Posted on 07/13/2006 3:17:33 PM PDT by Pyro7480
Misguided, Anti-Catholic, and Just Plain Evil
It is hard to encapsulate the more than 200 volatile emails and phone calls that I received two weeks ago concerning HLI's position on Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, but I think it is helpful to report a few of them in their own words. Perhaps this will give a clearer picture of the souls of some of our citizens who very deliberately and aggressively responded to our exposure of those wealthy population controllers. Certainly, not all Americans endorse the hateful remarks below, but the responses do illustrate how far the culture has regressed not just from sanity but from God.
The "misguided" crowd all blessed Gates and Buffett for reducing the ranks of the unwashed masses who are overpopulating the world; frighteningly, that was okay to them, and it appears that the racist myth of overpopulation lives on. Here are two representative responses:
How DARE you criticize Buffett in the vicious, mindless, medieval manner you did! Don't you short-sighted ignoramuses realize that the exploding populations are what causes most of the problems in the developed (sic) world?
You can be angry at people like Warren Buffett or you can actually do something helpful. Say, go to Africa, and tell people with HIV to start using condoms. Oh wait. You actually prefer that they have unprotected sex, right?
Just to set the record straight—I am composing this newsletter while on a pro-life missionary trip to Africa, and HLI is doing a great deal to solve the problems of this continent!
In the "anti-Catholic" category, pedophilia was of course a favorite theme even though it had nothing to do with the subject at hand. Here is just a sampling—and believe me, I have spared you the worst of them:
Thomas Euteneuer and his ilk are just a bunch of pedophiles. They are afraid that the Bill Gates foundation will educate people so they will be less inclined to be brainwashed by the catholic (sic) church, thus reducing the number of children available for them to sexually assault.
Take your comment and go to ***ing ***** you *****. The Catholic church is a ****ing joke and I hope you burn in hell you nazi (sic). Why don't you go after your Child Molesting Priest (sic) who get away with their crimes on children. The Catholic Church does not help the sanctity of human life, to call the church sacred is a **** joke.
Hitler attended parochial school and always claimed to be a Catholic. Hitler was one of yours. There is a special place in Hell for hypocritical liars like yourselves.
And that one leads me into some of the truly evil feedback that I received. I think these comments speak for themselves, and I would ask all our readers to pray for the authors of these emails:
I think your mother should have had an ABORTION!!!!
May the "good" Rev. rot in hell.
I hope you enjoy really warm places, because if anyone is bound for hell you are. I look forward to meeting you there.
You should all go to hell........you hypocritical, holier-than-thou ****.... I wish you an eternity of suffering....You are the Devil!!!!!!!!!!
SHAME, SHAME, SHAME. The catholic (sic) church should be outlawed and **** like Thomas Euteneuer should be taken out and shot.
As a final note, when Simeon met the Holy Family in the Temple (Lk 2:34), he prophesied that Christ would be a "sign of contradiction." So are all those who belong to Him and wish to eradicate the culture of death from our world. As you can see, our world needs it.
Catholic ping!
Well, he did criticize Buffett on Catholic principles; since Buffett is not Catholic, I'm not sure why he expects Buffett to subscribe to them.
This article is, for the most part, not about that. It's about the comments in red.
The comments are childish at best, and that's being as charitable toward "freedom of expression" as possible.
Wow, Havoc and biblewonk have been busy!
I don't think biblewonk would stoop that low.
I think his kind of hate makes him capable of this and more.
The principles in question--all of them derived from the conviction that human life has dignity and value--are Catholic in the sense that the Church teaches them but also "catholic" in the sense that they are written in the hearts of all people, even the hearts of those who refuse to acknowledge them. Why, they are even written in YOUR heart!
Indeed. These principles are part of natural law. St. Paul said that God writes them in the hearts of the gentiles as well as Christians and Jews. And he's not the only one to believe that.
As C.S. Lewis points out, you could just as well call this system of natural law "the Tao," because the ancient Chinese held these same beliefs.
Also, as Americans, we subscribe to three basic and INALIENABLE rights: to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are inalienable because they can never be taken away or even given away. They are God-given rights.
It might be added that these "critics" subscribe to a lot of counterfactual and unscientific beliefs. There is no population explosion. That is a myth. And condoms have been shown statistically to spread AIDS, not reduce control it.
The truth of the matter is that these leftist barbarians hate people, pure and simple. Even as they spout their multiculural mantras, they work to kill off as many third worlders as possible.
Try this:
The Dems can't agree on a candidate. They "draft" Gates after Gates (and/or foundation) have spent large money on a professional PR campaign for his image.
Gates is elected over McCain-Guiliani.
Gates installs an upgrade to the Constitution that works about as well as everything else he has done. The country gets the BlueScreen of Death. But in between re-booting the country, we can enjoy so many more bells and whistles.
Sheesh! Those comments in red are just the milk of human kindness. Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
Sarcasm/Off now.
Ah yes, those non-discriminating, accepting of all, folks strike again,
The whole point of evangelism is to convert and make known the truth. It's precisely those people who are mired in falsehood the deepest and who don't subscibe to Catholic principles who need to hear the truth.
Any religious organization which takes itself seriously and which conders that it possesses the fullness of truth must point out error where it believes it occurs.
It's not a question of "expecting" Buffet to subscribe to these principles. It's about placing them before him and praying that God opens his eyes and also the eyes of Buffet's fellow travelers.
A classic.
Rejoice when the ring dings come after you.
Catholic teaching regarding artificial birth control and the like is based entirely on the natural law.
Humanae Vitae is a classic example. I don't remember any appeal to divine revelation. Here's a sample:
Observing the Natural Law11. The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, "noble and worthy.'' (11) It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile. For its natural adaptation to the expression and strengthening of the union of husband and wife is not thereby suppressed. The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws. The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. (12)
Union and Procreation
12. This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.
The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.
Faithfulness to God's Design
13. Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one's partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife. If they further reflect, they must also recognize that an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will. But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source. "Human life is sacred—all men must recognize that fact," Our predecessor Pope John XXIII recalled. "From its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God." (13)
Unlawful Birth Control Methods
14. Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15)
Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)
Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good," it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (18)—in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.
Reflecting a deep spiritual problem.
For those who want to experience this deep spiritual problem firsthand, try attending a prayer vigil in front of a death "clinic." It's like something out of a Frank Peretti novel.
Again, that is Catholic (large-C) doctrine, in these modern times, and I don't even know too many Catholics who subscribe to their church's teachings on birth control. There is no reason Mr. Buffett has to. You are welcome to leave your billions to different causes, of course.
8-) Where does the pope appeal to any particular Catholic doctrine?
As an encyclical, the pope's writings represent authoritative Catholic teaching.
Considered purely on the merits, however, the pope's writings are accessible to everyone and knowable to everyone, since the pope appeals only to reason.
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