A very big question.

If you understand the theology behind why celibacy is spiritually superior to being married, are you then obligated to seek it out?

Can there be any justification for not being celibate if you can find no flaw the logic?

The fathers are careful to defend, and even go so far as to anathamatise anyone who denigrates, marrage. But they are equally careful to extol celibacy as being vastly better. Ergo, the ideal would be (and check me if I'm wrong here) that all Orthodox would embrace celibacy, and the church would expand by conversion only. In a perfect world. In reality the church fathers are not stupid and never for a moment thought or believed that this would happen. But does that give an excuse? Is it true that once you grasp the truth of that theology, you are then obligated to follow a celibate life even though you have, ostensably, a choice? If you were in front of the judgment throne and asked why you chose to marry over choosing celibacy, when you had been granted this understanding...is there any answer good enough?

I could not bear it Lord.

But theoretically everyone can, if they give themselves to God utterly. It is easier for some than for others, but in principle, anyone can. Right? Wrong? I don't know. The concept of celibacy seemes to me an incredably bitter one. I cannot make myself like it no matter how hard I try. I cannot even make myself ask for it seriously. I am at very bitter war with myself. On the one hand, I find no flaw in the church fathers logic (shocking I know), on the other hand, I burn with unwillingness to forgo marrage forever. Everything I ever wanted, a wife, a family, children, sex. etc... none of it is acceptable...or is it? It's not a sin. That much is clear. But what is acceptable once you know something more than you used to know? Accountability is a gigantic thing in Orthodoxy. You are accountable for what you know, but I'd be lying if I said this knowledge felt like anything other than a hot coal inside me, burning, screaming to be expelled, or finally swallowd, one or the other, and I cannot bring myself to swallow it. Nor can I reject the logic that put it there. I am at an indecision that will surely kill me if I do not do something about it with a good lick of speed.

I am seeking any wisdom at all that anyone reading this has to dispense.

Alexey the Sinner.

What constitutes death anyway?

I cannot deny the gut wrenching difficulty that must have accompany the decision to terminate artificial life support. First to loose someone, to whatever cause, and then to have to be the one to make the decision to not artificially sustain biological life. It would be far kinder, it seems, to simply die in one event, rather than in two.

The entire Terri Schiavo thing in Florida is of course what prompted this line of thinking. What thoughts must be dueling in the minds of the people that love that woman, or loved her (past tense) depending on where you stand.

Is someone dead when their brain is wiped out? When the only functions it can perform are ones you could build a machine to do? Or does the fact that something, anything, can keep the heart beating and the lungs breathing mean that such things ought to be done?

I have a pretty clear set of opinions on this. I think she died fifteen years ago from heart failure. I think force feeding her body is a farce, and that is an indignity (especially if a tiny part of her is still there) to keep her alive forcibly. I know of no one who would choose that kind of 'living' over a simple death. It is irrational to assume, given that her own Catholic curch has administered her communion after the removing of the tube, that she somehow benefits from being fed and watered through a tube.

But what must her parents think? To have to outlive a child must be hell. But is it honest delusion, or simple selfish denial, which keeps them from letting her die with dignity. Do they, in their despair of having lost a daughter, truly believe that she is still there? And if they do, and they cannot help but aknowledge her physical status, why would they consign her to such a living hell as that, when there is nothing doctournally wrong with not medically treating an illness? Wouldn't they want her to have the release of death from that kind of prison?

This is the reason I can never be a Republican. They seem to be rallying around this cause as if it were their own. Trying to push a law through congress to govern the fate of all such people as Terri, who did not sign a DNR order, and alternatively trying to push through a law spesifically giving the federal courts authority over spesifcialy Terri Schiavo. Of course I can never be a Democrat either because they tend to endorse abortion. The GOP would seek to make such circumstances no longer the purview of the families involved, but rather of the government.

If this whole thing can, by the Grace of God if it be in His will, be dragged out for another week, it may well all be over. It does need to end, one way or another, because untill it does, nobody is moving on with their lives who is involved in this. Least of all Terri.

Cats are Evil

Case in point

Liberation?

One of the mottos of INGSOC (The Party, in George Orwell's 1984) is: "Slavery is Freedom"

It occurred to me today as I was fixing the Magazine section of the Barnes and Noble that I work at, that women’s liberation never, in fact, happened. Women are slaves, well, at least some of them.

Primarily the ones that think they are liberated.

How is this the case?

What constitutes a 'liberated' woman? Well, it would seem a liberated woman is one who is taking her cloths off on the cover of a magazine. She is 'liberated' because she can do anything with her sexuality that she wants. Men no longer define who she is as a woman, she defines it, and she can do with her body what she pleases.

But wait....

Men always wanted women to do just exactly that. More sexually aggressive women is what most 'men' want. It makes sex easier to get. Women with no sexual inhibitions are what men desire. So who are they liberated from?

Ahh, from the old fashoned women who think that dressing nicely and being feminine are good. Because, naturally, since women dressed in a classy way in decades past, that makes dressing that way a bad thing, it makes you a slave. Never mind that such a mode of dress was designed to uphold a womans dignity, it was a marker of her status as a woman. No, we must destroy that! Women are equal to men!

But wait...

What does equality mean? We treat you the same as we treat ourselves? So we should treat you as jocular, crass, insensitive, sexually aggressive jerks? We should treat you like men? Aren't you women?

And then that was when I realized what actually happened. Men won.

Men won the war for women’s liberation. They changed the idea (or got women to change their own idea) of what freedom was. Slavery is Freedom, says The Party. Those women who would tell you that you ought to exercise self restraint are capitulators, traitors, thought-criminals. They want you to go back to being enslaved now that the revolution has been won. They are the Enemy.

What enemy? There never was any enemy!. Even if men were guilty of oppressing women, they were only doing what came naturally to them. There wasn't an organized effort to keep women out of 'men’s places' it was simply the social order of the time.

But a functional social order, such as we used to have, became perverted, and was abused. And a revolution did, in fact, happen. But it was a revolution in the Bolshevik sense. It inducted a reign of terror. Anyone who refused to accept the position that men and women are different, have different roles, and are good at different things, was a counter-revolutionary, and they were dragged into the streets and ideologically shot. The goal of our current society is to destroy the idea of gender. Everyone will be equal, we will have the world of "Harrison Bergeron", where we all wear masks of varying ugliness so that nobody is outwardly more attractive than the most hideous burn victim, we will all wear chains of varying weight so that no-one is stronger than the most barley functional invalid.

Except that it will happen in reverse, or perhaps in inverse. Everyone will be physically capable of different things, but it will be illegal to point that out. The truth will exist, and people will know it because there is no way to destroy it, but it will be illegal to speak of it.


Here is a solution.

Men, act like Men.

Women, act like Women.

All of you: be content with what you are, strive to better yourself and do not concerned yourself with what others have been gifted with that you lack.

Egalitarianism is the first step on a road to Hell paved in good intentions