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EXPLANATION:

Your distinction between fiction and non-fiction is wrong. Either can be used to convey moral and amoral or immoral messages.

Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is the obvious model for The Magnificent Seven. Fictional? Yes. Moral? Also, yes. You aren't really serious in suggesting that Shakespeare is not a purveyor of moral guidance in his dramas???? Do you really think Homer was not an author of moral guidance in The Iliad and the Odyssey???? The Godfather Trilogy, regardless of subthemes is a VERRRRRY moral tale and derives its fanatic audience from those of us who recognize that fact. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (check her biography, husband and friends) never planned to deliver a moral guidance but rather an antimoral one.

Enough of specific refutation of the authors you chose. Let us add a few others.

We agree on Seabiscuit. Good. Next is Cinderella Man, telling the very moral tale of James J. Braddock, Heavyweight Champion, played by the none too moral Russel Crowe, who is a truly professional actor nonetheless and brought to the screen a substantially forgotten morality tale of American sport. Unfortunately, we were required to witness and ponder the lowlife behavior of Max Baer lest the crassness quota remain unfilled. Barely, I would let my kids see this movie because the moral content would outweigh the unnecessary cold sores.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a committed Catholic and wrote a three volume allegory to lead his readers to the Truth. C. S. Lewis, though a close friend of Tolkien and of Charles Williams, was a committed Protestant and anti-Catholic but well worth reading for his moral guidance and his craft. They are two of the standards of fiction. Can anyone even name the author of Million Dollar Baby????? Will anyone be able to name that author five years from now???? No. And the obscurity will be no surprise. Euthanasia is one of our cultural antimoral fads. Five years from now it will be old hat. We may be pondering the WHAT IFs of sex with anti-war culturally diverse reptiles who operate abortion mills for anti-nuclear gay whales or some such abomination that may be capturing the interest of the bored culturati of that time and Hollywood will rush to the screen with cinematic portrayals of WHAT IF to make such things seem attractive to ever more jaded audiences. None dare call Hollywood related even accidentally to actual Western Civilization.

As to whether 17-year olds ought to spend their time wallowing in morally corrupt and corrupting literature, plays, movies, and other questionable works of "art", the short answer is no for seventeen-year olds and no for those younger and no for those older. You are free to frequent what we Catholics promise in the Sacrament of Penance to avoid---the near occasion of sin. You are also free to suffer the temporal and eternal consequences of doing so. A man who claims to be committed to avoid adultery is wise not to hang out at cathouses just to enjoy the humor and repartee available through the companionship of the ladies lest he find himself compelled to enjoy other aspects of their hospitality as well. If he falls, he can hardly blame the ladies when he ought not to have been in their company in the first place and could easily have avoided the temptation.

Suicide and euthanasia are wrong. WHY DOES A MOVIE NEED TO SUGGEST THAT THEY ARE RIGHT OR WISE OR PRAGMATIC OR OTHERWISE WORTH INDULGING??????

You don't think haiku or other forms of poetry carry moral guidance??????

I have spent the better part of my life acting in what was the conservative movement. It has boundaries. The idea of substituting a loyalty to "freedom of imagination" for the boundaries and principles of what was a great movement and will be a great movement again is not attractive.

To do so for the mere reason of not offending potential "converts" is positively craven. If you told me that you wanted to "convert" to Catholicism but could not believe that Jesus Christ was God, that you cold not believe that He is present Body and Blood in the Eucharist under the continued appearance of bread and wine, that you could not believe in the Resurrection, etc., I would not say welcome, convert. I would say: Get back to us when you have changed your mind on those things and any other doctrines you reject.

The conservative movement was and will be made up of, well, conservatives and not of "free thinkers." We may agree, from time to time with libertarians but it is merely coincidence. John Cornwell, who purports to write non-fiction, has delivered an antimoral message in his "Hitler's Pope" vilifying the memory of Pope Pius XII who saved more Jews than any other human being during the Holocaust and was publicly recognized for it by Golda Meir, the Israeli government, and more recently by Rabbi Dallin in Commentary, the Weekly Standard and several books on the subect. The Rabbi uses non-fiction as a moral message and moral guidance to correct the "non-fiction" lies and expressed evil of Cornwell.

Ayn Rand was no paragon of moral virtue. Hers was a life of militant atheism and serial adultery, complete with a phony "philosophy" concocted to justify both. Nonetheless, even Rand understood (The Romantic Manifesto) that it would not be a moral act to commission a great artist to paint a life-size portrait of a beautiful woman but to be sure to include a cold sore on her lip to reflect a temporary condition marring her beauty while she posed. Hollywood is in the moral cold sore business. It is not challenge. It is not speculation. It is antimoral cultural graffiti. Morality is well-settled. WHAT IF? is merely an invitation to the seduction of one's morality to place it in service to him who persuaded Eve. On matters such as euthanasia, abortion, homosexuality, there is and never will be any open questions. The questions are long-since resolved.

I know right from wrong. So do you and so does every other human courtesy of Adam and Eve saying yes to the forbidden fruit of the tree. I am an adult, whatever that has to do with frequenting the near occasion of intellectual sin. "Adult" themes in literature, photos and movies are often claimed to be those which maximize the portrayal of the maximum number of genital and eliminatory organs in various stages of mindless heat as graphically as the producer dares. As to whether "we" are adults, I cannot offer an opinion. I can only speak for myself. I am an adult and that description bears no resemblance to the warped view of adulthood expressed as various disordered forms of WHAT IF?

I am not a monkey. Darwin may well have been one. You can speak for yourself since we are not acquainted.

The question is not as to whether we "need moral guidance" from films or TV shows or books. It is whether we need antimoral conditioning conveyed through films, TV shows or books.

I am more ethical than I used to be and hope that I am less ethical than I intend to be.

The last two sentences of your second paragraph are obviously rhetorical, do not follow logically and need no answers.

"Your distinction between fiction and non-fiction is wrong. Either can be used to convey moral and amoral or immoral messages."

You didn't read what I wrote. Fiction is NOT non-Fiction. They are no more than same than a dream is reality or a word is an object. You are blurring lines, blurring concepts, and not *discerning*. Yes, fiction *can* offer a moral or immoral message (how many times do I need to type this?), but just because they can doesn't mean they *do*. This is a false choice you are offering--another logical fallacy. Just because a car *can* have a male or female driver, doesn't mean that every car has someone in the car at all times. 75% of cars are unoccupied, parked somewhere, likewise 75% of fiction can be a stimulus instead of a conclusion.

Fiction is basically a lie. It's about how things *aren't*. Fiction really isn't a lie, if you admit it's fiction and thus FREE from representing reality. It does make fiction a lie when you make the insistence you have made, that fiction = non-fiction. Morality is supposed to be true. If you suggest that morality should come from fiction, you are suggesting morality should come from a lie. Which is not only bad to base ethics on lying (ie the Plato, Hitler, Stalin worldview), but an argument in bad faith, as truth is generally considered a cornerstone of morality.

"Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is the obvious model for The Magnificent Seven. Fictional? Yes. Moral? Also, yes. You aren't really serious in suggesting that Shakespeare is not a purveyor of moral guidance in his dramas???? Do you really think Homer was not an author of moral guidance in The Iliad and the Odyssey????"

What about Rashomon? Or Kagemusha? Or Kurosawa's adaptation of King Lear, Ran? Iliad presented an ethical worldview, but hardly one's that's Catholic or Christian. If you agree with the ethics presented in the Iliad, you are a pagan. If you distance yourself from it, parcel it, discern and go "Woah woah woah, that's not what I mean, I mean I just like the cool violence you know people getting heads ripped open or the part about Achilles reclaiming his honor", well guess what, you're *discerning* and appreciating it for what it is! You're not condemning the entire work because it is either a.) written by and for pagans and presenting a pagan ethos or b.) exceedingly vulgar and x-rated (You *have* read the Iliad haven't you, and you know it has sex and dismemberment and child sacrifice in it?) You're thinking like *me*! You can't do that, I'm the Satanic enemy! It is not consistent to defend Kurosawa, the Godfather, and the Iliad, and then make the arguments you have made. These examples do *not* present the Catholic ethos you believe must be presented in every example of fiction, or haiku, or song, or poem, or whatever.

"As to whether 17-year olds ought to spend their time wallowing in morally corrupt and corrupting literature, plays, movies, and other questionable works of "art", the short answer is no for seventeen-year olds and no for those younger and no for those older...I would not say welcome, convert. I would say: Get back to us when you have changed your mind on those things and any other doctrines you reject."

Great, goodbye reading and thinking! Let's have a book burning while we're at it! Frankenstein, the works of Euripedes and Aeschylus, Tolstoy, all morally corrupting becuase they do not provide explicit moral guidance for the reader and/or they provide alternative worldviews to what we believe in real life. I think you should email every Conservative, and tell them that they shouldn't read Frankenstein, that their kids shouldn't read it, and that they aren't members in good standing of the conservative movement if they like it and appreciate it. See how large the conservative movement is then, with this notion that works of great literature or great music or mediocre literature or mediocre filmmaking shouldn't be read/viewed by anyone of any age. I doubt William F. Buckley, Francis Schaeffer and Condi Rice (Led Zeppelin fans), Rush Limbaugh (big Sopranos fan), G.W. Bush (big Austin Powers fan), agree with your definition of the Conservative movement and what traits are attractive or unattractive in it.

I guess those mentioned above would have to deconvert from the conservative movement, to accept your Catholicism analogy, because they willfully expose themselves to "intellectual sin", whether the nihilism of Led Zeppelin or the Sopranos or the sexual lewdness of Austin Powers. That must be the case, if people who like these things aren't members of your conservative movement. Wow.

You are confusing cause-effect, with stimulus-response. This is a problem in the conservative Christian movememtn. When you knock a water bottle on the floor, you cause the effect of water spilling on the floor. When someone whispers in your ear to kill your neighbor--and you do it--the neighbor has not caused you to kill your neighbor, he has provided a stimulus, and you have provided the response. You didn't have to kill your neighbor, no one forced you to like you forced the water to spill on the floor. You could have ignored the message of the whisper, you could have refuted the whisper, you could have punched the whisperer in the face. Stimulus-Response is NOT Cause-Effect. You have a will that decides what "corrupts" you.

You have a choice, when presented with a stimulus--agree to it, renounce it, or do nothing. When you watched the Godfather, the Godfather provided some bad "role models" for you. It gave you behavior choices--stimuli--and you had a varied amount of responses available to what was on screen. You could emulate it and join the mob, you could believe in the nihilistic worldviews of the characters, or you could do none of the above and just observe, and watch, and appreciate the creative arc of the fictional story as is. If the Godfather didn't cause you to join the mob, to kill and to steal, then Million Dollar Baby, Frankenstein, and Notes from the Underground don't cause these things either.

You can't have it both ways--that is, Story A (Rashomon, the Iliad, the Godfather) isn't morally corrupting even though it has murder, rape, sex, pagan worship, blasphemy, ect., but Story B (Frankenstein, Million Dollar Baby, ect) is morally corrupting because it has murder, rape, sex, pagan worship, ect. Just as fiction is not non-fiction, cause-effect is not stimulus-response. We are NOT monkeys, yet your arguments suggest that we must be programmed by our environment and by what we are exposed to. No such thing. We are autonomous individuals, able to wonder, discern, and use the tool of logic to separate fact from fiction, A from B, a good idea and from an ok idea, and ourselves from our media.

If someone watches Million Dollar Baby, uh oh they're going to be caused into believing in euthanasia! Uh oh, if someone watches the Godfather, he's going to cut off horses heads and shove them in beds! Uh oh, if someone reads Frankenstein, well Mary Shelley's two centuries old mindwaves will reprogram that poor soul's neurons and from the grave she has cloned herself into the mind of another, ready to spread sexual liberation through her new body. One is only morally corrupted by Frankenstein and the Godfather if he himself is *stupid*. And a stupid person has bigger problems than the movies he sees or the books he (tries to) read.

Right here, with your praise of the anti-Catholic Godfather and the Iliad, yet condemnation of Million Dollar Baby and Frankenstein, we have dismantled your view of fiction. Some films and books with bad behavior and dubious worldviews (keep in mind Coppola made the Godfather trilogy as an attack on the American Dream and the capitalistic system) are tolerable because *you* like them, others are not because you haven't seen them/read them thus don't like them. That's arbitrary.

" You don't think haiku or other forms of poetry carry moral guidance??????"

Do you know what a haiku is? Do you know the philosophy and worldview that led to the haiku? Hardly a philosophy one should expose himself to, as the haiku comes from the Japanese view of nature, that itself comes from Shintoism. And Shintoism has had some negative consequences just in the past 80 years.

"I am more ethical than I used to be and hope that I am less ethical than I intend to be."

You speak of Catholicism--I work for a Catholic services organization. I get my hands dirty to feed the poor and clothe the cold. My buddies who work with me love the Sopranos, and classic rock, and Celtic drinking songs (speaking of the temptation of "intellectual sin"), yet they do explicitly what Christ commanded us to do--feed the poor, help the needy, heal the sick (although the latter is a little hard for our organization to do). This is *non-fiction* morality. Actually DOING--not speaking, not whining, not typing--what's right.

I see this often in the Christian movement, of people who think that they have done a good deed if they complain about what someone else is doing, instead of doing the right thing that the other person isn't doing (not unlike people who claim to know the Bible, but don't know Hebrew or Greek). Again, back to the start--fiction and non-fiction is blurred. Complaining about what fictional characters are doing is somehow ethical?!? They're not real, they don't exist, no sin was actually done by Anne Karenina at the end of the novel, because she isn't real. If the sin didn't happen, than the righteous indignation over the fictional sin doesn't have any substance either. Meanwhile there are poor black kids who need tutors, homeless people with severe emotional problems who need friendship (and Christ), and atheists who need salvation, and *won't* get it from some stick-in-the-mud who whines about every little form of media that doesn't provide a perfect gameplan of morality and ethics for the reader/viewer.

"Total Truth" by Nancy Pearcey was written for you. I pray you read it, because it speaks directly to the current of anti-intellectualism and "cultural captivity" of the American Christian. Can't drink, can't dance, can't listen to secular music, can't watch R rated movies--how can one witness to the lost if you don't understand where that poor soul is coming from, what that person loves and fears and wonders about? How can that person trust you if you urinate on everything he or she likes (ie, the movies and the paintings and books he enjoys)? God made the imagination, he made the talents and skills within us all. We should appreciate them, while disagreeing with the message (again, many do not even have a message), as parts of God's GOOD, yes, GOOD creation. The imagination is what it is, speculation is what it is, "what if?" is what it is, and they aren't *sin*. They are wonderful parts of God's creation, and the most hated and misunderstood by God's servants on this earth.

I am directing this to you, my brother in Christ, not your friends you ping and probably misrepresent my post for--when we die and go to Heaven, Jesus isn't going to look at us and say "Gee, here's an addenum to your mansion because you didn't see Million Dollar Baby, what a good deed you did!", rather he will say "Here's where the extra floor of your house would have been if you had taken that atheist friend of yours to watch Million Dollar Baby, and used that shared non-sinful experience as a chance to get inside his inner world, understand it, then over a beer explain with clarity a better way."

In order to witness effectively, you have to understand, you have to relate. In order to relate, you have to expose yourself to the culture. And you might have some FUN in the process. It doesn't have to be MDB, it could be ancient greek "pagan" literature, or Japanese religion and art, or Led Zeppelin, all of which are apparently outlawed to the good conservative Christian, according to the tenets you have outlined in your post. You undermine your own strength, your own will, and thus the heart God has put in you, if you think that you will somehow be corrupted by a stimulus you have control over how to respond to. You do yourself a disservice by denying the power of discernment--that no one at any age can read something like Notes From the Underground--you lobotomize yourself, and worse ask others to do the same.

Another great gift given by God--logic. Distance. The ability to separate oneself from one's environment, from one's experience, from the film before your eyes and the "message" it may or may not propose. If you expose yourself to a pro-euthanasia "message" or "argument" (and MDB doesn't have one, but for the sake of argument) than you have bettered yourself, because you have challenged yourself and renewed and reinforced your understanding of your own arguments against euthanasia. You can better respond to what the pro-euthanasia crowd says, because you actually know what they're going to say. Cultural captivity, intentional intellectual weakness, is not ethical, but *un*ethical. It won't save souls. It won't make you better prepared for defending the faith. It's not rational. God don't make no junk, yet we have this undercurrent in Christianity that Logic and Fiction are junk, instead of using them as tools to witness, relate, understand, enjoy, and thus in the end, refute the wrong worldviews.

And I'm done, if you want the last word you can have it.