Expressing a phrase or sentence in a single word, as is the case in the aboriginal languages of America.

One of Dogen’s key insights is the unity of practice and enlightenment. If we adopt the position of neurotheological congruency, that insight must have a physioneurological analog. I’d hypothesize something along the lines of a low-level neuronal adaptation process which raises the organism’s fitness level in the immdiate present while simultaneously creating conditions for improved future fitness.

Producing decreases in sports performance. Cf. ergogenic, producing increases in performance.

Watching Bush bound up onto the stage for his victory speech, I felt an unnerving, momentary flash of warmth towards the guy: There’s our President, and now he’ll be President for four more years. I imagine the sixty million people who voted for Bush across the huge red mass of states ranging from Florida to Idaho have similar feelings, only theirs are a thousand or a million times stronger and sustained them for four years. They just, well, really like their guy.

So I’ll join the two-bit political pundits in stating the obvious, that John Kerry couldn’t get elected because people didn’t, couldn’t, get to like him.

Now normally, after an election like this I would beat my chest and bemoan how this election heralds the end of America’s Golden Age and the start of its long decline. And few can doubt that societal trends, technology, and the growth in government has stretched our quaint democratic system far beyond its limits. Now the government is so dominant, and the means it possesses to get out its messages so powerful, that it can state that up is down and people will believe it.

Yet it remains a fact, to invoke a hoary old cliche, that American voters have made their choice. America is not some abstraction or ideal that these people are betraying; America is those gullible, ignorant people who chose four more years of Bush. We can’t want an American different than the one that actually exists in reality.

Recall that Bush won four years ago running on a neo-isolationist platform. This time he ran on a radical doctrine of pre-emptive warfare against distant lands, and won all the same states, but with uniformly higher margins of victory—proving decisively that voters are not basing their decision at all on actual policy differences. Imagine that—and John Kerry wasted the whole campaign actually talking about issues!

We are now witnesses to a race to the death between the severely debilitating effects of Bush’s policies in virtually every field, including foreign affairs, economics, and the environment, and, on the other hand, the ability of his regime to not just shade, but actually redefine reality as it is presented to the American people at large, filtered through the good-old-boy persona of George W. Bush himself. And it doesn’t seem to me that anything individuals like myself do can affect this race one way or the other. The only real hope for reality winning out in the end is the Bush people greedily overreaching, which is certainly not beyond them. Failing that, it literally seems that people in the Red States could be unemployed, be sick with no insurance, have their son killed in Iraq, and have a toxic waste dump in their back yard, and they would still vote for Bush. Get used to it. Those are your compatriots, and they are in the majority now in your country.

I’ve read the materials the Archbishop pointed me to in response to my criticism of his Op-Ed piece in the NYT, and I think I understand his thinking (better).

In the original transcript of his NYT interview, he says:

The dignity of human life. You never violate it.

Hmmm…sounds good so far. He calls this “foundational,” But then:

Whether it’s the creation of embryos for embryonic stem cell research or abortion, are violations of the dignity of human beings, from our perspective. And you can never justify it.

Suddenly, he’s shrunk his whole emphasis on human life down to those who are less than zero years old. What about people killed in war? Well, it turns out that

You can sometimes justify going to war. You may think that the Iraq war is horrible, but there may be sometimes when you can justify [going to war]. It doesn’t have the same moral weight.

Couldn’t be clearer. The life of the child dying in the Iraqi bombing raids just isn’t worth as much as that of the frozen embryo. Sorry about that! Some things are more foundational than others!

This is a perverse viewpoint not supported by anything in scripture. But the real problems start when the archbishop combines this with his peculiar notion of the separation of church and state—something he called, if you recall, “dangerous” and “dishonest”. It’s not enough just to believe something and conduct your life in accordance with your beliefs, but you must, not should but must, on pain of perdition, also vote for politicians who agree that people that disagree with you should be thrown in jail. God wants that.

Somehow it sounds better when cloaked in soothing words such as

…the importance of our faith having a substantial impact on our public life, whether it be the generosity of our giving or the public policy we embrace in our speaking, or the positions we take in running for office or voting.

I see. Voting for Presidents who will appoint Supreme Court Justices who will throw raped teenagers in jail for getting an abortion is right up there with “generosity of giving”.

Archbishop Chaput has managed to take two radical errors of thought—that some lives are worth more than others, and that separation of church and state should be abolished—and combine them in a particularly pernicious way.

Perhaps he should consider the recent report that abortions, which went down under Clinton, have now gone up under Bush. The reason: the dismal Bush economy. Chaput must be proposing that instead of electing someone who can improve our economy, we should elect someone who will make all the girls get coat-hangar abortions in back alleys.

Apart from the merits of his position, one wonders if His Eminence has given any thought to the long-term effects of his unwise outspokenness, which will be to discredit Catholic thought in the context of the American political process, and to discourage Catholic politicians from running at all.

PS. The Archbishop responded to the comments above with a polite message:

Thank you for your reflections.
+cjc

More excitement than ever now around West Hollywood: now we have our very own earthquake! This one woke us up.

I send a link to my criticism of his NYT op-ed article about how Catholics should vote for Bush to Archbishop Chaput of Denver, and lo and behold, I received a semi-informative answer.

Dear Mr. Myers,

It’s obvious you haven’t read other things I’ve written. I’ll include some links in case you’re interested.

+cjc

Here are the links he gave me:

• The actual New York Times interview transcript
• Some thoughts on the relationship of Church and state
• On the death penalty: [1] and [2] and [3]
• On Catholics and their responsibilities both within their Church and as citizens
• On embryonic stem cell research
• And on Iraq: [1] and [2] and [3]

I’d like to thank His Eminence for his response, and I’ll be getting back to him soon.

Readers of this blog will recall Steven M. Altig, an incompetent Las Vegas defense lawyer thanks to whose efforts “K” ended up with a 25-45 year sentence in the Nevada pentitentiary system.

And I’ve just been contacted by “M”, another unfortunate client of Mr. Altig’s. Thanks to Google, my blog article about Altig is very easy to find (it’s the first hit for him). “M” relates:

I just this very afternoon returned from a “last chance” hearing. It had already been continued once for Altig’s benefit (something about him going out of the country on vaction for 4 months and didn’t bother notifying anyone – I had to call Wolfson’s office a week before my trial to find out he was out of town,) and they would not allow it to continue again without severe penalty. And he didn’t even bother to show up! I’m glad I did even though he had recommend I not, as otherwise I would have been found in default if one of us hadn’t shown up and suffered highly. Fortunately I had prepared extensively for just such a situation (he has been continuing things for 10 months now and I’ve been beginning to suspect something suspicious) and managed to stumble through it “without legal representation” and think I probably did better than he would have. As it is, if this does not play out, I’m considering a malpractice suit and have already demanded a refund of his fee. If you decide to do a class action malpractice suit let me know.

Even more ironic, the date you wrote the blog was almost to the day when I first contacted him. Wish I had read it first. I’ve got some choice words about Wolfson now too. Originally my acceptance letter from Altig claimed Wolfson would be conferring my case. By June, after one continuance, Wolfson was elected to ward rep., a politcal office, for my ward (unfortunately the fact that I voted against him was not sufficient to keep him out of office—he actually walked door to door in my neighborhood and I asked him if his getting elected would affect my case and he said “no”) and now cannot practice law in LV municipal court where my case is being heard (conflict of interest), so now I’m stuck with Altig, alone, in his own office (you think getting him to return calls before was a problem?), he doesn’t even have a secretary anymore apparently, you just get voice mail. I think he’s currently operating out of a cardboard box on Fremont and 4th.

Feel free to post this in your blog if you like, just leave out my name and other info, and any other changes you need to. I’ll feel better knowing I helped keep someone else out of his clutches.

We feel for you, M. Good luck. Let’s talk about that malpractice suit.

In an absurd NYT Op-Ed piece on October 23, 2004, Charles Chaput, the Catholic archbishop of Denver, says the separation of church and state is “an empty slogan…dishonest…dangerous.” Gee, that would surprise the framers of the Constitution, who put it in the very first Article of the Bill of Rights. Thanks to the editors of the Times for inviting such vigorous discussion. What’s next, an article calling for the revocation of the 13th Amendment? The 19th?

Chaput then goes on to reveal the central, and fatal, misunderstanding of those who, like himself, would impose religion-based beliefs on others. He says:

Lawmaking inevitably involves some group imposing its beliefs on the rest of us. That’s the nature of the democratic process. If we say that we “ought” to do something, we are making a moral judgment.

This is precisely, and fundamentally, wrong. Perhaps the good bishop is incapable of imagining the world in other than purely moral terms, but there is an entirely different perspective upon which modern-day democracies are based: judgments about the best (not morally right) ways to run our societies. Basic example: we put murderers in jail not because what they did is wrong, but because left unpunished it will harm the operational fabric of society. The minute we outlaw things because we think they are wrong, we have stepped onto a very slippery slope. The bishop claims that “No one in mainstream American politics wants a theocracy”, yet what he is proposing—a politics based on morality (his)—is the exact definition of theocracy.

The anti-abortionists believe that abortion should be outlawed because it is Wrong. Again, this is your quintessential theocratic viewpoint. The real question is whether abortion harms our society operationally. Preventing me from controlling my own body and life is to impose your anti-abortion beliefs on me. On the other hand, allowing people to control their own bodies and lives is not “imposing” anything on the anti-abortionists, other than the existence of behavior in their society of which they morally disapprove. Sorry guys—no one ever said democracy means you could outlaw everything your religion doesn’t like.

First the Catholics said that voting for John Kerry would be a sin. Now they’re taking the ridiculous faux-symmetry position that if their opponents are going to stand up in favor of some human right, then it’s OK for them to inject religious tenets into the political debate to deny people that right.

Let them just tend to the spiritual needs of their flocks instead. If they continue to insist that being true to your beliefs requires forcing others to abide by your moral standards, ship them to Iran.

And as in all the anti-Kerry Catholic diatribes in this election, of course, we find no mention of capital punishment or killing innocent civilians in unjustified wars in our friendly vicar’s “pro-life” screed.

I just noticed that installing Google Desktop injected Google code into my TCP/IP stacks. I love Google Desktop, but do we really want Google controlling the TCP/IP on our computers?