Andrew Sullivan, as usual, has a thougtful post on being Catholic and how this is reconcilable with modernity.  Here’s the problem: those folks who want to show that Catholics and the modern age have a lot in common might run the same risks liberal Protestants ran in the end of the 19th century, basically ending their religious faiths.  And then those conservative Catholics that want to save everything–well, they just wind up looking reactionary and not often that thoughtful.  As usual, it’s the golden mean that works out, and Sullivan, I think, is one of the folks that does this well.

Good Lord.  Should there be a law?  Hmm.  I think there should, yes.  I understand people want kids, but I think it’s usually a safer bet that, say, four children at once is better for all parties concerned than eight.  What about even one kid?  Shocking, right?  The question, though, is how this decrease of children will occur: is this by implanting fewer embryos or by aborting the “extras”?  Because obviously, for Catholics, those two options are pretty dramatically different.  Here’s a bit from an article about this question in Time:

Richard Paulson, director of the fertility program at the University of Southern California, helped write the original professional recommendations regarding embryo transfer. Although he decries the birth of triplets, he’s irritated at calls to legislate assisted reproduction. Doctors aren’t the problem, he contends; laws are. Some European countries limit the number of embryos transferred, but that doesn’t allow for physicians to take into account individual medical histories; generally, the older the patient, the less likely embryos will implant.

The California octuplets are only the second set to be born in U.S. history. “We’re picking out this incredibly rare event, and all of a sudden, we want to pass laws,” says Paulson. “Would we write laws limiting the size of someone’s family to six? Would we write laws mandating selective reduction?” he asks, referring to the option of aborting some embryos if a high number successfully implant in the uterus. “Restricting reproductive rights would be a minefield.”

In the meantime, the subject of how the California woman came to deliver eight babies — 10 years after a Houston woman gave birth to the first-known living octuplets — is preoccupying fertility doctors across the country. The ASRM is caught up in the craziness too. “If this resulted from an IVF treatment, we can say that transferring eight embryos in an IVF cycle is well beyond our guidelines,” the group’s president, R. Dale McClure, said in a statement issued four days after Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower, a Los Angeles suburb, announced the babies’ birth. “We have a process for looking into these kind of matters and taking appropriate action.”

John Updike was a great writer, and he was also important.  One of the reasons this is so true is because he could never shake a deep religious faith.  Ian McEwan, one of the world’s best writers in English right now (and, by the way, an Atheist), has a lovely tribute to Updike here.  McEwan is my favorite kind of atheist.  He’s incredibly generous, he’s rigorous without being ideological, and he’s comfortable with material explanation without becoming a complete materialist.  Here are his thoughts on Updike and God:

This most Lutheran of writers, driven by intellectual curiosity all his life, was troubled by science as others are troubled by God. When it suited him, he could easily absorb and be impressed by physics, biology, astronomy, but he was constitutionally unable to “make the leap of unfaith”. The “weight” of personal death did not allow it, and much seriousness and dark humour derives from this tension between intellectual reach and metaphysical dread.

In a short story from 1984, “The Wallet”, Mr Fulham (who, we are told in the first line, “had assembled a nice life”) experiences death terrors when he takes his grandchildren to a local cinema. While “starships did special-effects battle”, Fulham’s “true situation in time and space” was revealed: “a speck of consciousness now into its seventh decade, a mortal body poised to rejoin the minerals, a member of a lost civilization that once existed on a sliding continent”. This “lonely possession” of his own existence, he concludes, is “sickeningly serious”.

God makes no appearance in this story, but it is unlikely that an atheist could have conjured so much from the minor domestic disturbance that follows. First, a large cheque “in the low six figures”, a return on canny investments, fails to show up in the post. Fulham makes many phone calls to the company in Houston, the matter begins to loom too large - “He slept poorly, agitated by the injustice of it.” He suspects a thief, a “perpetrator”, or there is a flaw in the mindless system. He is tormented by “outrageous cosmic unanswerableness”.

Today is the birthday of the finest Catholic writer of the modern era, James Joyce. Below is the famous epiphany scence from Joyce’s semi-autobigraphical novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (you can find the whole thing here). I like this novel a lot, and a lot of Catholics find the story of Joyce’s rejection of his faith deeply affirming, ironically, of their own faith. Joyce is rejecting a stern sort-of Catholicism with rigid rules and a deep, deep rootedness in guilt. This is not exactly the kind of religion that I think of as mine, and what I think Stephen discovers in this epiphany is not the reason to be atheist but an actual connection to the transcendent:

–Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His
cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On
and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly
to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the
holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had
leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate
life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal
youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open
before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error
and glory. On and on and on and on!

I know the Catholic arguments.  All you natural law fans–not to mention those who have read our declaration of independence–can rest assured: I am aware that many people (including those of my creed) believe that people have inherent rights, etc.  However, I also believe, based on empirical experience, that unless those are put in laws, whatever you believe about society is only about as useful as a fairy.  So we need laws, and that’s why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was so important.  Check this out from one of my favorite Nobel-prize winners of all time:

So what is the underlying argument here? Taking an exclusively legal view of rights, Bentham asserted that for a right to be “real,” it had to be legislated. A right, he said, can only be a “child of law.” This grants no room whatsoever for the public recognition of the importance of certain freedoms, and of the role of these ethically recognized freedoms and rights in providing motivation for fresh legislation. For if human rights are publicly supported claims that can contribute to the basis of legislation, then they function not as children of law, but rather as “parents of law.”

The legitimacy of this way of understanding “moral rights” was well discussed by the great legal theorist H.L.A. Hart. Indeed, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her pioneering move, hoped that the provisions in the Declaration would serve as something like a template for legislation across the world. And to a considerable extent, this has occurred both in national legislation and through regional “human rights laws.” The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and other such conventions and laws have clearly been inspired by the vision that the Universal Declaration affirmed in 1948. And the impact of the declaration did not stop there.

Wednesday’s episode was one of the best ever.  Holy smokes!  The time travel makes it so much more exciting, and, not only that, but we’re learning a lot about the island’s past and the characters’ relationships to each other and lots of other cool stuff.  I know it might be too late to start watching this show, but there are some good recaps at abc and you owe it to yourself to jump in.  It’s got my money for the best TV show ever, in the sense that Casablanca is the best movie ever: not the most highbrow or intellectual, but incredibly well-made, well-acted, and overwhelmingly fun.  So fine: Six Feet Under, the Wire, and Sopranos (some might say The West Wing) are like Citizen Kane or The Searchers or whathaveyou.  But for solid TV, LOST can’t be beat.

Honestly, it seems pretty simple, doesn’t it?  It’s like my mom always said, Don’t be mean.  You can always criticize, but don’t be mean.  It doesn’t seem that hard of a principle: ie, your logic is flawed, you should stop drinking, I think what you’re doing is bad for the economy rather than, you are evil, we should destroy you, etc.  I know the response: but some people ARE evil!  Maybe, sure.  But those situations are a lot more rare than current discourse allows, and such a lack of nuance makes real claims of evil much less powerful.  So, to quote my loving mother, be nice!  This is all in reference to a Dutch fellow who wants to ban the Koran, comparing it to Hilter’s magnum opus:

This seems a trifle obtuse. Comparing a book that billions hold sacred to Hitler’s murderous tract is more than an exercise in literary criticism; it suggests that those who believe in the Koran are like Nazis, and an all-out war against them would be justified. This kind of thinking, presumably, is what the Dutch law court is seeking to check.

One of the misconceptions that muddle the West’s debate over Islam and free speech is the idea that people should be totally free to insult. Free speech is never that absolute. Even — or perhaps especially — in America, where citizens are protected by the First Amendment, there are certain words and opinions that no civilized person would utter, and others that open the speaker to civil charges.

This does not mean that religious beliefs should be above criticism. And sometimes criticism will be taken as an insult where none is intended. In that case the critic should get the benefit of the doubt. Likening the Koran to “Mein Kampf” would not seem to fall into that category.

It’s  pretty wild really.  The guy just never stopped believing.   I’m not sure why that’s so attractive a quality, but there’s something about the persistent refusal to  call a  duck a duck that is  pathetic, ridiculous, but also sort of amazing.

is the Fringe, which is a great new SF show.  It’s got fun characters, good mysteries, and it’s funny.  It also has really fantastic guest actors, many of whom come from the Wire.

So I suppose I understand the other side.  The problem is that sometimes presidents have to do things that might be viewed by others as non-necessary (Truman dropping the bomb being the biggest example, but each president has them).  So I see that this can be a thorny issue, and that presidents are understandably worried that they won’t be able to make controversial-but-necessary decisions if they’ll be punished for them afterwards.  But this is a slippery slope, right?  Because if we grant this, then we allow presidents to do anything, provided we trust their good judgement.  But, how can we know they have good judgement?   Should we really trust four years (let alone eight) to a team who can be allowed to do whatever they want?  I don’t think it’s a precedent we want, and I’d rather risk making presidents too moderate than making them too powerful.  So, all in all, Rove should talk:

“To my knowledge, these [letters] are unprecedented,” said Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor who specializes in executive-privilege issues. “I’m aware of no sitting president that has tried to give an insurance policy to a former employee in regard to post-administration testimony.” Shane likened the letter to Rove as an attempt to give his former aide a ‘get-out-of-contempt-free card’.”