Want to Come to Rome?

How's that for a timely invitation?

Want to Come to Rome?:

Come to Rome withMark “Catholic and Enjoying It!” SheaandFr. Shane “Catholic Ragemonkey” Tharp!Click on the pic for more information! 

(Via Mark Shea.)

My Favorite City

It's true you shouldn't have favourite offspring so it might also be true that you shouldn't have a favourite city. As if that was gong to stop me. I've visited Rome four times, only once on a day trip. The others lasted from five to nine days. And still I can't get enough.

Life will probably not permit me to see her again but this article sure gave me great pleasure. You have to be a history and art buff to get the full flavour of it. Read it anyway even if you're not.

Rome’s past shows not only in her monuments and ruins, but in the very layout of the streets themselves...:

The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from classicists that this single act proves the nobility of the human species.

Read the whole thing.

(Via .)

So How Do They Pick a Pope Anyway?

This is quite nice:

So How Do They Pick a Pope Anyway?:

An explanation in nifty graphic form.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

Why Doesn't Google Translator

do a job like this?

Translating the “catholics For Choice” statement about Pope Benedict:

When Pope Benedict announced his abdication, the heretical “catholics for Choice” issued a statement.    I didn’t want to sully my hands with it but someone else got out the little plastic bag and did the dirty work.

At the blog Acts of the Ashpostasy, we find a little parsing of their statement.  Holding your nose helps a little.

Read the whole thing.

(Via What Does The Prayer Really Say?.)

Five Reasons

not to co-habit prior to marriage:

5 (secular) reasons not to live together before marriage:

One interesting aspect of undergoing a dramatic conversion as an adult is that it's given me the opportunity to be deeply immersed in two rather different cultures. Up until my mid-20s, I was very much a part of post-Christian secular culture. Then my husband and I changed our religious beliefs, and though we're still in touch with many of our old friends, we've increasingly found ourselves in social circles where most people are religious.

Read the whole thing.

(Via New Advent.)

Five Reasons

not to co-habit prior to marriage:

5 (secular) reasons not to live together before marriage:

One interesting aspect of undergoing a dramatic conversion as an adult is that it's given me the opportunity to be deeply immersed in two rather different cultures. Up until my mid-20s, I was very much a part of post-Christian secular culture. Then my husband and I changed our religious beliefs, and though we're still in touch with many of our old friends, we've increasingly found ourselves in social circles where most people are religious.

Read the whole thing.

(Via New Advent.)

Mark Shea Does It Better

Ooh! Ooh! Me! Me! I Know!:

Because we are a Paris Hilton People in an Apocalyptic World?

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

Truth in the News

I caught a brief news report on CNN about the annual March for Life which happened again today. Three things caught my attention:

The single camera shot was from below and only caught a couple of dozen participants.

The reporter referred to "thousands" attending the March. Yeah, right.

The reporter provided the background information about the original case Roe v. Wade, including the real name of "Roe" in this case: Norma L. McCorvey. Norma's conversion to the pro-life cause, of course, wasn't mentioned.

Lesson learned (again): if you want to know anything more than the most superficial and misleading things about causes that the political elite despises don't rely on the MSM.

Let's Start the New Year Right

By reducing the irrational biases in our thinking:

The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational:

The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn't mean our brains don't have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do math thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless — plus, we're subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Here are a dozen of the most common and pernicious cognitive biases that you need to know about.

Read the whole thing.

(Via New Advent.)

Let's Start the New Year Right

By reducing the irrational biases in our thinking:

The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational:

The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn't mean our brains don't have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do math thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless — plus, we're subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Here are a dozen of the most common and pernicious cognitive biases that you need to know about.

Read the whole thing.

(Via New Advent.)

A Little Ecumentical Dialogue

This is an interesting exercise:

Dialogue between Christ and a Muslim:

Very enjoyable read.

H/T Foolishness to the World

Read the whole thing.

(Via SoCon Or Bust.)

A Little Ecumentical Dialogue

This is an interesting exercise:

Dialogue between Christ and a Muslim:

Very enjoyable read.

H/T Foolishness to the World

Read the whole thing.

(Via SoCon Or Bust.)

Reasoning & Informal Logic

Informal logic frequently focuses on identifying fallacies. Sometimes that is where an argument stops: "You are guilty of fallacy x, so your argument is invalid." But some claims of fallacious reasoning may need to be examined more closely:

Philosophical Folklore and the Reification Fallacy:

Among the many things worth studying, one of the most interesting is what I call ‘philosophical folklore’.  Folklore, of course, consists of micro-traditions passed down within communities as part of the ordinary ways of life of the people in those communities. We usually think of these micro-traditions as artistic, but much folklore is philosophical in character. Studying this kind of folklore, often fascinating in its own right, can be quite illuminating.

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Thoughts.)

Jesus as Myth: a Losing Battle

I love the analogy employed here. In any case this is the least troublesome aspect of Christianity's claims: There was a man named Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. I especially appreciate the criticism of Dawkins for relying on an inappropriate authority (German language?) who has since retracted his position.

A fight they can't win: The irreligious assault on the historicity of Jesus – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation):

It is time for the evangelists of unbelief to give up the nonsense that the figure at the heart of Christianity may have never even lived.

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Links.)

Monsignor Teaches Logic

Our inability to communicate with one another when there is significant disagreement may arise in part because of faulty thinking. I'm particularly struck by the observation that a kind of skepticism supported by an unreasonable demand for perfect proof paralyzes dialogue. If you enjoy this the follow-up post is here.

Thinking About Thinking – A Reflection on some of the Modern Pitfalls and Logical Fallacies that Hinder Us
By: Msgr. Charles Pope

- - - - - - - - - - - A Logical Fallacy

A lot of breakdown in modern communication comes down to logical fallacies and cognitive distortions that have us talking past each other. Perhaps, as the new year draws near, we might spend a little time reflecting and “thinking about our thinking.”

All of us fall into these traps. I have spoken before on the blog of the problem of “all or nothing thinking” and also our tendency today to take everything personally, to be thin-skinned. Perhaps some of the following reflections on the nature of our knowledge and how we both argue and reason, may also be instructive, since, as a group, we tend today to be ver

Read the whole thing.

(Via .)

Logic and It's Misuses

While Philosophy is my first love, Logic has been only a passing fancy for me. It's on my list of things to do: study at least beginning-level Logic. But the mini-controversy over Aristotelian versus Symbolic Logic is worth a read:

More on Symbolic v. Aristotelian Logic:

I’ve learned much about logic in the week and a half since my previous post here. In that little missive, I wrote about a Peter Kreeft essay that I had trouble making sense of. Kreeft argued that symbolic logic “has serious social, moral, and even sexual implications, and it is one of the unrecognized indirect causes of ‘the culture of death’,” but I hardly recognized in his description the logic I used in undergraduate studies and in work with computers.

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Thoughts.)

A Follow-up on TLRJ

*The Latest Real Jesus:

Of Gnostics and Religion Professors:

In September, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King ignited an international controversy when she claimed to have found a piece of what she claims is a fourth-century papyrus that refers to Jesus’ “wife”.[1] (To be fair, she doesn’t claim that she believes that Jesus was married, only that whomever wrote the scroll believed He was. Of course, most of the media coverage didn’t make the fine distinction and played it up as evidence that orthodox Christianity was wrong and/or hiding the truth.) There’s been plenty of criticism of King and her claim and even the way she went public about it.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Bettnet.com - Musings of Domenico Bettinelli.)

The Latest Real Jesus

There are a few lessons we can learn from this latest debacle:

First, scholars when working according to their professions standards:

thoroughly research their thesis

submit this thesis to a peer-reviewed journal

which is then reviewed by experts in the field before publication to avoid obvious problems

then it is published and submitted to general review by scholarship as a whole

From this it follows that something which is first announced in a press conference with a tv special on the Smithsonian channel being quickly organized you should prepare yourself for some blowback. Scholars don't like being ignored while the scandal-hungry press and money-grubbing media are feted.

The usual caveats are appropriate for Christmas and Easter-themed "Real Jesus" stories.

It's bad enough we have this shoddy stuff coming at us twice a year. Givest me a break!

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife…:

…is now a confirmed forgery. Replicates blunders from an online version of the gospel of Thomas it was ripped off from.

Will the media learn from this Latest Real Jesus incident not to instantly fall for the next Latest Real Jesus? Have fish, since the invention of fishing, ever learned not to bite a hook with bait on it?

It’s what they *do*.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

Drones and Morality

My uneasiness at the use of drones is amplified by this:

The Many Victims of Drones:

We’ve discussed drones on this blog before, generally agreeing that killing enemy combatants with unmanned drones can be morally legitimate but leery about their seemingly indiscriminate use.

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Thoughts.)

School is Back in Session

So let's get our brains working again. The Professor in the video gives a capsule version of Natural (Moral) Law Theory. His book What We Can't Not Know could serve as a primer. Then you could move on to The Line Through the Heart. I'm behind in my reading so I added them to my Wishlist.

*A Primer on the Natural Law...*

...by J. Budziszewski.

It's:

A Primer on the Natural Law...

...by J. Budziszewski.


Read the whole thing.

(Via Lex Communis.)