Modern Atheists Debunked (?)

My Great Aunt Dorothy Jean (who just turned 90 on March 1) a few years ago lent Demetrios a book entitled, An Atheist Manifesto, together with a companion volume, Positive Atheism. Demetrios, fascinated, read them both, and concluded that the objections to religion were specifically to Western Christianity. The things the author was discussing simply did not apply to Orthodox Christianity.

"But," he added, and I agreed, "If I thought God were who these people think He is, who your Great Aunt thinks He is, I'd be an atheist, too!" Well, okay, there's a logical contradiction there, but you get the point. It's a false god to whom these atheists rightly object!

That's why we don't feel we have a dog in this fight. Nevertheless, for anyone interested, First Things has published a review of a book purporting to demolish the logic of several of today's prominent and popular atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Here is the meat of it.

The Irrational Atheist
Posted by Anthony Sacramone

Just when atheists thought it was safe to enter the public square, a book like this comes along. The Irrational Atheist by Vox Day is not a work of Christian apologetics. It is, instead, a merciless deconstruction of atheist thought—or what passes for thought. That’s the gimmick, if you will, of the book: Day does not accept a single assertion made by any one of the “Unholy Trinity”—Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens—without first pinning it to a sheet of wax as in a seventh-grade science class, dissecting it until there’s nothing left but a case for anti-vivisection legislation.

Day starts off with the charming declarative sentence “I don’t care if you go to hell”—this despite being a Southern Baptist, a group not known for complacency in such matters. But the author wants to make clear that he’s not trying to convert anyone to Christianity, only to ensure that those readers who are susceptible to straw-man arguments, tautologies, clichés, and urban legends understand that the New Atheists—who are on a conversion mission—are not only guilty of all of the aforementioned but also are seemingly incapable of mustering anything stronger by way of Reason in their own cause.

To take just one of many examples, a common trope among atheists is that religion is the No. 1 cause of wars in history. “If religion were an important element of warmaking, one would expect to find a great deal of text commenting upon it,” Day writes. But you don’t. After reading the great war theorists, from Sun Tzu to Von Clausewitz, Day found pages and pages about perseverance, spies, geometry, inspirational music—but virtually nothing about religion.

As for the nature of the wars themselves, talk about specific: Day found 123 wars that could validly be claimed to have religion at their heart—a grand total of 6.98 percent of all wars fought. “It’s also interesting to note that more than half of these religious wars, sixty-six in all, were waged by Islamic nations,” Day offers as an aside.

Of the New Atheists Day examines in The Irrational Atheist, the most irrational, by the author’s lights, is the man who started the atheism bestselling craze, Sam Harris. “Harris is an appallingly incoherent logician. He frequently fails to gather the relevant data required to prove his case, and on several occasions inadvertently presents evidence that demonstrates precisely the opposite of that which he is attempting to prove.” One quick example: Harris asserts that most suicide bombers are Muslims. Yet, “the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who are not Muslims but a Marxist liberation front that committed 168 of the 273 suicide bombings that took place between 1980 and 200, have historically been the leading practitioners of suicide bombing.”

Dawkins doesn’t fare much better in Day’s analytical meat grinder. Day sics the anthropic principle on him, which Dawkins rejects because any God capable of fine-tuning the universe so as to make possible the advent of DNA is at least as improbable as the universe in question, because he would have to be a being of unimaginable complexity. Day offers as a refutation the existence of the mathematician who calculated the “goldilocks values” (the cosmic fine-tuning that the birth of man would require) in the first place, this “despite being less complex than the sum of everyone and everything else in the universe.” Day, who creates computer programs, is well placed to demonstrate how “mass quantities of information can easily be produced from much smaller quantities of information”—as anyone familiar with computer-generated fractals understands.

As for some atheists’ resorting to “multiverse theory” in a desperate attempt to answer the probability problem of a human-compatible Earth, “not only is multiverse theory every bit as unfalsifiable and untestable as the God Hypothesis, it is demonstrably more improbable,” replies Day.

Day then aims his rhetorical guns at Christopher Hitchens. When the latter states that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence,” the former lays out quote after quote of unsupported and “auto-refutable statements” culled from the pages of God Is Not Great. Needless to say, Hitchens is dismissed rather quickly.

Day is kinder to Daniel Dennett, whom he dubs “the pragmatic philosopher.” Despite some of Dennett’s more supercilious comments regarding believers’ intelligence, he, according to Day, is willing to at least “examine” religion in the light of science. Day nevertheless rejects Dennett’s “claims that ‘brights’ have better family values than born-again Christians,” a contention based on George Barna’s flawed 1999 study. The fact that “half of all atheists and agnostics don’t get married” turns such a charge into an “apples and oranges” error. Day cites the more reliable 2001 ARIS study and finds that atheists are “twice as likely to get divorced and have fewer children than any other group in the United States.”

Postscript: Demetrios picked up Hitchens' book one evening at Barnes and Noble and sat down for some 45 minutes perusing it. When he was finished, he expressed disappointment. He had expected some argument worth dealing with, some good intellectual stimulation, and couldn't find any. "I really did not expect a man with such a reputation as an intellectual to turn out to be such a shallow thinker."

RIP, Both of You

My sister Barbara was working as an intern on Capitol Hill when a very tall man came through the doors of "her" Congressman's office, causing quite a stir. There were professional photographers in attendance, and the whole staff was eager to have pictures taken with the visitor. All except Barbara, who at 6'4" herself, wasn't much impressed by height. When asked repeatedly, "Don't you want to have your picture taken with him?" she obliged. Two very tall people might make an interesting shot for somebody, she supposed.

(Dear family, does anybody know where that picture is now? Or have a copy of it?)

It wasn't until the developed photograph came back that Barbara realized what all the fuss had been about, and recognized the man with whom she had posed: Charlton Heston.


Update: Daniel, with whom I just spoke, says he has a copy of that photo somewhere. But it's horrible of Barbara, he says, and if the other person in it hadn't been Charlton Heston, he says, he would have "torn it up" long ago. I will still try to get it -- some day.
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Oh, no!

How insular we must have been, how proccpied with our grief! I spoke to our priest Friday night about arranging the 40-day memorial service for Barbara, and told him all about her death, and per his instructions called the church secretary this morning about it. Then I called Iannoula to arrange for her to make the koliva, and she remarked that she was doing another one, too, for the same day -- for Fr. Nicholas' dad! He obviously died the same time as Barbara, and we never knew it.

At least I know, now, how to write a sympathy card. I'm outta here, to go buy one.

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Enlightenment!

Joseph Patterson, over at Mind in the Heart, posted this.

These photos of an Orthodox Chrismation have been going around the net. The photos were taken a few years ago at Holy Trinity Orthodox Church in Santa Fe, NM where we attended when we lived in Santa Fe. We know everyone in the photo including the one illumined with light. The light was not noticed by the naked eye but showed up in all the pictures. If you are ever in Santa Fe you have got to visit Fr. John and Holy Trinity. One of my favorite places in all the world. Glory to God for all Things!

"Transactionalism"

The Internet Monk, who bills himself as a “post-evangelical,” has a very interesting article entitled, Out of Business With God. Subtitle, “I'm throwing out the vending machine Gospel.”

He makes some excellent points. God does not do things for us in response to anything we’ve done. He does not save us or answer our prayers because we believe (and He is thereby flattered), but through our faith, since only belief is capable of receiving, or even asking for, His gifts. He does not love us because of anything anybody has done, including Jesus; instead, He sent Jesus to do those things because He already loved us. (Romans 5:8) He does not graft us into Christ because we are baptized; rather, Holy Baptism is that grafting. He does not send us the Holy Spirit because we are chrismated, but Holy Chrismation is the reception of the Holy Spirit already sent. He does not forgive us because we repent; instead, our repentance is our embracing of that forgiveness already poured out upon the world from the Cross. He does not save us because of anything we have done – although He doesn’t save us without our doing it, either, for salvation by definition is our transformation into, among other things, “doers of the Word” (James 1:22) and co-workers with God. (2 Corinthians 6:1)

There is no vending-machine Christianity, insert your coin (faith) and out comes Grace in various wrappings. There is no bargaining with God, no way to get Him to do anything, because He has already done everything for us and given us everything. It’s just up to us whether or not we want it.

Hat tip: Is God Anonymous?

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Repentance isn't just (or even mainly) about Guilt

Someone recently asked a very good question about The Divine Liturgy and other Orthodox worship services. Why do we keep asking God so many times to wash away our sins, pardon our transgressions, visit and heal our infirmities, and so forth? Doesn’t the prayer “take” the first time? Doesn’t God forgive when we ask Him only once?

Well, yes, of course He does. But that isn’t the main point.

WHAT? You repent and the fact that God forgives your guilt isn’t the main point? That’s right. It's ever so much more than that! The point is mainly our broken human condition. The biblical (Greek) word for sin, amartia, means falling short (of the goal). Imperfection, in other words. Imperfection is obviously something we were born with; hence, it isn’t our fault. Yet it is, insofar as we acquiesce in it! Insofar as we are content to remain such pathetic creatures as we are, and do not struggle to overcome our inheritance, well, we are going to be stuck with it. Forever. And the indispensable way to press forward (one of them, at least) is to keep repenting! Meaning, keep struggling against our brokenness, keep renouncing it, keep striving to live above it and not in slavery to it. That is the main thing “repentance” involves. And if we observe ourselves closely enough, we discover that every moment we are not repenting, we are sliding backward toward the nothingness from which we came. And that is why we constantly utter prayers of repentance. They amount to prayers of aspiration. We are pleading for deliverance not only from guilt, but most of all, from bondage to our brokenness. We need to do that all the time, all our life long.

Patriarch Bartholomew, in his Lenten letter to the Church, puts it better than I could. Here’s most of what he wrote:

Now as Christians, we are used to both hearing about and practicing repentance, and we do not feel a conflict with our Church’s call to repentance. However, there is a need for us to make a deliberate and conscious effort to realize that a complete repentance has two objectives.

The first objective is threefold: a renunciation of our sins, a decision to cease and desist from sinful deeds and habits, and a decision to make amends for the consequences of our sins. For example, the publican Zacchaeus, who sincerely repented during his encounter with Christ, demonstrated his repentance in a practical way by repaying fourfold the very people from whom he had unjustly seized wealth.

The second objective of repentance is that we should change our mentality. We should replace our understandings with other higher and loftier ones; or in the words of the Psalmist: to “ascent in our hearts” (Psalm 83:6, Septuagint numbering). This second objective needs to be pursued especially by those who are unconvinced by their consciousness about specific sins. For example, our understanding of love surely falls short of perfection; likewise our understanding of humility. For when we compare our own spiritual state to the perfection of God, a perfection we are called to imitate, surely we will see our shortcomings and realize the endless road we must traverse in order to find ourselves in the path of those who are like unto God.

As we examine the quality of our inner peace, we ascertain that we fall short of the peace of Christ “which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Pondering the level to which we trust our lives to God’s Providence, we sadly realize that we are often seized by anxiety and uncertainty about the future, as if we were either of little faith or even without faith. In general, upon examination of the purity of our conscience, we realize that we fall short of understanding correctly the many feelings we harbor within ourselves that are detrimental to our purity, often mistaking them as healthy. Thus, a new and more complete enlightenment of our conscience is needed through the teachings of the Fathers and of the Gospel, so that we will be in a better position to think critically about ourselves and our shortcomings, in line with the judgment of God. Since no one can claim to judge himself perfectly, by the same token no one can claim that he has no need of a renewed mind, a more enlightened mind, a transformation of mind, a correction of mind and mentality, i.e., a need of repentance.

The call of our Orthodox Church to repentance is not merely a call to self-reproach. Self-reproach can be useful, as are deep contrition and tears of repentance; but they are not of themselves sufficient. We need to experience the joy emanating from the forgiveness granted to us by God, the sense of deliverance from the burdens of the bondage of sin, and the sense of God’s love for us. Our repentance does not deprive us from the joy of life, making us indignant when we hear a sermon calling us to repentance. Repentance means cleansing and enlightenment of our minds, more ardent love for Christ and His creation, freedom and joy through the newness of life into which we continually enter through our constant repentance.

The one who constantly repents, ever progresses, ever rejoices through new ascents, finds constant satisfaction in deeper understandings of all things. Through the transformation of mentality and understanding, the one who repents better understands the whole world, becomes wiser, more judicious, more discreet, nobler and a true friend of Christ.

Part of loving Christ -- no matter how like Him we may have grown! -- is to grieve at how very UNlike Him we still are!

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When City Folks Move to the Country

Cedar Waxwing and Other Successes

...if you can count 27 survivors out of an original 49 a success.

We DO!! It's a miracle any of them made it.

Amber is going to release most of the 27 remaining Cedar Waxwings on Monday afternoon. She has already notified the press and the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, both of which have been following their progress.

A few of the birds still don't have enough feathers for release.

I'm planning to attend the big event, and will try to post photos.

Meanwhile, Lucky, the Flying Squirrel, has suddenly almost doubled his intake of formula (presumably on account of being less afraid of me when I offer it) AND I have found empty shells from sunflower seeds in his bed. And crumbs of other munchies, too. So he is well on his way.

Beethoven, the Gray Squirrel who a few days ago wouldn't even slurp his formula from a bowl, now does and is nibbling on broccoli and apples, too, just like his foster brother, Mozart. They will be transferred out of doors as soon as weather permits.

Puer and Puella's eyes opened this morning. In a very few days, they will be ready for a wire cage, instead of the plastic box they now occupy.

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God and the Problem of Evil

Sometimes I think my blog exists for the sole purpose of referring people to Fr. Stephen's blog.

This time, among other excellent posts, Fr. Stephen has commented upon and linked to this article about the problem of evil from an Orthodox point of view. It's found here, and I reprint it in full.

by David Bentley Hart

David Hart’s reflections are expanded in a book: The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? In 2007 he will be visiting professor at Providence College. This article appeared in The Christian Century, (January 10, 2006, pp. 26-29.) Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation: used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
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David Hart’s 2003 book The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans) was widely touted as a theological tour de force. He offers in that book a powerful and deeply learned statement of Christian truth that draws on the Eastern Orthodox tradition while engaging modern and postmodern critics of Christianity. After the tsunami in 2004 he wrote several commentaries in response to what he regarded as unhelpful attempts to understand that catastrophe theologically. His reflections were expanded in a book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans). Hart, who next year will be a visiting professor at Providence College, spoke with us about evil and its place in the world that God created and loves.

It’s often said that three claims of the Christian tradition -- "God is omnipotent," "God is love" and "Evil exists" -- present a logical contradiction. One of the claims has to be revised. Do you agree?

If by "evil exists" you mean that evil possesses a real substance of its own, and that it therefore exists in the way goodness exists (or, for that matter, a tree, a rabbit, an idea or a dream exists), in point of fact Christian tradition has usually denied this quite forcibly. Patristic and medieval thought (drawing, admittedly, on Platonic precedent) defined evil as a privation of the good: a purely parasitic and shadowy reality, a contamination or disease or absence, but not a real thing in itself. This, incidentally, is a logically necessary claim if one understands goodness and being as flowing alike from the very nature of God and coinciding in him as one infinite life.

That said, there surely is no contradiction between God’s omnipotent goodness and the reality of evil. It may seem somewhat trite to invoke the freedom of creation as part of the works and ends of divine love, or to argue that the highest good of the creature -- divinizing union with God in love -- requires a realm of "secondary causality" in which the rational wills of God’s creatures are at liberty; nonetheless, whether the traditional explanations of how sin and death have been set loose in the world satisfy one or not, they certainly render the claim that an omnipotent and good God would never allow unjust suffering simply vacuous. By what criterion could one render such a judgment? For Christians, one must look to the cross of Christ to take the measure of God’s love, and of its worth in comparison to the sufferings of a fallen world. And one must look to the risen Christ to grasp the glory for which we are intended, and take one’s understanding of the majesty and tragedy of creation’s freedom from that.

In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously points to the brutal killing of children and proclaims that he refuses to believe in any God who has arranged the world in such a way that it entails such suffering -- regardless of what "meaning" can be attached to it. What does a Christian say to Karamazov’s protest?

Actually, what Ivan ultimately refuses is not belief but consent: he will not acknowledge that there is any justice, any glory, any truth that is worth the suffering of a child. If he were merely a truculent atheist, he would he a boring figure. Instead, he is a rebel against the divine order, and intends to remain a rebel even if that order should -- in some way transcending his finite understanding -- prove to be perfectly just. One might very well read his protest not as a brief for atheism, but as a kind of demythologized Gnostic manifesto, an accusation flung in the face of the demiurge.

Still, the pathos of his protest is, to my mind, exquisitely Christian -- though he himself seems not to be aware of this: a rage against explanation, a refusal to grant that the cruelty or brute natural misfortune or evil of any variety can ever be justified by some "happy ending" that males sense of all our misery and mischance.

In a sense the whole of The Doors of the Sea was a response to Ivan’s "rebellion" -- and indeed a kind of endorsement of it. What I would say here is that it is important to understand the terms of the argument clearly: Ivan assumes -- in good late-l9th-century fashion -- that the eschatological horizon of history and nature is, in a very direct way, the consummation of a process wherein all the apparent contingencies of history and nature have an indispensable part to play. For him, the Christian promise of the kingdom of God is the promise, as well, of a final justification not only of those who have suffered, but of their suffering, and of the part suffering plays in bringing the final kingdom of love and knowledge to pass. This is what he finds intolerable: the notion that the suffering of children will prove to have been meaningful, to have had a purpose, to have been in some sense a good and necessary thing; for him, the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.

My contention is that this places Ivan’s sensibility much nearer to the authentic vision of the New Testament than are many of the more pious and conventional forms of Christian conviction today The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those principalities and powers -- death chief among them -- that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity or treat it as part of the necessary fabric of God’s world. All that Christian scripture asserts is that evil cannot defeat God’s purposes or thwart the coming of his kingdom. Divine providence, of course, will always bring about God’s good ends despite -- and in a sense through -- the evils of this world; but that is not the same thing as saying that evil has a necessary part to play in God’s plans, and that God required evil to bring about the kingdom. As the empty tomb of Christ above all reveals, the verdict of God that rescues and redeems creation also overturns the order of the fallen world, and shatters the powers of historical and natural necessity that the fallen world comprises.

Christians often try to distinguish between what God wills and what God permits or allows. But does this distinction really help? If God allows something, or creates a world in which evil is allowed, then in some sense isn’t it part of God’s will?

Unless one thinks that God’s act of creation is purely arbitrary -- and it would be incoherent to attribute arbitrariness of any kind to a God of infinite goodness (an argument for another time) -- then one must understand creation as a direct expression of God’s own Logos. God does not create like an omnipotent consumer choosing one world out of an infinity of possibilities that somehow stand outside of and apart from his own nature. Here’s one without cancer, there’s one without Bach, over there’s one with a higher infant mortality rate, and so on; this is the worst sort of anthropomorphism.

God creates the world of Jesus, the world conformed to his infinite love for his Son in the joy and light of the Spirit; he thereby also wills his goodness in all his creatures infinitely, which is to say he wills this world for eternal union with him in love, and he wills that we should become partakers of the divine nature.

There is no other world that God might have created, not because he is bound by necessity, but because he is infinitely free, and so nothing can hinder him from expressing his essential and infinite goodness perfectly, in and through the freedom of creatures created to be the fellows of his eternal Son.

That may seem obscurely phrased -- it is, I know -- but if one thinks through what it means to understand God as the transcendent source of all being, one must abandon the notion that God chooses to create in the way that I choose to buy blue drapes rather than red. God creates a realm of rational freedom that allows for a union between Creator and creature that is properly analogous to the Trinity’s eternal union of love; or, stated otherwise, God creates his own image in his creatures, with all that that may entail.

Followers of Calvin have been particularly concerned to defend God’s sovereignty. Do you think that tradition presents a particular problem for Christian thinking today?

Yes -- and not only today. I quite explicitly admit in my writing that I think the traditional Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty to be deeply defective, and destructively so. One cannot, as with Luther, trace out a direct genealogy from late medieval voluntarism to the Calvinist understanding of divine freedom; nevertheless, the way in which Calvin himself describes divine sovereignty is profoundly modern: it frequently seems to require an element of pure arbitrariness, of pure spontaneity, and this alone separates it from more traditional (and I would say more coherent) understandings of freedom, whether divine or human.

This idea of a God who can be called omnipotent only if his will is the direct efficient cause of every aspect of created reality immediately makes all the inept cavils of the village atheist seem profound: one still should not ask if God could create a stone he could not lift, perhaps, but one might legitimately ask if a God of infinite voluntaristic sovereignty and power could create a creature free to resist the divine will. The question is no cruder than the conception of God it is meant to mock, and the paradox thus produced merely reflects the deficiencies of that conception. Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably far more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.

Is universal salvation a corollary of your view of the absurdity of evil?

Probably not; but Gregory of Nyssa would say otherwise. The preferred Eastern Orthodox understanding of hell, one with profound patristic pedigrees, defines hell as something self-imposed, a condition of the soul that freely refuses to open itself in love to God and neighbor, and that thereby seals itself against the deifying love of God, thereby experiencing divine glory as an external chastisement. That hell I believe in, inasmuch as all of us from time to time have tasted it in this world. The refusal of love makes love a torment to us.

Does your understanding of evil have implications for pastoral practice in the face of evil?

I honestly don’t know. I haven’t a pastoral bone in my body. But I would implore pastors never to utter banal consolations concerning God’s "greater plan" or the mystery of his will. The first proclamation of the gospel is that death is God’s ancient enemy, whom God has defeated and will ultimately destroy. I would hope that no Christian pastor would fail to recognize that that completely shameless triumphalism -- and with it an utterly sincere and unrestrained hatred of suffering and death -- is the surest foundation of Christian hope, and the proper Christian response to grief.

So where was God in the tsunami?

Where was God? In and beyond all things, nearer to the essence of every creature than that creature itself, and infinitely outside the grasp of all finite things.

Almost all the reviews of The Doors of the Sea that I have read have recognized that, at the heart of the book, is a resolute insistence upon and adoration of the imperishable goodness of creation, an almost willfully naive assertion that it is the beauty and peace of the created world that truly reveal its original and ultimate nature, while the suffering and alienation and horror of mortal existence are, in an ultimate sense, fictions of fallen time, chains and veils and shadows and distortions, but no part of God’s will for his creatures. This is why, at one point in the book, I grant the Gnostics of old the validity of their questions, though I go on to revile the answers at which they arrived.

To see the world in the Christian way -- which, as I say in the book, requires the eye of charity and a faith in Easter -- is in some sense to venture everything upon an absurd impracticality (I almost sound Kierkegaardian when I say it that way). But, as I was writing the book, I found myself thinking again and again of a photograph I had seen in the Baltimore Sun. The story concerned the Akhdam, the lowest social caste in Yemen, supposedly descended from Ethiopians left behind when the ancient Ethiopian empire was driven out of Arabia in the sixth century, who live in the most unimaginable squalor. In the background of the photo was a scattering of huts constructed from crates and shreds of canvas, and on all sides barren earth; but in the foreground was a little girl, extremely pretty, dressed in tatters, but with her arms outspread, a look of delight upon her face, dancing. To me that was a heartbreaking picture, of course, but it was also an image of something amazing and glorious: the sheer ecstasy of innocence, the happiness of a child who can dance amid despair and desolation because her joy came with her into the world and prompts her to dance as if she were in the midst of paradise.

She became for me the perfect image of the deep indwelling truth of creation, the divine Wisdom or Sophia who resides in the very heart of the world, the stainless image of God, the unfallen. I'm waxing quite Eastern here, I know, But that, I would say, is the nature of God’s presence in the fallen world: his image, his bride, the deep joy and longing of creation, called from nothingness to be joined to him. That child’s dance is nothing less than the eternal dance of divine Wisdom before God’s throne, the dance of David and the angels and saints before his glory; it is the true face of creation, which God came to restore and which he will not suffer to see corruption.

Update: There is some interesting discussion of this, too, over at Fr. Stephen's blog.

Memento Mori

(Click on image to see larger version.)

Steven Robinson posted this picture, suggesting the second hand needed the label I have added.

Seems very suitable for Great Lent to keep this in mind and live and pray accordingly.

You can buy the watch, if you care to, here.

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On Immortality

The human soul, like the human body, is not immortal by nature, but only by grace. Why is this important? Because the alternative is that the human soul is immortal in itself, by nature. If this were so, it would mean, by definition, that nothing and nobody could kill us. The only exception would be almighty God, if He were to retaliate against us on account of our having offended Him. This is exactly what many heterodoxies tell us happened, and it is a huge and hideous slur upon our all-good Creator, Who alone has life in Himself and is Life and the Life-giver.

What happened is simply that our first parents thoroughly trashed their relationship with God, rejected and walked away from the Life-giver. They pulled their straws out of the Fountain of Immortality and tore them up. They died, as it were, from thirst. They did it to themselves, without any help whatsoever, unless from the devil, but certainly not from God.

For those of you with an academic turn of mind, here is part of what Fr. John Romanides has to say about it in his book, The Ancestral Sin:

According to the Apostle Paul, God is ‘the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Who alone hath immortality.” Theophilus writes that God is “changeless because he is immortal.” The basic presupposition in patristic teaching on the Holy Trinity, on Christology, and on grace is the fact that God alone is self-existence and, therefore, is immortal. The souls of men and angels are immortal not by nature but by grace. According to St. John of Damascus, the angels “are not immortal by nature but by grace because everything that has a beginning has by nature and end also.” Similarly, Justin writes, “Those things that exist after God or will ever come to exist, have a corruptible nature and may disappear and cease to exist. For God alone is uncreated and incorruptible, and therefore He is God. But all other things other than God are created and corruptible.” Against those who believe that the soul is ingenerate and by nature immortal, Tatian emphasizes, “O Greeks the soul is not immortal in itself.” St. Irenaeus argues that the teaching about the soul being immortal by nature is from the devil.

Some of Christianity’s first theologians insisted that the soul is by nature mortal and others that the soul is immortal. At first glance, it would seem that they contradict each other. Careful study, however, shows this to be only the appearance of contradiction. Against the philosophers and Gnostics who taught that the soul is ingenerate and by nature immortal, Justin, Tatian, and Irenaeus insisted that the soul is by nature mortal. But it seems that Athenagoras had other opponents before him, and he repeatedly emphasized, together with the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, the immortality of the soul. Irenaeus, however, presents both aspects of the same truth: the soul is mortal by nature but immortal by grace.

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Lucky

Early this afternoon, another furry friend temporarily joined our family. He is a 5-week-old flying squirrel, weighing all of 26 grams, who was caught by a cat and deposited by that cat on his humans' kitchen floor. The lady had the good sense to put the baby in a shoebox with some soft rags and to warm the box on a heating pad set to "Low", and she brought the baby to me this afternoon.

I started him on antibiotics immediately, because cat saliva contains a bacterium called Pasturella, highly toxic to small mammals. Then I put 3 ccs of IV fluid under his skin - easy to do, as flying squirrels have such loose skin. (They need it for stretching themselves out like a kite and gliding from tree to tree.) He never complained.

By my calculations, based upon his weight, his stomach can hold at least 1.3 ccs of formula. He's drinking one, quite diluted. He will start full-strength formula sometime tomorrow, depending on how well he tolerates the diluted.

Meanwhile, he has both upper and lower teeth, the lower teeth being quite long already. So I've put a variety of munchies in his box with him, and am waiting to see how much of what is gone by morning. (Flying squirrels are nocturnal.)

He doesn't offer to bite, although he is quite shy.

His rescuer shyly confided that she had named him, "Lucky," so in her honor, he keeps that name.

He hasn't quite had a full physical yet, only a general looking over to make sure nothing horrible was wrong. I'm letting him relax a while before that ordeal. But so far, it looks to me like he will do very well, and be releasable in a few weeks.


This isn't Lucky; it's an adult flying squirrel. Lucky is gray with white undersides. And this picture is maybe three times lifesize.
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Wildlife Rehab Bloopers

When we make ‘em, it’s helpful to remember that everybody does. At a recent class we held for new rehabbers, we old-timers recounted several of ours.

There was the time someone found all her ducklings beheaded one morning. She just couldn’t believe her little fox kit was old enough to have predatory instincts, and she had been letting him have the run of her animal room.

There was the time a hawk swooped down and grabbed one of my ducklings out of his enclosure, right before my eyes. I worked all morning long to put a wire roof over it. Then, when the hawk came back, I sat nearby and dared him try to get another one of my babies. The hawk just stood there. The ducklings waddled right up to him, crying, “Mama, mama! You’re home!” The hawk inserted his talons into the chicken wire and grabbed the nearest one. So what if he couldn’t get it out to eat it? It was still dead! (Moral of the story: cover your outdoor cages with a tarpaulin! If a hawk can’t see anything interesting from aloft, he won’t come in for closer inspection.)

There was the time somebody’s ailing crow ate some tiny rabbits.

There was the time someone who was feeding newborn squirrels though the night decided the easiest way to warm their milk, administered via 1-cc syringes with pet nursing nipples over their tips, would be to stick those syringes in her cleavage while she snoozed a bit longer, before reaching over for the squirrel box. They developed thrush, a white infection, in their mouths.

There was the time somebody, who shall remain unidentified, put a Hoary Bat in a plastic aquarium that had a tiny chip out of the corner, smaller than a dime. She snapped the cover securely in place, thinking that would take care of it. She even put a book on top of the lid. Next morning, no bat. Now rehabbers who work with bats have been vaccinated against rabies, but usually their families haven’t. Humans very rarely contract rabies from animals, but when they do, it is statistically likely to be the Hoary Bat from which they get it. This Hoary Bat was (more or less!) in hibernation, not moving around much, so it took two weeks to locate her. She was hanging by her toes behind a painting on a brick wall over the fireplace, hibernating peacefully.



And then there is the occasional unexpected success. Like the time a woman and her five-year-old son, Travis, brought me a large squirrel that was just too far gone. Its heart was still beating, but it was stone cold and not breathing. I said, “I’m sorry; there’s nothing I can do,” and laid the expiring creature in the nearest warmer, for lack of any other place to put it at the moment.

Teary-eyed, the woman said she would still like to make a donation. While she went to her car to retrieve her checkbook, I rolled the corpse in paper towels. Then I caught myself. “Not while the little boy is here,” I said to myself. “You can dispose of the body later.”

The woman handed me a nice check for ARK and left. Her visit had delayed my feeding schedule, and I had some 19 creatures to feed. So I cared for the living first, and only afterward got around to the dead squirrel. Except that when I looked into the warmer, that squirrel blinked at me and raised its head! I quickly injected some IV fluids under her skin, then put her in a warm box in a large, wire cage.

In the morning, she was scurrying all over in that cage. She actually offered to bite me! I called the woman back and told her, “You have to see this to believe it!” So she came with her son and her parents, who made another large donation to ARK.

I told Travis, “Last night, we didn’t need a name for this squirrel, but now that she’s going to live, we do. And since you are the one who found her, you get to name her.” He thought hard, but he couldn’t find a name as pretty as his mother’s. So he named the squirrel, “Debbie.”

And there was the time a friend brought me her pet rat. I told her the rat needed a vet, not a rehabber. But she said she had already been to a vet and the vet hadn’t helped, and I was her last hope. That poor rat coughed and wheezed for two days, and all I could do was keep her hydrated with IV fluids, and keep her warm, and give her antibiotics. I fed her through a stomach tube. Nothing seemed to help, though. Then one night, after we had come home very late from a party, Demetrios had a look at her, watched her poor body convulse with coughs, and his heart broke. He went to bed and prayed for that rat, and prayed and prayed.

"How long ya gonna pray?" I asked.

"Until the peace comes."

We were both so worried we woke up at 5:00 next morning, and rushed over to the rat’s cage. She was running around in her wheel, in between making short work of rodent chow! The coughing had disappeared. We kept her three more days, and she just kept improving. By time she went back home, she was more active and healthier than her sister!

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GET YOUR MAMMOGRAM!

Wendy and I just did and we’re both all clear.

It will never again be hard for me to remember; I am going to do it on or about the anniversary of our sister’s death every year.

She delayed. And delayed, and delayed, and didn’t go have her lump looked at until it was nearly as big as a tangerine. She was too scared, and she admitted that was stupid. Many, many women make the same mistake for the same reason.

Don’t do that! Be scared not to be checked!

And yes, we need to remember the other unpleasant screenings, too, the pap smears and the colonoscopies.

Just do it.

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Poor Beethoven!

I was wrong when I said Mozart and Beethoven (squirrels) were both eating solid foods. Mozart is. On closer observation, he's the only one of the two. Beethoven still won't even take his formula from a bowl. He still insists on being hand fed. Jumps into my hand every time I come near, asking to be fed. All weekend I tried taking the "tough love" approach: let him learn to eat solids or go hungry! Well, fortunately, tough love is hard for me, and I gave in now and then and fed him, albeit with diluted formula.

Today I had a ridiculous thought: what if he still doesn't have his top teeth? NAW! I hadn't even bothered checking, the idea was so outlandish. A big squirrel like Beethoven! But I stuck my finger in his mouth to check anyway, because the poor baby was all skin and bones, and -- no top teeth! Just two hard little bumps where they have barely begun to come in.

I cried. It was that kind of a day anyway. I woke up crying -- and thinking if only I could just get back to feeling snarky that would be great progress. I cried over Beethoven and asked his forgiveness. I promised him I'd hand-feed him all his life if that's what he wanted.

I've added peanut butter to his formula now (along with the usual baby cereal and applesauce), for the extra calories, and he's eating like a little pig. He'll be nice and fat in a few days.

And one day, he won't want to be bottle-fed any more, and another day I will release him after all and he will like it much better, living the way God intended him to, instead of in a cage.

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