Hello friends of Bustedblog!  (I recognize that might be seven people, but you’re an awfully nice seven people, and that’s all that really counts I think.  Advertisers might think otherwise however).

At any rate, I’ll have sporadic access to e-mail for a while now, but I’d like to ask all of you what you think about the blog so far, how it could be improved, what you’d like to see, what you wouldn’t like to see, all of this.  And please make very clear if you didn’t like something (you usually do anyways!).  I’d especially like it if you could tell me what would make the site stickier for you–that is, what would make you want to keep coming back?  New voices?  My voice in different ways?  Different topics?  the same topics? More postings?  What’s up?

Thanks everyone.  E-mail me at jeff@bustedhalo.com and cc our editor, Bill McGarvey, at editor@bustedhalo.com

Shukran!

So I’m often told the same story: “I used to be proud and doubt like you, but now I know the Church is true.”

Here’s my response:

There was a period in my life when I was terrified of nuance and realizing that the world is complicated and lacking simple answers. I eventually got over this, in the same way that you seem to have gotten over your pride (obviously, I haven’t totally escaped this as you haven’t totally escaped pride, but we both seem to have made progress in these problems we’ve identified as deeply difficult). In the same way you see your past problems and present salvation as my path, I could say the same for you. In the same way that you worry I am motivated by pride, I worry you are motivated by a desire to find clear answers by subsuming yourself in an institution that gives them. I think it was Augustine who said that moderation was harder than abstinence. I still find this to be true, and I am often tempted by One Answer but then I realize that God did not make the world that simple.  And I wholly reject that believing in this nuance implies a rejection of the Church writ large. That kind of simplification is precisely the problem. I also recognize that you haven’t stopped thinking. In fact, you spend a whole lot of time thinking about how to reconcile these Catholic ideas with empirical evidence and the doubts you still hold. However, you no longer let yourself question certain things that I think still ought to be questioned.

And by the way, I certainly am too proud. That’s true. But that doesn’t make me wrong. The rightness of my argument and my pride (or tone in producing the argument) are related but ultimately separate.

Look, they’re a lot more conservative than I am.  But they are Catholic, through and through.  They are the opposite of the Republican shrills with which they are often associated, and articles like this go to show it.

Two interesting bits here: (1) Republicans seem to care a lot less about same-sex marriage than they used to.  (2) Catholics are apathetic about this as well, if not outright opposed to what their Bishops and leadership is saying about it.  I think that this has a lot to do with the public role of reason.  Honestly, there are compelling and logical reasons available to public reason about why abortion might be wrong.  This is why plenty of atheist and non-Christians can jump onboard.  This is clearly not the case about homosexuality.  Let’s face facts: one is an argument, the other is an assertion.  And assertions always wind up losing to better arguments.

As Spector (for various and certainly not all laudable reasons) leaves the Republican party, I read this in the LA Times:

In most cases, former Catholics who are now unaffiliated said they were dissatisfied with the church’s teachings on abortion, homosexuality, birth control or treatment of women.

Change can happen from within people!  You don’t have to leave.  Your leaving just makes the crowd that much more difficult for the rest of us.

all my friends are in serious relationships.  We’re all either married or, more likely, in long-term relationships that resemble marriage.  This weirds me out.  Does this weird anyone else out?  I love my girlfriend, don’t get me wrong, but I’m still a little surprised by how few single people I encounter anymore.  To all you single people out there: sorry for rubbing it in.  I’m just thining out loud.  Feel free to comment in rage.

Thanks to JB for her comments on Susan Boyle, and I think I often do need a good beating-up for too often beating my self up.  Although I still think I’m right about this Boyle thing, at least for me, but I don’t want to put that on anyone else.  Maybe everyone else loves Susan Boyle for who she is and there’s nothing cynical about their feelings.  I hope that’s true.  However, I’m pretty sure that’s not true for a single element of my life, which is kind of depressing, but it’s also encouraging, in that it’s a good reminder I’m broken and need God’s help.

Anyways, a quick point of clarification: JB says I overthink the Boyle situation.  That might be true, but that doesn’t make it wrong.  I’m not sure what “overthink” means.  Certainly, what can think about a problem and, by thinking longer, alternate from a previous (possibly correct) position to an another (possibly incorrect) one.  However, at fault here is not the length of time one thinks but rather the changing of one’s mind from one position to another.  This does not have to happen when one thinks for a long time.  Here’s an analogy: if I drive a car for a long time, it might break down.  It does not break down, however, because I drove it.  It breaks down because the engine failed, or what have you.  Now my driving might make this break-down more possible, just as my thinking for a long time might make a change-of-mind possible.  But ultimately neither the long drive nor the long spate of thinking are to blame.  And besides, if I didn’t take long drives or think for a long while, how could a wanderlusting nerd like me have fun?

So I’m really, really interested in this.  And I’ll admit my ignorance, so I ask for the advice of you readers.  How did it happen that John Courtney Murray SJwas silenced for his advocacy of certain political mechanisms but then later redeemed while Gustavo Gutierrez (now OP) got in trouble and more or less stayed there?  I would argue that it’s because of the historical record: Murray’s advocacy of democracy turned out to produce pretty good governments while the socialist-like governments Gutierrez wrote about did not turn out nearly as well.  So by your fruits you knew them?  Could we then see a similar result about, say, gay marriage or birth control?  Just as people did democracy despite the Church being opposed to it and the world did not end, could they see the good fruits of controlled marriages and change their mind?  I wonder.

Anyways, let me know what you think.  I’m working all of this out right now in my head and I’m not really sold any which way.

Or, if you want to be all historically accurate, I guess you could say it’s that talking to communists is like talking to Catholics.  Still, the similarities are striking.  Really, this is true for anyone with a certain ideological purity, and the same could be said for libertarians, or intense pacifists, or anyone with serious assumptions (obviously this is true of all of us –we are all supported by assumptions, but since some people’s assumptions are in the minority, theirs becomes more obvious). So, look at this:

1. There is no such thing as orthodoxy.  A Catholic friend (who is orthodox) told me this.  There is either Catholic or non-Catholic.  This is the case for dogmatic communists as well: of course, they would not admit they were dogmatic, or even orthodox.  They’re simply right.  Hence, ideology.

2. Wrongness is not possible.  If there’s something inconsistent, it is never the Party or the Church or the Market (depending on if you’re commie or Catholic or libertarian).  These simply cannot fail.  It would be impossible.  And so there’s a cool maxim in this: “Intellectual honesty seeks the truth; ideology seeks to prove itself true.”

3. Growth is not possible.  If you’re already perfect, you have no need to grow.  Instead, if a change is needed, it is never acknowledged but rather denied for as long as possible until it is accepted as though it always existed.  The differences between Vatican I and Vatican II, for example, really do resemble some of the stark changes in 1984 in which “eternal wars” change all the time.

All of this is not to deny that I love the Church, or that I do believe certain fundamentals within it really do never change.  Nor do I deny that the Holy Spirit works to guide that Church.  It’s just that I think we all ought to act like grown ups about acknowledging an argument and the possibility of change.

Hey friends of the Bustedblog,

Sorry about a lack of posts recently.  You should all be aware that, first, I am in the middle of finals, and second, I will be in Damascus, Syria starting in the very beginning of May and I won’t be back until late August.  As a result, there will be some changes to this blog, most of which are yet to be determined.  But rest assured, the blog will be around, and I’ll be back.