Comments on: The Cafeteria is Wide Open for Antonin Scalia

By: Matt McDonald

Matt McDonald — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:33:02 +0000

I still don’t see where it can be shown that any practices permitted by the US (as opposed to those not permitted, such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib) would be reasonably defined as torture, let alone definitively.

Perhaps someone can use an authoritative document to show this.

I would at first propose that any treatment morally permitted on our own troops in regard to their training, any treatment morally permitted on convicted criminals as a means of punishment at the very least would not be considered torture.

God Bless,

Matt
ps. Katerina ows Bill an apology and a reasoned response which does not attack his catechesis, surely someone on this blog understands that her attacks are personal.

By: bill bannon

bill bannon — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:32:41 +0000

Katerina
So the Church is suddenly Pope John Paul II when he overturns centuries of praxis and the Church is suddenly John Paul II who appointed Fr. Raymond Brown to the Pontifical Biblical Commission…a scholar who contended on page 349 of “Birth of the Messiah” that Mary never said the Magnificat but that Luke stuck it in the gospel after getting it really from Palestinian Anawim in order to make the gospel look more like the OT where women also actually (not fictiously) said similar speeches when they received a mission from God…..historical scripture as fictious advertising and manipulation for effect. And I actually like Raymond Brown when his redaction side is applied to the problems in John where he makes perfect sense….even though his earlier work bordered on crap at times from the Jesus Seminar.

By: Katerina

Katerina — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:13:26 +0000

but please read Veritatis Splendour No, MM, I would recommend Bill to read Dei Verbum so he can understand the nature of divine revelation and start reading Sacred Scriptures with the Church, because all of his arguments show that this is lacking.

By: bill bannon

bill bannon — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:22:40 +0000

X-Cathedra
It could be. I would want moral theologians to dispute each other on it as one has seen at Theological Studies periodical where no one author is safe…. and let such a group approach the matter in rigorous detail as to the water boarding. I don’t see Popes doing much rigorous detail because they have so little accountability and are guarded from cross examination unlike world leaders and ceo’s nowadays who do face cross examination and are not protected from the painful growth that that brings. “Because I say so” is over for modern man….unless a Pope accesses the venue for that…the ex cathedra venue where his point does not need the consent of the laity or clergy.
That is one of several reasons that Humanae Vitae met with an avalanche of non assent. To many, a celibate with nothing at stake was writing in a room under no cross examination an encyclical that he did not place in the venue that would require no cross examination…the ex-cathedra venue. Instead, he wrote with no cross examination in the non infallible venue (introduced twice at its press conference as non infallible) where cross examination would be natural in the modern world with its ease of communication. That generation was asked by a previous pope for their imput on that topic and that genreration had an ex cathedra encyclical just 14 years prior to HV in the Assumption encyclical and thus thought on a more critical issue…their lives….they would get that amount of intensity and work which the ex cathedra process requires according to Vatican II. When they found that after two years, the infallible Pope chose less than infallibility…less work….. to deal with their concerns, the non assent was deafening. I’m all for ex cathedra non cross examined papal edicts. Few Popes will do the work. John Paul had all the time in the world to do one on birth control and he did nothing of the sort and Benedict in an interview simply noted that that topic needs reflection. Your post name must have caused this digression into the ex cathedra area.
But outside that area, I would prefer seeing work by moral theologians than cursory paragraphs by the Pope sans nuances that section 80 of VS amounts to. Go to section 40 of EV and you will see part of the problem of VS…John Paul’s view of elements of the OT resembles the ancient complaints of Mani and Marcion that the OT was evil in some ways….thanks but no thanks.

By: X-Cathedra

X-Cathedra — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:25:11 +0000

Bill,

If in fact torture is not among those practices that are intrinsically evil, would you judge the current U.S. involvement with it to be evil from a prudential standpoint?

Pax Christi,

By: bill bannon

bill bannon — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:03:46 +0000

Simple….you are not to kill the child nor perform the act of bestiality because both are intrinsically evil and that really would be consequentialism. The dooms God commanded against the tribes of the promised lands….were not about land…..the real reason and the real mercy extended to them prior to the dooms are given in Wisdom 12…and involved child sacrifice to idols and Jewish weakness prior to grace…..which see. Your other references were too sketchily constructed to respond to. If you meant Osee marrying a prostitute, he married her as a sign of God’s love for israel which marriage is not a sin though not recommended to Christians later wherein it says… ” do not bear the yoke with unbelievers”.

By: Spirit of Vatican II

Spirit of Vatican II — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:51:12 +0000

Bill Bannon, your consequentalist logic can justify anything whatever.

For instance, suppose I am told to kill a baby or terrorist will blow up a school.

Or suppose I am caught by terrorists who tell me that unless I perform an act of bestiality they will kill my family (the US seems to have gone in for this kind of demoralizing blackmail in Iraq).

Likewise, appeal to the letter of Scripture can justify anything — not only genocide, but lots of sexual irregularities too — take what God says to Hosea about the women or what Ruth gets up to with Boaz.

By: bill bannon

bill bannon — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:42:37 +0000

MM
Here for example is God in John Paul’s logic permitting an intrinsic evil…slavery….by permitting eternal slavery of foreigners to the Jews:

Lev 25:45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that [are] with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
Lev 25:46 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit [them for] a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.

Is it not more accurate to say that slavery is a penal or existential evil when economies are primitive and a moral evil when economies are advanced ….so that it’s evil depends on context….rather than it being intrinsically evil which forces you to indict God or the Old Testament as did early heretics in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

So John Paul in VS was being inaccurate on slavery e.g. ….because as a group, we have no system of correcting Popes when they are fallible which the Church admits they can be.

By: bill bannon

bill bannon — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:21:09 +0000

Except that the scriptures themselves show that some of the actions that John Paul names are not evil intrinsically at all so that consequentialism does not apply….or they would not have ever been allowed including in the Old Testament….let alone for centuries in the Church’s canons. Bestiality actually is intrinsically evil since God has never permitted it for a nanosecond throughout both testaments…likewise with adultery, murder, covertousness, omitting to help the suffering etc.

By: Morning's Minion

Morning's Minion — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:07:56 +0000

Bill Bannon:

You are arguing in favor of consequentialism. I know you are at heart a Protestant, but please read Veritatis Splendour on why this is a monstrous evil. It is the clear, unambiguous, and infallible teaching of the Church that one cannot do evil to bring about a greater good.

By: bill bannon

bill bannon — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:39:57 +0000

Spirit of Vatican II
Catherine II by the way at 60 years old seems to have had a woman whipped who stole one of her serial fornicators and married the man whereupon Catherine is said to have had the police whip her in front of the man. You might hunt around for another opponent of torture…fi only on more credible moral grounds.

By: bill bannon

bill bannon — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:22:26 +0000

Spirit of Vatican II

But there are gradations and extraordinary circumstances. Give us your take on the example that no one touches and which would be allowed under the interpretation of Fr. Brian Harrison even with the extant Church documents as he interprets the elipsis within them: you have a 7 year old daughter kidnapped by a
rapist who tells the police he has raped her and left her half dead in a shack and he taunts them that he will not tell them the whereabouts and that she is bleeding from her stomach area. Would you not want the police to have the power to give him pain in certain nerve centers like the finger tips as the Church did for centuries in ecclesiastical courts….so that he discloses where your daughter is…pain that will do no great lasting damage.
Do not post to me unless you are going to deal with this case.