Before U.S. Roman Catholics feel too comfortable with the harmony of religion and freedom worked out by the bishops in Fortnight of Freedom or by Tea Party Catholics, they may also want to consider a strain of conservative Roman Catholicism that objects to Americanism and that John Zmirak (a serious Roman Catholic himself) finds troubling. For instance, he has observed these instances of Roman Catholic illiberalism:
– It was a festive evening at the small Catholic college. A hearty dinner followed Mass for the feast of its patron saint. Now the students were gathered with the school’s faculty and leaders for a bonfire and robust songs. The high point of the night was the piñata, which the school’s director of student life hung from a hook. It was full of candy and shaped like a pig. Across it was written, “Americanism.” The student life director held up a bat, and told the students, “Okay, everybody, let’s SMASH Americanism!” The students lined up behind their teachers, their dean, and their college president, to smash whatever it was they thought was Americanism. (They had never been taught what Leo XIII actually meant by that word.)
– At this same school, in an academic discussion, the college dean explained the greater economic success of Protestant countries that embraced capitalism (compared to agrarian Catholic nations) as the “effects of Freemasonry.” The college president quickly corrected him, pointing out another critical factor: “diabolical intervention.”
– That same dean, in a conversation with me, waved off the possibility of democratic reform in America. Moral reform, he explained to me, would only come in the form of a forcible coup d’état, by which “men of virtue” would impose their will “on the people, who will fall in line when they see that they have no choice.” That dean had previously criticized Franco’s Spain for being too lax.
– The historian at a large Catholic university gathered his friends and family on the day that the rest of us call “Thanksgiving.” But his clan called the holiday “Anathema Thursday,” and every year used it to mock the Protestant origins of America by hanging a Puritan in effigy. This same historian teaches those he mentors to call the Statue of Liberty “that Masonic bitch-goddess.”
Zmirak goes on to credit Protestantism with the sort of liberties that Americans enjoy (if not take for granted):
In one of God’s little ironies, as Russell Kirk showed in The Roots of American Order, it was largely Protestants who championed the rights of Christians against the State, while Catholics endorsed old Roman, pagan conceptions of the State and its nearly limitless prerogatives. After the Reformation destroyed the Church’s political independence, popes saw little choice but to baptize, and try to morally inform, the absolutism of monarchs. (The nadir was reached when Catholic kings — who already picked all the bishops in their countries — forced the pope to suppress the Jesuits, who had eluded their royal control.) In the wake of the French Revolution, any talk of liberty seemed tainted by the blood of murdered priests, nuns, and Catholic peasants. The fear of revolutionary violence was enough to make Pope Pius IX side with the tsar and his Cossacks against the freedom-loving Catholics of Poland, and with the British Crown against the Irish.
He concludes with an expression of gratitude for the Enlightenment rarely countenanced in conservative circles (non-mainline Protestant or Roman Catholic):
We ought to be deeply thankful for the heritage of the Enlightenment — because the American anti-Catholics of the 19th and 20th century were dead right about one thing: Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals the Inquisition. Do I exaggerate? Consider the fact that during the Spanish occupation of New Orleans, before the Louisiana Purchase, an officer of the Inquisition was interrogating heretics and collecting torture equipment — which he never got the chance to use, thank God. (The Inquisition did take root in Florida, and continued in Cuba until 1818.) Protestants in Spain were subject to legal restrictions as late as the 1970s. The great defender of Pius IX and Vatican I, Louis Veuillot, summed up what was for centuries the dominant Catholic view of religious liberty:
“When you are the stronger I ask you for my freedom, for that is your principle; when I am the stronger I take away your freedom, for that is my principle.”
As Americans, too, we must be self-critical, and acknowledge that in their reaction against the paternalism of the past, men like John Locke made grave philosophical errors — and unwittingly poisoned the ground of human dignity where the roots of freedom must rest. Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker do an excellent job of explaining Enlightened errors in Politicizing the Bible, as does Edward Feser in his classic The Last Superstition. In Tea Party Catholic, Samuel Gregg shows in detail how freedom-loving Catholics can reintroduce the critical truths about human nature that our Founding Fathers overlooked. Such constructive criticism of the Enlightenment project, which we might call “reparative patriotism,” is essential to preserving the lives of the unborn and the integrity of marriage, among many other things.
It is one thing to say that John Locke and Thomas Jefferson had flawed views of human flourishing. It is quite another for Catholics — given our long, unhappy heritage of paternalism and intolerance — to reject the Enlightenment wholesale; to pretend that religious, political, and economic freedom are the natural state of man, which we can take for granted like the sea, the sun, and the sky. These freedoms are the hard-won fruit of centuries of struggle, and many of our ancestors were fighting on the wrong side. If we expect to preserve our own tenuous freedom in an increasingly intolerant secular society, we must make it absolutely clear to our non-Catholic neighbors that we treasure their freedom too. Denouncing the Enlightenment a mere fifty years after our Church belatedly renounced intolerance, at the very moment when men as level-headed as Archbishop Chaput and Cardinal Burke are warning that Catholics face the risk of persecution, and we desperately need allies among our Protestant neighbors… can anyone really be this reckless?
Another point you’re not going to hear from the Callers.
Old Life 
Darryl,
Along with points about the stock market, the politics of North Korea, and the latest developments in cancer research. What you would need to do, if you wanted to make Zmirak’s post a criticism of CTC, is show how it contradicts something we have claimed. You haven’t done that (and can’t do that) because nothing he brings out is incompatible with anything we’ve claimed. If you don’t agree, feel free to demonstrate otherwise.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
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This is comforting. It wouldn’t be fair if prots had all the wackjobs. And Bryan, will you now here — and for the record — admit that the CCF has its share of insincere, crazy, cultural, illiberal, liberal, anti-intellectual, over-intellectual, superstitious, uncatechized, phony, grasping and downright embarrassing adherents and clergy? We’re always willing to do so. Will you?
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Always willing to do so of our OWN communions, that is. Will you return the favor?
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Talk about throwing spaghetti at the wall, a series of semi-related polemics in search of a thesis. The Inquisition! Buchananite [and worse] John Zmirak makes Glenn Beck look like Thomas Aquinas.
Although he’s right in propping Protestantism for religious liberty. But after the various sects slaughtered each other with no help from the Catholics, religious liberty was arrived at as a practical matter well before it became an article of faith.
Voltaire ended his 1732 letter, “On the Presbyterians,” by observing: “If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.”
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Bryan — one thing you have claimed in a comment while discussing the Priestly Sex Abuse Scandal is “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”, and then you dropped it. I believe you failed to say another word about it.
Lesson: CTC actually claims very little, and even what they claim, they fail to take responsibility for.
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I am just glad that the popes inclined to inquisition never had access to nuclear weapons.
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Bryan, what I post always demonstrates how partial your call is — you hide the warts, you sleight the history. Honest?
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http://news.yahoo.com/top-pope-ally-urges-vatican-doctrine-chief-loosen-205104535–sector.html
Now, so here’s some of the underbelly of the Ratzinger-Francis tension. Which if you were raised RC, you already knew existed. This is yet another area where CtC is at best unhelpful, at most fraudulent. They weren’t raised RC so their temperature taking and ability to assess Rome culturally and politically is almost non-existent. Their diagnostic ability is akin to a surgeon using a dull spoon instead of a scalpel, and it’s absolutely vital because, dogma or otherwise, everything gets interpreted coming down the pike. Anyway, this is part of why Ratzinger remained in the Vatican(The other part is he’s a rich, religious german aristocrat and this is how they do) and why he assigned his personal secretary to the new pope. Francis rather than take on Ratzinger’s henchmen straight on has outmanuevered them, but eventually there’s gonna be some head butting. ROME IS POLITICS. And this is gonna be interesting. I don’t know how much ultimately makes the papers but as long as these two popes are alive, this is gonna be there.
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I was reading a NAPARC report the other day. Most of the P&R folks who comment here are from the PCA, OPC, or URC. According to the report:
* PCA – 364k members
* OPC – 30k members
* URC – 24k members
The other 10 member churches, other than the Korean American Presbyterians (72k) and the ARP (35k), are all smaller (in some cases, really small).
If I add all these up I maybe get 550,000 people out of a nation of 300 million (I’ll leave Canada out of the denominator for simplicity). This means we are far less than 1% of the U.S. Population.
Now consider that the Roman Catholic Church claims 1.2 BILLION members the last I heard on NPR.
How many of those “members”, the people the Callers are sitting next to in the pews each Sunday, are woefully undercatechized?
My question? Why are they not more worried about catechizing their own people than converting people from our tiny little sects?
They might claim they have time to multitask, but consider these words from Bryan Cross on his own blog:
“But another reason for my relative silence has been that I have focused on completing and defending my dissertation, which I did in December of 2012. I have since taken up a position at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; my office is in the building pictured in the photo to the right. So now I am focusing my energy and time on serving my students here at MMU. I believe that education in its fullest sense is a personal activity, and for humans that means that it is an embodied activity. Education is like eating together; you can’t do that as well, or truly, while separated some great spatial distance. Philosophical education, in its fullest form, includes sapiential formation. And that takes place most perfectly only in shared embodied life together. Does that mean that there is no place for online or internet discussions/education? No, of course not. But for me it does mean that the form of education to which I wish to devote most of my energy and time is embodied education in embodied community, in face to face discussions, over shared meals, in reading groups conducted not just in classrooms or cafeteria, but also in my home, and in concrete charitable work done in the flesh together with others in the flesh. Lost in the ether of the internet is the dimension of the gospel that is incarnate, not gnostic. So I will not be posting here much at all for the foreseeable future. However, if any readers wish to study with me in this embodied, human way, here at Mount Mercy University, please contact me.”
Somehow he’s Johnny on the Spot whenever Hart blogs, though.
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The dirty little secret is that it reeks of them still trying to convince THEMSELVES. Reformed theology possesses potent truths that gnaw away at even former adherents.
Man by saved from God, by God, due to no goodness in themselves or work done by themselves. The simple, pure, biblical gospel.
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I can hear the CtC crickets chirping — somewhat muted because they’re all wearing oversized woolen flat caps.
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Darryl,
It is easy to assert anything. When you find some debate among Catholics you infer that this is a “wart,” and that because we (CTC) have not mentioned this particular debate, therefore we are “hiding” it. And that’s not a charitable or justified assumption on your part. Nor have you shown any place where we have “sleighted” the history. But you make such claims over and over, without every substantiating them. The debate you are pointing to above is fully compatible with everything we’ve said, for the reasons I’ve explained in the “Catholics are Divided Too” article at CTC, and also in “The Holiness of the Church” post. And that’s why it is not relevant to the *arguments* we have made regarding the Catholic Church being the Church Christ founded, because that debate does not refute any of our arguments. And that’s why there is no need for CTC to take a side in the debate, or make it a news item. As I’ve explained to you before, we are not a news site, and do not claim to be a comprehensive news site, or take on the responsibility of a news site. Again, if you disagree with anything we post, feel free to show even a single claim we’ve made to be false, or a single argument we’ve made to be unsound. We welcome that.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
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D.G. – Bryan, what I post always demonstrates how partial your call is — you hide the warts, you sleight the history. Honest?
Erik – Here’s how he does it. From his post that you link to at the bottom of the page:
“the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae is a development of a doctrine that the Church has always held. Dignitatis Humanae notes that ‘the doctrine of the Church that no one is to be coerced into faith’ has always been the doctrine of the Church even through times when other ways of acting appeared in the history of the Church”
It’s never, “look at what the Catholics have done” or even “look at what the Church has done”, it’s always “look at the documents (as I interpret them in painfully long, dry, academic, blog posts)”.
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1.2 Billion People are supposed to wade through Bryan’s posts in order to arrive at maturity in their Roman Catholic faith?
No wonder Pope Francis waves a doll around when he goes to South America. So much easier.
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Another interesting line from the Uber-logician:
“So why aren’t these contradictions? As I have worded them, they surely seem to be contradictions. When approaching this question it is essential to recognize that the errors being addressed in the earlier documents are not the errors being addressed in Dignitatis Humanae. The appearance of contradiction is formed by abstracting the words from the historical and intentional contexts in which they were written.”
If we’re looking at context it might be easier to just conclude that in the 19th century the church was still ticked off that their Constantinian monopoly had run out. In the 1960s they were resigned to it. I don’t know if the rest of the church is as concerned with consistency as the Callers, but that’s what happens when Protestant Fundamentalists convert to Rome in search of certainty. They have to view everything through their former lenses.
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This is a few days old:
“Andrew Cuomo Puts Up a ‘Catholics Need Not Reside’ Sign in New York”
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368829/print
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Bryan, are you saying that it is easy to harmonize your presentation of Roman Catholicism with what goes on at any of the many websites that carry voices much to the left of yours? I can well imagine someone reading your blog and then being surprised by the state of affairs at National Catholic Reporter, National Catholic Register, or even the Catholic Vote. Why are those sites irrelevant? And why is John Zmirak not representative of conservatism in the U.S. RCC? Those are not easy questions to answer.
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Sean, from that story:
Okay, CVD and KL, it’s only discipline not doctrine, except that everything touching the magisterium turn out to be doctrine — you know, infallibility.
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You would think that a church with an infallible head wouldn’t need Bryan Cross to write hundreds of thousands of words to harmonize past teachings with more recent teachings. One would think they would be able to handle this themselves.
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Darryl,
I can’t answer that question without knowing what claims in particular you have in mind.
You seem to think that CTC is a comprehensive news site about all things Catholic. It is not. That’s not its purpose. Only a person who presumed CTC to be a comprehensive news site about all things Catholic would be surprised by learning of debates or events in the Catholic Church that we don’t write about at CTC.
I didn’t say they are irrelevant per se. But nothing at those sites refutes the arguments we have made, because the content at those sites is compatible with the truth of our conclusions, and the soundness of our arguments. If you don’t agree, you’ll need to show how something from those sites is incompatible with something we’ve claimed.
I don’t make any claim about whether he is or isn’t. Whether he is or isn’t “representative of conservatism in the U.S. RCC,” both possibilities are fully compatible with the soundness of our arguments.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
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Bryan – But nothing at those sites refutes the arguments we have made, because the content at those sites is compatible with the truth of our conclusions, and the soundness of our arguments.
Erik – Bryan, you totally missed out on your calling. We pay members of the defense bar over $300 per hour for stuff like this.
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Basically whatever anyone, anywhere says about Catholicism Bryan and the Callers have got it covered. The paradigm is consistent, the apologetic remains coherent, all is well. I know I’ll sleep better tonight.
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HAL 3000 Lives!
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Make that HAL 9000:
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Bryan – But nothing at those sites refutes the arguments we have made, because the content at those sites is compatible with the truth of our conclusions, and the soundness of our arguments.
Erik – Consider for a minute the implications of that statement. If we substituted “Mad Magazine”, “Playboy”, and “The Ladies’ Home Journal” for the three publications that D.G. listed and Bryan would give the same response. It’s chilling. He and this band of former Protestants who have seen the light and are now in submission to the Pope have it all figured out. They’re wearing teflon suits and nothing can stick to them. Give them all the evidence you want and all the arguments you want and it won’t matter. Their minds are made up.
This isn’t Catholicism, it’s a cult.
And how does Bryan speak for all 15 or so guys?
Maybe it’s a cult within a cult.
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Erik Charter
Posted January 20, 2014 at 9:22 pm | Permalink
Basically whatever anyone, anywhere says about Catholicism Bryan and the Callers have got it covered. The paradigm is consistent, the apologetic remains coherent, all is well. I know I’ll sleep better tonight.
Well, FTR, that’s what a “formal” argument is, it’s not about the theological truth claims.* And most of Dr. Hart’s attacks on them are formal, that they are internally inconsistent and incoherent. Bryan Cross’s rebuttals are along those lines. “Show us your work. Where does A not equal C?”
__________
*”The Holy Spirit guides the living Church, the magisterium, the Pope.”
–“The Holy Spirit does not!” And besides, liberal Catholics!”
“Liberal Catholics speak for nobody but themselves, and especially not of the Holy Spirit. They are not the Church any more than that infected cyst on your nose is part of your body. Which it is, sort of, but you know what I mean.”
&c.
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Bryan, great, more shuck and jive.
You are calling to a communion. Don’t you think you should describe it in some kind of accurate way. The OPC stands for Calvinism (never mind that we have small churches and struggle to pay our bills).
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Someone get it. I knew it had to be true.
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Andrew Buckingham
Posted January 20, 2014 at 10:48 pm | Permalink
It is quite another for Catholics — given our long, unhappy heritage of paternalism and intolerance — to reject the Enlightenment wholesale
…
Denouncing the Enlightenment a mere fifty years after our Church belatedly renounced intolerance, at the very moment when men as level-headed as Archbishop Chaput and Cardinal Burke are warning that Catholics face the risk of persecution, and we desperately need allies among our Protestant neighbors… can anyone really be this reckless?
Someone get it. I knew it had to be true.
Dude, whose Enlightenment was it, anyway? You need to learn your Calvinist heritage! [Then you can explain it to the Catholics. But they already suspect, at least the American ones…]
http://tinyurl.com/mgzoeyd
Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment”:
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Tom, when you stick to history, we’re game. You’re entitled to your opinions and to share them, as regards theology, of course. You just have to realize some of us have something to defend here. I’m digging my new avatar, because people who don’t have something to fight for, aren’t worth fighting.
History is wonderful. We have much to discuss, and I love to learn.
Peace.
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Uhhh, Master Bryan, whose interpretation of the Roman church is correct, if not infallible, wants a demonstration of his errors.
Res ipsa loquitur.
DGH wants to know who appointed Bryan as the shadow pope and conscience of the church.
Umm, see above.
Hint, after we rule out Benedict and Francis, we’re left with TvD’s performative hand waving assertion that CtC is rockin the house, so Mr. ” fully compatible with everything we’ve said” takes home the monstrance once again.
(In his spare time, a hunting he will go, to find the only target his crooked arrow will allow him to shoot. Others might call it a frame job.)
But this just in.
Former lutheran Kenny says Luther was not excommunicated, but quit the Roman church.
Former historian Thomas says Machen was not excommunicated but quit the Pres. Ch. Uh huh.
(But since he’s quite sharp in picking up on formal fallacies and phony arguments and since Romanism is the apostolic island in a sea of raging prot anabaptist mud slingers, we keep him around for target practice. Like Bryan, his side never loses, so it’s funner than shooting at/running out of bottles.)
Clete, having recently graduated from Teacher’s College, really believes the kool
aid and thinks the bishops are on par with the apostles, just like teachers = principals. Next he’ll be telling us the animals run the zoo and elementary students should get to vote in the college of cardinals after Francis calls Vat 3 and dissolves the magisterium. (The tradition, already lost and invisible, is half way there already.) Not to worry, one of the benefits of implicit faith is you can always yawn and go to sleep when the understanding the argument
paradigmthing gets boring and perfomatively declare your church the winner.cheers
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Free
crapmusic advice for anypied piperused paradigm salesman in the audience.Any direct marketer or salesperson knows the next technique
EnemaEminem uses.When you are selling a product, or yourself, or even going on a debate or convincing your kids to clean up their room, the person or group you are selling to is going to have easy objections.
They know those objections and you know those objections. If you don’t bring them up and they don’t bring them up then they will not buy your product.
If they bring it up before you, then it looks like you were hiding something and you just wasted a little of their time by forcing them to bring it up. So a great sales technique is to address all of the objections in advance.
Either that or refuse to acknowledge there even can be any objections. Which strike>NY state of mind some people might call a
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If Tom’s right, and these blog convos are tone enshrined and cherished by future generations, I have Bryan Cross answering my Boston Terrier on the Pope Francis thread.
Pet owner, Tom? Proverbs 12:10. Ruff.
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Darryl,
Again, you are assuming that if a site makes claims about the Catholic Church, but isn’t a comprehensive news site about all things Catholic, what it does say is inaccurate. But that assumption is itself inaccurate.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
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And forever enshrined if I have anything to say about it.
By the way, Bryan, I’m not a scribe or elder trying to trick you (to respond to your words to me on the Pope Francis thread yesterday). I am a friend, who has a dog in the fight.
Take care.
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Byran,
Look at it this way:
You are using your education in reformed seminary against us, your former brethren. I know you likely feel, in your mind, you are working towards Psalm 133 ends to promote healing in your church. You need to know though, your website hurts us. I look in your archives, and you are bark bark barking against us. Who do you serve, the Pope, or God?
I know that’s a nuclear question, but that’s why we do what we do at OLTS. I actually want to talk to you. I think you can clean up your act. But you need to know. Your actions hurt.
Your friend (honest, sorry if the dog stuff gets to you, my dog is snoring on the floor next to me, she’s wonderful),
Andrew
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(Take 2)
(HTML fail, and I don’t moderate here. Delete the above, Darryl, or the parenthesis remarks, or leave Thanks!)
Bryan, knowing your former tradition, what would you have us do?
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Would you tell a family member to become a ¿Quaker?
We will never stop.
I’m out. Peace.
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Bryan, in this case, though with the claims you make I shouldn’t let you off the hook on this either, it’s not about being comprehensive it’s about being truthful. That you’re unwilling to engage in the discussion apart from a syllogism in which you will ultimately beg off as question begging within two responses is not a reflection of your disciplined engagement, but of your dishonesty in being a truth seeker. You’re a charlatan with a degree. You’re pedantic enough for me to believe part of it is intrinsic to your personality, like having small talk with an engineer, but you’re also self-aware enough to know your own deceitfulness in the process. Beware the admonition of Jesus against those who lead others astray.
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Just one more com box.
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Bryan, I’ll repeat and rinse since you do. If you are courting someone, do you hide your worst features? Sure, if you’re worried those features will break the deal.
Same applies for becoming the bride of Christ. If you don’t want to give an accurate appraisal of Rome, it’s a free country. But no one can say that you are either honest or informed.
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Darryl,
See my previous comment.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
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Tom – Well, FTR, that’s what a “formal” argument is, it’s not about the theological truth claims.* And most of Dr. Hart’s attacks on them are formal, that they are internally inconsistent and incoherent. Bryan Cross’s rebuttals are along those lines. “Show us your work. Where does A not equal C?”
D.G. – You are calling to a communion. Don’t you think you should describe it in some kind of accurate way. The OPC stands for Calvinism (never mind that we have small churches and struggle to pay our bills).
Erik – That’s the rub. Bryan is not calling people to come spend their lives in a classroom doing philosophy. If people heed his call they are going to be dealing with all this crap within Catholicism that we bring up day after day. Bryan is not preparing them for that with his arid, effete, idealistic take on Catholicism. It’s patently false advertising. The church he depicts does not exist in reality.
The only way it works is if people sit around reading documents as opposed to opening their eyes and viewing the Catholic Church as it operates in day-to-day life.
Someone could do the same thing with liberal Presbyterianism if all they did was look at the Westminster Standards. The Westminster Standards are irrelevant to liberal Presbyterianism, however.
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Bryan – But nothing at those sites refutes the arguments we have made, because the content at those sites is compatible with the truth of our conclusions, and the soundness of our arguments.
Erik – Is Bryan making a case for the infallibility of Called to Communion? Would this make him the Pope?
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The wife of a prominent Caller reportedly refuses to convert because she will not join a church that hid child abuse.
Of what use is Bryan’s apologetic to her?
He needs to be able to answer those kind of objections. They are real world.
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Resurrect OLTS WEB BOT 9000?!
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The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. ― G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton was RC, hated Calvinism, but wasn’t a pedant. And surely he didn’t bob-and-weave under the veil of “logic.” Honestly, these Caller ripostes are now sounding like “sticks and stones.”
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Bryan, back atcha.
Fun, isn’t it?
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How can it possibly be that this “Anathema Thursday” never appeared on the webz until this Zmirak (any relation, Zrim?) article?
After the Reformation destroyed the Church’s political independence…
Huh? Destroyed the RCC’s stranglehold on politics maybe.
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We a living a interweb Calvinist civil war.
Oy vey
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Eric- The wife of a prominent Caller reportedly refuses to convert because she will not join a church that hid child abuse.
Of what use is Bryan’s apologetic to her?
He needs to be able to answer those kind of objections. They are real world.
I have only been reading OL for a few months, but it seems clear to me that BC is very clear that he has no need whatsoever to deal with real world issues. He is calling people to a communion found only between his ears, and seems fine with that. In the meantime, the hits just keep on coming, this story linked on Drudge today:
chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/01/21/abuse-files-for-30-chicago-priests-to-be-made-public/
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Bryan is Pope of CtC. One need only see that they moderate comments. I have a friend that has his fantasy football league so engineered towards his success (he’s been doing it since 1995 or so, it’s amazing) that guess what, everyone’s dropping out. Literally, he created websites before people did that stuff. That’s all this is. BC is an advertiser. And not very good.
This has been brought to you by:
Sent from my HTC One™ X, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone
PS my dog could kick your dog’s ass!
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Competitive sports is as old as (fill in the blank). With animals? The assman speaketh.
Sent from my HTC One™ X, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone
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Man vs. machine, which is the whole Hal and bot thing, is also a fun topic in sci fi. Kudos to Erik for that Willy wonka (id link the comment, but I don’t believe in going to purgatory (two links and all, though that rule rocks)) for my OLTS bot creation. It’s officially dead. It’s mean to dehumanize anyone. I won’t be caught doing it again.
My favorite narrative is that Bryan is Machenista Catholic. It fits all we see out here.
The drumbeat continues. Oh, and civil wars are the worst. Don’t trust me tho. Ask a historian. Know any good ones? I could name a few.
Peace.
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One of my favorite authors says this:
These days, you need only a cellphone (in other words, no computer necessary), the weapon of our age,and you can engage in this interweb ideolological civil wars.
The Catnip well has officially run dry. I’m out.
Peace..
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For Tom Van Dyke and his future generations reading OLTS archives (as if, who would have the time for that?!?) this creation required only a cellphone and the HTML code
code.I’ll be hitting golf balls on the range at lunch today. I’ve done too enough harm to the environment around here for a while. Oh, and for you, Muddy. I know you read these. All is well. Yo.
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