The Negative Man

I have been regularly watching on You Tube one Father Mark Goring, a remarkable young priest in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. A recurring theme of his is to look for the positive good and to do positive good: it will make you good.

In college, and I really should find it to reread, a class assignment was to read Dr. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Dr. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. As I recall, a story from his book was how one prisoner gave a hidden potato to another prisoner who was (if this can be imagined in such atrocity) in more dire shape. I still marvel at such a moral good coming from any given man under the unimaginably horrible circumstances of a Nazi death camp. Dr. Frankl believed that part of survival was finding something to be positive about and to do positive good.

My overriding point here is that we should strive to find, act, and be positively good. This can be done without denying the horrors of what is negative and working all along to fight them.  Fr. Mark for example when he feels angry prays to find a moral good to focus on and to do, because they're out there even in trying times. Indeed, it may be all the more important to seek the good when evil, yes, evil, seems so prevalent. But the thing is, if you seek the positive you find it.

The corollary is that if you search for the negative you will find that. If you find it you likely will wallow in it. When you wallow in it you become the Negative Man. When you then look in the mirror, will it be a vision worth seeing?

Respect Life Sunday 2014

Today is Respect Life Sunday. It is a day which the Catholic Church has set aside each year to remind people that life must be respected from the moment of conception. Naturally enough, the aim is to convince everyone that abortion, and things such as assisted suicide, are moral evils.

It cannot be said enough that being against abortion is a philosophic and not inherently religious stance. Society likes to dismiss it as merely religious so that it can justify the deed. Separation of Church and State and all that, you know. It's funny how they don't mind religious action on other matters, such as poverty and capital punishment, but that is a question for another time.

Human beings have human babies. Common sense tells us as much. Science, if you simply must have everything interpreted empirically, tells us as much. When a couple decides to have a child, they fully expect a human child. Even in the despicable cases of rape and incest, we cannot set aside the question of personhood involved with the child simply for the sake of the unfortunate (in terms of having a crime committed against her) mother. We know that a pregnant woman is carrying a human being. To deny that is intellectual dishonesty, or worse: a moral evil perpetuated by those who benefit from the act of abortion. This must include the men and women who happen to want one merely because a child would cramp their style.

Likewise, assisted suicide and any form of euthanasia must be seen too as abhorrent. Did you put yourself on this Earth? No; indeed, you had no say on the matter. Why ought you have in say in how and when you leave? We have addressed the question philosophically, without an appeal to any higher authority. This before we get into the question of someone helping you...which means that someone helping you check yourself out must be doing something wrong too.

These conclusions can be derived by logical argument and inference without any reference to religion. It is time that we as a society accept it as such, and act accordingly. Short of that, we are simply savages.

Finally, you must respect life from conception if you expect your life to be respected equally. We are less than human otherwise; you are less than human otherwise. If you will not respect someone else's life simply because it is their life, on what grounds can you demand respect for yours? Because you're already here? Listen to how selfish that sounds. Where's the respect in such attitudes?

All right, this is harsh. But it's less harsh than denying a human being humanity.

Respect life at all times. Especially at its weakest and most defenseless.

On Individual Choice.

Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican party, is in trouble over a remark that abortion is 'an individual choice'. What could he mean by that?

He insists that he's pro-life and was merely illustrating the practical aspects of the question. And as a practical matter, he is right. All choices eventually devolve into what a person decides to do at a given time over whatever question may be under consideration at that point. No matter how many laws tell us that theft is wrong, someone somewhere will still abscond with the property of someone else.

The trouble is that attitude, properly called "cavalier and flippant" by a conservative wag, if made a benchmark of moral analysis, leads to very dangerous conclusions. Liberal conclusions, I should add. If moral choices, not only about abortion but on any moral issue, are only individual choices, what do we have left?

No true morality, that's what.

We need to understand that there's a difference between the practical aspects of an issue and the question of how we ought to handle or address the issue. Sure, some folks will choose to do wrong no matter what. But are we obliged, as neighbors and friends and countrymen, to tolerate it when the natural moral code clearly shows a given behavior to be a moral evil?

Of course not. So the question then becomes, did Mr. Steele really mean it that way? In light of his remarks about Rush Limbaugh and gay marriage, it is fair to wonder. Is he the type of Republican who wants a big tent, an attitude which I must say simply translates into a desire for political gain? Or is he a Republican of virtue who wants what is right, not only for the benefit of the people he would lead, but for rightness sake? Because if he doesn't want that, then he may as well exercise his individual choice and join the party of the moment and become a Democrat. At least he would be among his philosophical peers.