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You certainly are done. You may praise logic or intellect but you do not evidence either.

I am a Roman Catholic. I am a conservative. I am not a social worker. I am a retired and recovering attorney who represented more than 1100 people who were arrested for sitting in in abortion mills, desterilizing the suction machines with raw eggs poured into their inner works to be a very efficient medium for growth of bacteria so that the machines had to be torn down by repair engineers putting the mills out of business for far more than the one day. About 30 of the 1100 were convicted (mostly of non-criminal infractions when they had been charged with felonies) which is more of a result of their militance than of their legal representation. Most of the 30 also refused to pay fines or sign probation papers.

I have posted that I can not very well speak for your experiences since we are not acquainted. You fail to return that modesty and, accordingly, assume much that is not so. Thus, more facts: I graduated a Jesuit prep school long enough ago that the Jebbies were still quite Catholic. The Iliad is not as high on my list of Classical literature as was the Aeneid. We translated the entire Aeneid (360 pages in the Oxford edition) and the capable Jebbies did challenge us as to the ideas and lifestyles of the Trojan pagans who founded Rome. They did not promote the idea that it would be really neat to engage in all of Aeneas's behavior even though he was to pagan Rome: Pius Aeneas. Therein lies the difference.

If you think that your false distinction between the uses of fiction and the uses of non-fiction is true, you are very wrong but you are welcome to advertise your wrongness wherever those who are right are free to demolish your errors lest they be believed by the impressionable. One cannot stand up in a theater and argue with the amorality/immorality of Clint Eastwoods decidedly anti-life propaganda and lifestyle. At least not with due regard to the rights of the ticket-buying public. The late John Cardinal O'Connor strongly advised Catholics NOT to protest Kazantzakis's despicable Last Temptation of Christ lest they inadvertently encourage others to see it. It crashed and burned at the box office which ought to be the fate of all such trash.

If these views mark me as anti-intellectual in some fashion, so be it and proud of it although wallowing in every speculation is no more intellectualism than working your way through Reno cathouses constitutes love. Whatever my intellect may be and, I assure you that it is in a very high sliver of the 99th percentile, it is high enough for me to recognize that, if I disagree with God, His is far and indefinably higher and deserves deference from the likes of me and from the likes of thee. On the other hand, if I agree with God and disagree with you, you are wrong with certainty because you disagree with God. My participation in that particular comparison is utterly irrelevant other than to stick to God's side of the argument.

I most certainly have read what you have written. I most certainly disagree with and reject most of it as I ought. Much is incomprehensible faux intellectual gibberish. Your friends and associates may be wowed by what passes for your arguments. I am not. Whether fiction is what things aren't or what things are, the complaint is that Million Dollar Baby is rank propaganda and anti-moral and anti-Judaeo-Christian propaganda at that. Those who develop a habit of submitting themselves to such trash as Million Dollar Baby and providing money to subsidize its production are gravely in error. Well, God gave free will to thee and to me. You are free to go to hell in a handbasket, if you choose. Working at some soup kitchen will not ameliorate unrepented sin.

Hippocrates was a Greek pagan and a father of medicine. He admonished doctors in the words of the oath they were to take to neither perform abortions nor to facilitate them. Pagan? Yes. Moral, also yes. We Catholics believe in Natural Law. So did Hippocrates whether he would have articulated it precisely that way or not. I agree with the pagan Hippocrates on Natural Law and the evil of abortion. If that makes me a pagan in your imagination, have a party. Your argument as to Plato, Hitler, Stalin is an example of incomprehensible gibberish. I would also note that I have read the Bible and it has sex (too many instances to cite) and dismemberment (ditto) and child sacrifice (Jeremiah, inter alia). Rumor has it that the book is Truth and is for moral guidance even so. It contains parables as well which are also for moral guidance. AND, if someone wrote a totally fictional account along the same lines (faithful to the principles) and avoided the propaganda for evil that marks much of Hollywood, that fictional account would also be for moral guidance whether you admit it or not.

You keep on having the same problem of thinking that I want you propagandized by fiction. I do not. I simply want me and mine not to be propagandized by the evil that emanates from so much of Hollywood and we accomplish our purpose by avoiding that which we find unacceptable lest we encourage or subsidize more of the same.

You give yourself far too much credit by referencing yourself even sarcastically as "the Satanic Enemy." Lucifer is far more capable than thee or even Million Dollar Baby.

Your choices of Euripedes, Aeschylus and Tolstoy do not bolster your argument. Perhaps you should use the fudge-packing lit of James Baldwin as an example of that to which we ought not to waste time paying any mind. Ohhhh soooooo sensitive, soooooo intellectual, soooooo morally "complicated", sooooooo pathetic! Baldwin who long ago assumed room temperature is sorry now!

I don't particularly care what you may regard as consistent or inconsistent. Who was it that observed that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?

I must admit that I do like cool violence. The baptism scene in Godfather I is superb and likewise Michael Corleone's minions trying valiantly to rescue JP I.

On the other hand, half vast pop psychology enunciated as psychobabble is tedious and trite.

The 17-syllable Japanese poetry is a high art form and does carry moral messages. I do not have to be Shinto to think so any more than I have to be Shinto to admire the character, competence, brilliance and good fortune of the great Lord Toronaga in Clavell's Shogun and to revel in the postscript to that novel.

The Godfather is a saga of justice, and a better justice than that afforded by mere government.

I know Bill Buckley personally. I was a leader in Young Americans for Freedom on a state and regional level for some years. Bill invented YAF. I bet that you do not know Bill from what you write. He would not claim to be personally consistent with Catholicism in all of its beliefs. He is nonetheless a wonderful man who understands the actual conservative movement as you do not. He invented it which is a major advantage he enjoys over you. My wife worked for him for years. I could sic her on you on the matter of literary criticism but charity forbids. She studied under Cleanth Brooks. She says that you should, as a sci-fi fan re-read your Jerry Pornuelle (sp.?) to disabuse yourself of your curious notions as to the uses of fiction.

I could turn you over to the actual Catholic intellectuals here (some of whom have been pinged, but, again, charity suggests that I refrain.

The Rev. Mr. Francis Schaeffer was a remarkable man but decidedly NOT a fan of Catholicism. Nonetheless, like C. S. Lewis,he is well worth reading. Condoleeza Rice, Ph.D., was NOT in the conservative movement despite working at the Hoover Institute and other virtues. Rush Limbaugh, the closest thing to a movement nowadays, did not emerge in public until about nine years after the conservative movement died of euphoria over the election of Ronaldus Maximus and the simultaneous gutting of Jimmuh Peanut and the cream of the Senate Demonratic commie caucus on election night 1980. Dubya has his virtues but involvement in the conservative political movement is not one of them. He is just a good guy and good president.

AND, ummmm, please, the very idea of some misbegotten little twerp like Austin Powers having his name in the same sentence as the word "sex" is a bit much for the contemplation of anyone who is a fan of or participant in normal sex. I suppose you find Pee Wee Herman entertaining too, even when he is off duty and hanging out at porno theaters doing whatever that was that got him arrested.

In the eleventh to the last paragraph of your ramblings, you use the imperial we, which is never acceptable unless you happen to be, oh say, Queen Victoria: "We, Victoria in the fifty-sixth year of our reign....."

I am, BTW, a street-fighting Elk who patrols the periphery of Catholicism on FR and when I find someone making superficially persuasive arguments against the Faith which you do not, I can turn them over to those who care more for scholarly argument than do I. Of course, they have to have something to argue with. As I am pinging many, scholarly and otherwise, not all of them Catholic, it is not because you have earned refutation but for their entertainment.

If these authors you are promoting (the homeschooling moms who think that we should be wallowing in bad fiction/may God protect their own children) had any sense they would rethink their priorities. Save your prayers for worthwhile causes. I am well enough along in my journey that I need neither them nor you to tell me how to waste my time with the likes of Million Dollar Baby.