Posted on 08/16/2013 2:10:26 PM PDT by NYer
Catholic ping!
bkmk
Permit me to use this as a pretext to pass along a good quote from my favorite philosophical giantess, Elizabeth Anscombe:
We live in a society where sex prevails ... as evidenced by the endless commercials for ED. One gets the impression that ED is a plague and needs to be addressed, even by those men who are suffering from prostate disorders. Children pick up on these commercials. A while back, when a friend asked her children what they wanted for Christmas, her 6 year old son responded "those blue pills".
Just look out the window.....common sense reveals a problem that's epidemic.
It was, he said, as if the Church went into a cave, like St. Benedict, and fasted and prayed and scourged itself, until finally they emerged with clean flesh and pure hearts. They could look at stars and see lights placed by God, not frolicking pagan deities. They could look at a garden without ever thinking of Ovid's Metamorphoses. They could enjoy music without remembering bacchanalia or satyrs' revels.
Chesterton said it better, of course, but I'm sure you get the point. I think this will have to happen again ... a conscious rejection of "this we have now," until men and women love children more than they love their genital pleasure, until people can have clean bodies, minds, and hearts again.
Outstanding comment.
Well stated, and from your own loving and far-sighted heart. Amen.
Scanned — will read again later. But just as a quick comment, it’s almost a curiosity to me that anyone from Europe over the age of 50 can write/believe this way. I guess that’s part of her point...?
Thank you. I read a lot and remember stuff and think about it.
I take this issue very personally. Conservatives like to say there isn’t a “War on Women,” but there is. It’s Satan’s war against Our Mother of Guadalupe and all her children. Against girls who should live in complete innocence, with a pure enjoyment of health and strength. Against virgins who can serve the Lord wholeheartedly while they mature and discern an adult vocation. Against faithful and chaste married women. Against women as mothers. Against consecrated religious women. Against women as wise and useful widows. Against lonely, helpless elderly women, who don’t have the loving children and grandchildren they should have.
In this Godless society, women - including girls just past infancy - are valued primarily for their utility as a sexual stimulus and outlet. Visually, they’re to be available to the general male public, and they are excoriated if they are homely, old, fat, untidy ... or modest. Adult women, married or not, are expected to be available for sex. Look at the comments about consecrated religious women we see here: they’ve broken the “agreement,” that women will be tolerated if they’re providing a sexual service to someone.
Look what happens when a woman has a baby. Yesterday she was “hot,” but today she’s a cow, a pig, taking our money for her litter. She’s broken the agreement: she’s to be a sterile sexual outlet, like a man’s rectum, not a mother! Look at the comments about women with large families. Filthy comments. Look at the comments about women who are old, unattractive, fat, handicapped. “Once she was hot, but now she’s just ...” dismissed. Expendable. Taking up space someone else could use.
This isn’t coming from “the left,” but from “conservatives,” and from religious people, people who are anti-abortion often, but they’re anti woman-as-God-made-her, too, and it’s all from Satan.
I beg the audience’s pardon, but sometimes one just must rant.
Chesterton on birth control/population control: In 1925 Chesterton wrote an introduction to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in which he said that “The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.”
Good rant. Thanks!
Hadn't thought about that. Very true.
G.K Chesterton was incredibly wise! Is it a wonder “why” no one who graduates from the public “school” systems have even heard of him, much less read a word he wrote.
Here is one of my favorite quotes by him:
“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
It's one thing to say, in a reasonable and amicable way, that one doesn't agree with this or that doctrine or devotion. Fine. We can talk.
But it's quite another thing to heap contempt upon her. Some deny that her motherhood had any particular significance to her divine Son. It's as if she were just a disposable carton; as if intelligent, dedicated mothering were not the primary natural, nurturing factor in the splendid development of her Son's gifted human nature.
Some go so far as to fling baseless insinuations against her innocence --- resembling (though they don't recognize this) that imbecilic contemporary artist Ofili who adorned her portrait with dung. Cultural vandalism uniting the Left-wing atheist and the Mary-degrading "Christian".
In celebration of Mary's lovely Motherhood I offer today's favorite portrait --- I have so many favorites -- this one by a Croatian artist, Kristian Krekovic:
I think that's what I'm going to do when people start in with their campaigns of diminishment. I'm just going to run picture after picture. Let the honorable be honored. Let joy be enjoyed. Let loveliness be loved!
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I don't know, chick, the consensus at my house is that you got it better, at least for the Reader's Digest Condensed Version.
Excellent rant!!!!
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