impatient; others are uneasy. "Too simplistic," "not nuanced," "a complex issue"—do these phrases leap to mind as shields to protect you from the spear that you know is coming at the end of the argument?

The principle that morality depends on metaphysics means that rights depend on reality, or what is right depends on what is. Even if you say you are skeptical of metaphysics, we all do use the principle in moral or legal arguments. For instance, in the current debate about "animal rights," some of us think that animals do have rights and some of us think they don't, but we all agree that if they do have rights, they have animal rights, not human rights or plant rights, because they are animals, not humans or plants. For instance, a dog doesn't have the right to vote, as humans do, because dogs are not rational, as humans are. But a dog probably does have a right not to be tortured. Why? Because of what a dog is, and because we really know a little bit about what a dog really is: We really know that a dog feels pain and a tree doesn't. Dogs have feelings, unlike trees, and dogs don't have reason, like humans; that's why it's wrong to break a limb off a dog but it's not wrong to break a limb off a tree, and that's also why dogs don't have the right to vote but humans do.

7. Moral Arguments Presuppose Metaphysical Principles

The main reason people deny that morality must (or even can) be based on metaphysics is that they say we don't really know what reality is, we only have opinions. They point out, correctly, that we are less agreed about morality than science or everyday practical facts. We don't differ about whether the sun is a planet or whether we need to eat to live, but we do differ about things like abortion, capital punishment, and animal rights.

But the very fact that we argue about it—a fact the skeptic points to as a reason for skepticism—is a refutation of skepticism. We don't argue about how we feel, about subjective things. You never hear an argument like this: "I feel great." "No, I feel terrible."

For instance, both pro-lifers and pro-choicers usually agree that it's wrong to kill innocent persons against their will and it's not wrong to kill parts of persons, like cancer cells. And both the proponents and opponents of capital punishment usually agree that human life is of great value; that's why the proponent wants to protect the life of the innocent by executing murderers and why the opponent wants to protect the life even of the murderer. They radically disagree about how to apply the principle that human life is valuable, but they both assume and appeal to that same principle.

8. Might Making Right

All these examples so far are controversial. How to apply moral principles to these issues is controversial. What is not controversial, I hope, is the principle itself that human rights are possessed by human beings because of what they are, because of their being—and not because some other human beings have the power to enforce their will. That would be, literally, "might makes right." Instead of putting might into the hands of right, that would be pinning the label of "right" on the face of might: justifying force instead of fortifying justice. But that is the only alternative, no matter what the political power structure, no matter who or how many hold the power, whether a single tyrant, or an aristocracy, or a majority of the freely voting public, or the vague sentiment of what Rousseau called "the general will." The political form does not change the principle. A constitutional monarchy, in which the king and the people are subject to the same law, is a rule of law, not of power; a lawless democracy, in which the will of the majority is unchecked, is a rule of power, not of law.

9. Either All Have Rights or Only Some Have Rights

The reason all human beings have human rights is that all human beings are human. Only two philosophies of human rights are logically possible. Either all human beings have rights, or only some human beings have rights. There is no third possibility. But the reason for believing either one of these two possibilities is even more important than which one you believe.

Suppose you believe that all human beings have rights. Do you believe that all human beings have rights because they are human beings? Do you dare to do metaphysics? Are human rights "inalienable" because they are inherent in human nature, in the human essence, in the human being, in what humans, in fact, are? Or do you believe that all human beings have rights because some human beings say so—because some human wills have declared that all human beings have rights? If it's the first reason, you are secure against tyranny and usurpation of rights. If it's the second reason, you are not. For human nature doesn't change, but human wills do. The same human wills that say today that all humans have rights may well say tomorrow that only some have rights.

10. Why Abortion Is Wrong

Some people want to be killed. I won't address the morality of voluntary euthanasia here. But clearly, involuntary euthanasia is wrong; clearly, there is a difference between imposing power on another and freely making a contract with another. The contract may still be a bad one, a contract to do a wrong thing, and the mere fact that the parties to the contract entered it freely does not automatically justify doing the thing they contract to do. But harming or killing another against his will, not by free contract, is clearly wrong; if that isn't wrong, what is?

But that's what abortion is. Mother Teresa argued, simply, "If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong." The fetus doesn't want to be killed; it seeks to escape. Did you dare to watch The Silent Scream? Did the media dare to allow it to be shown? No, they will censor nothing except the most common operation in America.

11. The Argument From the Nonexistence of Nonpersons

Are persons a subclass of humans, or are humans a subclass of persons? The issue of distinguishing humans and persons comes up only for two reasons: the possibility that there are nonhuman persons, like extraterrestrials, elves, angels, gods, God, or the Persons of the Trinity, or the possibility that there are some nonpersonal humans, unpersons, humans without rights.

Traditional common sense and morality say all humans are persons and have rights. Modern moral relativism says that only some humans are persons, for only those who are given rights by others (i.e., those in power) have rights. Thus, if we have power, we can "depersonalize" any group we want: blacks, slaves, Jews, political enemies, liberals, fundamentalists—or unborn babies.

A common way to state this philosophy is the claim that membership in a biological species confers no rights. I have heard it argued that we do not treat any other species in the traditional way—that is, we do not assign equal rights to all mice. Some we kill (those that get into our houses and prove to be pests); others we take good care of and preserve (those that we find useful in laboratory experiments or those we adopt as pets); still others we simply ignore (mice in the wild). The argument concludes that therefore, it is only sentiment or tradition (the two are often confused, as if nothing rational could be passed down by tradition) that assigns rights to all members of our own species.

12. Three Pro-Life Premises and Three Pro-Choice Alternatives

We have been assuming three premises, and they are the three fundamental assumptions of the pro-life argument. Any one of them can be denied. To be pro-choice, you must deny at least one of them, because taken together they logically entail the pro-life conclusion. But there are three different kinds of pro-choice positions, depending on which of the three pro-life premises is denied.

The first premise is scientific, the second is moral, and the third is legal. The scientific premise is that the life of the individual member of every animal species begins at conception. (This truism was taught by all biology textbooks before Roe and by none after Roe; yet Roe did not discover or appeal to any new scientific discoveries.) In other words, all humans are human, whether embryonic, fetal, infantile, young, mature, old, or dying.

The moral premise is that all humans have the right to life because all humans are human. It is a deduction from the most obvious of all moral rules, the Golden Rule, or justice, or equality. If you would not be killed, do not kill. It's just not just, not fair. All humans have the human essence and, therefore, are essentially equal.

The legal premise is that the law must protect the most basic human rights. If all humans are human, and if all humans have a right to life, and if the law must protect human rights, then the law must protect the right to life of all humans.

If all three premises are true, the pro-life conclusion follows. From the pro-life point of view, there are only three reasons for being pro-choice: scientific ignorance—appalling ignorance of a scientific fact so basic that nearly everyone in the world knows it; moral ignorance—appalling ignorance of the most basic of all moral rules; or legal ignorance—appalling ignorance of one of the most basic of all the functions of law. But there are significant differences among these different kinds of ignorance.

Scientific ignorance, if it is not ignoring, or deliberate denial or dishonesty, is perhaps pitiable but not morally blame-worthy. You don't have to be wicked to be stupid. If you believe an unborn baby is only "potential life" or a "group of cells," then you do not believe you are killing a human being when you abort and might have no qualms of conscience about it. (But why, then, do most mothers who abort feel such terrible pangs of conscience, often for a lifetime?)

Most pro-choice arguments, during the first two decades after Roe, disputed the scientific premise of the pro-life argument. It might be that this was almost always dishonest rather than honest ignorance, but perhaps not, and at least it didn't directly deny the essential second premise, the moral principle. But pro-choice arguments today increasingly do.

Perhaps pro-choicers perceive that they have no choice but to do this, for they have no other recourse if they are to argue at all. Scientific facts are just too clear to deny, and it makes no legal sense to deny the legal principle, for if the law is not supposed to defend the right to life, what is it supposed to do? So they have to deny the moral principle that leads to the pro-life conclusion. This, I suspect, is a vast and major sea change. The camel has gotten not just his nose, but his torso under the tent. I think most people refuse to think or argue about abortion because they see that the only way to remain pro-choice is to abort their reason first. Or, since many pro-choicers insist that abortion is about sex, not about babies, the only way to justify their scorn of virginity is a scorn of intellectual virginity. The only way to justify their loss of moral innocence is to lose their intellectual innocence.

If the above paragraph offends you, I challenge you to calmly and honestly ask your own conscience and reason whether, where, and why it is false.

13. The Argument from Skepticism

The most likely response to this will be the charge of dogmatism. How dare I pontificate with infallible certainty, and call all who disagree either mentally or morally challenged! All right, here is an argument even for the metaphysical skeptic, who would not even agree with my very first and simplest premise, that we really do know what some things really are, such as what an apple is. (It's only after you are pinned against the wall and have to justify something like abortion that you become a skeptic and deny such a self-evident principle.)

Roe used such skepticism to justify a pro-choice position. Since we don't know when human life begins, the argument went, we cannot impose restrictions. (Why it is more restrictive to give life than to take it, I cannot figure out.) So here is my refutation of Roe on its own premises, its skeptical premises: Suppose that not a single principle of this essay is true, beginning with the first one. Suppose that we do not even know what an apple is. Even then abortion is unjustifiable.

Let's assume not a dogmatic skepticism (which is self-contradictory) but a skeptical skepticism. Let us also assume that we do not know whether a fetus is a person or not. In objective fact, of course, either it is or it isn't (unless the Court has revoked the Law of Noncontradiction while we were on vacation), but in our subjective minds, we may not know what the fetus is in objective fact. We do know, however, that either it is or isn't by formal logic alone.

A second thing we know by formal logic alone is that either we do or do not know what a fetus is. Either there is "out there," in objective fact, independent of our minds, a human life, or there is not; and either there is knowledge in our minds of this objective fact, or there is not.

So, there are four possibilities:

1. The fetus is a person, and we know that; The fetus is a person, but we don't know that; The fetus isn't a person, but we don't know that;
2. The fetus isn't a person, and we know that. What is abortion in each of these four cases?

In Case 1, where the fetus is a person and you know that, abortion is murder. First-degree murder, in fact. You deliberately kill an innocent human being.

In Case 2, where the fetus is a person and you don't know that, abortion is manslaughter. It's like driving over a man-shaped overcoat in the street at night or shooting toxic chemicals into a building that you're not sure is fully evacuated. You're not sure there is a person there, but you're not sure there isn't either, and it just so happens that there is a person there, and you kill him. You cannot plead ignorance. True, you didn't know there was a person there, but you didn't know there wasn't either, so your act was literally the height of irresponsibility. This is the act Roe allowed.

In Case 3, the fetus isn't a person, but you don't know that. So abortion is just as irresponsible as it is in the previous case. You ran over the overcoat or fumigated the building without knowing that there were no persons there. You were lucky; there weren't. But you didn't care; you didn't take care; you were just as irresponsible. You cannot legally be charged with manslaughter, since no man was slaughtered, but you can and should be charged with criminal negligence.

Only in Case 4 is abortion a reasonable, permissible, and responsible choice. But note: What makes Case 4 permissible is not merely the fact that the fetus is not a person but also your knowledge that it is not, your overcoming of skepticism. So skepticism counts not for abortion but against it. Only if you are not a skeptic, only if you are a dogmatist, only if you are certain that there is no person in the fetus, no man in the coat, or no person in the building, may you abort, drive, or fumigate.

This undercuts even our weakest, least honest escape: to pretend that we don't even know what an apple is, just so we have an excuse for pleading that we don't know what an abortion is.

One Last Plea

I hope a reader can show me where I've gone astray in the sequence of 13 steps that constitute this argument. I honestly wish a pro-choicer would someday show me one argument that proved that fetuses are not persons. It would save me and other pro-lifers enormous grief, time, effort, worry, prayers, and money. But until that time, I will keep arguing, because it's what I do as a philosopher. It is my weak and wimpy version of a mother's shouting that something terrible is happening: Babies are being slaughtered. I will do this because, as Edmund Burke declared, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Song of the Week

Narrator:
(So apropos:
Saw death on a sunny snow)

Him:
"For every life..."

Her:
"Forgoe the parable."

Him:
"Seek the light."

Her:
"...My knees are cold."

(Running home, running home, running home, running home...)

Her:
"Go find another lover;
To bring a... to string along!"

"With all your lies,
You're still very lovable."

"I toured the light; so many foreign roads for Emma, forever ago."