The existence of God is a topic that tends to elicit strong passions. People have their beliefs about whether God exists or not, but they also have their hopes. Many people hope God does exist, but some prominent voices express a hope quite to the contrary.
This idea that one might hope God doesn’t exist appears deeply perplexing from a Christian perspective, so it is perhaps understandable why a Christian might be inclined to assume such a hope is automatically indicative of sinful rebellion. But is that necessarily the case? Or might there be other reasons why a person might hope God doesn’t exist?
Before going any further, we should take a moment to define the topic under debate. As the saying goes, tell me about the god you don’t believe in because I probably don’t believe in that god either. The same point applies to hope: if you hope God doesn’t exist, there is a good chance that I  also hope God (as defined) doesn’t exist. So it is critically important that we start by defining God so as not to talk past one another.
With that in mind, we can define God as a necessary being who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good and who created everything other than God. If that is what we mean by God, is it possible that a person might reasonably hope God doesn’t exist?
You might think that the place to begin is with the new atheists, for they have surely been among the most vocal in expressing their opposition to the very idea of God. But I will turn instead to a much-discussed passage from Thomas Nagel’s 1997 book The Last Word. Nagel’s testimony is particularly relevant here because while the new atheists are populists with an iconoclastic ax to grind, Nagel is a deeply respected and sober philosopher, a professor at New York University and the author of such critically acclaimed books as The View From Nowhere and Mortal Questions. What is more, while the new atheists are unabashedly partisan in their critiques of God and religion, Nagel is measured and very fair. One can find evidence of Nagel’s objectivity in the fact that he has occasionally angered many in the broader atheist community, and endured substantial derision as a result, by endorsing positions or making arguments at odds with majority atheist opinion.1
With that in mind, Nagel’s candid observations about atheism in The Last Word have attracted a lot of attention from theists. He wrote:
“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
 
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”2
It’s not surprising that this quote should have caught the attention of Christians committed to the Rebellion Thesis. After all, as already noted, Nagel is a leading philosopher and an independent thinker so his testimony immediately carries far more weight than your typical new atheist polemicist, Nagel speaks the truth as he sees it without lens-distorting party-line commitments. Moreover, after beginning with a reflection on his own state of unbelief, he then opines that many atheists share the same “cosmic authority problem.” Now that’s starting to sound promising. In the accompanying footnote, Nagel refuses to speculate on which sources, Oedipal or otherwise, might explain the genesis of this aversion. This, in turn, leaves it open for the Christian to attribute that opposition to sin, just as the Rebellion Thesis supposes.
Given the aura of this quote, it shouldn’t surprise us that several Christians have appealed to it as support for the Rebellion Thesis. Steven Cowan and James S. Spiegel draw attention to the passage in their book The Love of Wisdom: “Nagel, like others, has a problem with ‘cosmic authority.’ He doesn’t want there to be an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good deity to hold him accountable.”3 Even more significant, in his commentary on the quote, Douglas Groothuis opines that Nagel’s words harken back to Paul’s description of cosmic rebellion: “Nagel’s visceral disclosure resembles the apostle Paul’s description of those who, in opposition to the divine knowledge of which they have access, suppress the truth of God’s existence, fail to give God thanks, and thus become darkened in their understanding (see Rom 1:18-21).”4
Perhaps Cowan, Spiegel and Groothuis are on to something. It is true that the Rebellion Thesis doesn’t look quite as outrageous after considering Nagel’s quote. Add to this the self-described antitheist Hitchens as he gripes about “the prospect of serfdom” under God and you just might see a pattern emerging. So could it be that Nagel is demonstrating that this cosmic authority problem really does bring us to the heart of atheism? To put it another way, did Nagel inadvertently produce his own “47 percent” quote, one which lays bare the intransigent spirit of atheism?
As we consider whether Nagel’s quote supports the Rebellion Thesis, let’s start by noting that Nagel himself nowhere suggests that all atheism can be attributed to a “cosmic authority problem.” He merely speculates that many instances could be. He also suggests that there is nobody neutral about the existence of God.5 But one simply can’t support the Rebellion Thesis based on those comparatively meager results.
What is more, a careful reading of The Last Word suggests that Nagel provides at least one explanation for this aversion toward God which is not, in fact, driven by antitheistic hostility. In the following passage, Nagel offers a fascinating speculation on the ultimate source of this aversion and this source is not tied to any problem with cosmic authority per se:
“there is really no reason to assume that the only alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one. However, this may not be comforting enough, because the feeling that I have called the fear of religion may extend far beyond the existence of a personal god, to include any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and nonaccidental part. I suspect that there is a deep-seated aversion in the modern ‘disenchanted’ Weltanschauung to any ultimate principles that are not dead—that is, devoid of any reference to the possibility of life or consciousness.”6
Note that in this passage Nagel suggests that the aversion to God may, in fact, be sourced in a more fundamental aversion to, or even fear of, ultimate explanatory principles that are personal in nature. If Nagel is right about this then his problem, and that of other atheists like him, may not be that they are against God but rather that they have an aversion to unknowable or mysterious personal explanations.
Perhaps you’re not exactly clear about what Nagel is referring to here, so let me try an illustration to unpack his speculation a bit further. Imagine that there is an indigenous tribe living beside some sweeping sand dunes. Day after day there is a low, mysterious hum emitting from the sand dunes and the indigenous people attribute that hum to a supernatural cause, i.e., mysterious spirits that live in the dunes. Many western visitors to this community would not only be inclined to think there is a natural explanation, but they also might prefer there to be a natural explanation. Why? This could be for at least two reasons. To begin with, the westerners would prefer the parsimony (that is, the simplicity) and familiarity of a picture of the world in which novel phenomena can ultimately be attributable to natural causes. In addition, those westerners might simply find the notion of spiritual agencies wandering the dunes to be unsettling.

​https://strangenotions.com/atheists-who-want-atheism-to-be-true/

 by Peter Sud
The Problem of Military Robot Ethics

 I’m not entirely sure what it would mean for a robot to have morals, but the U.S. military is about to spend $7.5 million to try to find out. As J.D. Tuccille noted earlier today, the Office of Naval Research has awarded grants to artificial intelligence (A.I.) researchers at multiple universities to “explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems,” reports Defense One.


The science-fiction-friendly problems with creating moral robots get ponderous pretty fast, especially when the military is involved: What sorts of ethical judgments should a robot make? How to prioritize between two competing moral claims when conflict inevitably arises? Do we define moral and ethical judgments as somehow outside the realm of logic—and if so, how does a machine built on logical operations make those sorts of considerations? I could go on.


You could perhaps head off a lot of potential problems by installing behavioral restrictions along the lines of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which state that robots can’t harm people or even allow harm through inaction, must obey people unless it could cause someone harm, and must protect themselves, except when that conflicts with the other two laws. But in a military context, where robots would at least be aiding with a war effort, even if only in a secondary capacity, those sorts of no-harm-to-humans rules would probably prove unworkable.


That’s especially true if the military ends up pursuing autonomous fighting machines, what most people would probably refer to as killer robots. As the Defense One story notes, the military currently prohibits fully autonomous machines from using lethal force, and even semi-autonomous drones or others are not allowed to select and engage targets without prior authorization from a human. But one U.N. human rights official warned last year that it’s likely that governments will eventually begin creating fully autonomous lethal machines. Killer robots! Coming soon to a government near you.


Obviously Asimov’s Three Laws wouldn’t work on a machine designed to kill. Would any moral or ethical system? It seems plausible that you could build in rules that work basically like the safety functions of many machines today, in which the specific conditions result in safety behaviors or shut down orders. But it’s hard to imagine, say, an attack drone with an ethical system that allows it to make decisions about right and wrong in a battlefield context.


What would that even look like? Programming problems aside, the moral calculus involved in waing war is too murky and too widely disputed to install in a machine. You can’t even get people to come to any sort of agreement on the morality of using drones for targeted killing today, when they are almost entirely human controlled. An artificial intelligence designed to do the same thing would just muddy the moral waters even further.


Indeed, it’s hard to imagine even a non-lethal military robot with a meaningful moral mental system, especially if we’re pushing into the realm of artificial intelligence. War always presents ethical problems, and no software system is likely to resolve them. If we end up building true A.I. robots, then, we’ll probably just have to let them decide for themselves.


https://www.inoreader.com/#subscription/12033568

 ‘For I am Lonely and Afflicted’


Published on February 4th, 2014





‘For I Am Lonely and Afflicted’
Toward a just response to the needs of mentally ill persons
A Statement of the Catholic Bishops of New York State
Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am lonely and afflicted.
Relieve the troubles of my heart;
and free me from my anguish.

(PS 25: 16-17)
 Severe-depressionMental illness does not discriminate. Neither age, nor ethnicity, nor economic or social status exempts one from its effects. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in four adults, some 61.5 million people, experience some form of mental illness in a given year, and one in 17, or 13.6 million, live with a serious mental illness. About 20 percent of youth experience severe mental disorders in a given year. And for every mentally ill individual there is a family – parents, spouses, children, grandparents – who are directly impacted as well.


In our society, those with mental illness are often stigmatized, ostracized and alone. The suffering endured by mentally ill persons is a most difficult cross to bear, as is the sense of powerlessness felt by their families and loved ones. As the Psalmist called on God to deliver him from affliction and distress, so, too, does the person with mental illness cry out for healing. Our Judeo-Christian tradition calls us to be witnesses of God’s love and mercy and to be instruments of hope for these individuals.


We have no better example of how to respond to those with mental illness than that of Jesus Christ. Time and again throughout the New Testament, we encounter our Lord’s mercy toward this population. The curing of this affliction in men, women and children was a central part of Jesus’ healing ministry. Always, we saw Him engage these individuals in the same way he would engage anyone else, with tenderness. We are called to do no less. To do so, we must reject the twin temptations of stereotype and fear, which can cause us to see mentally ill people as something other than children of God, made in His image and likeness, deserving of our love and respect.


Our society has made great strides in our understanding and treatment of mental illness. But in many cases the labels and fears remain, continuing to influence public policies related to how people access the services they need to reach their full potential in society. For example, our society continues to assume mentally ill individuals are prone to violence, either directed against themselves or others. Yet, fewer than 5 percent of violent acts are committed by people with serious mental illness. Persons with mental illness are more often victims than perpetrators of violent acts, and they also are more likely to be victims of sexual abuse.


While a small percentage of individuals with very severe and untreated mental illness may be at an elevated risk of violence, especially when substance abuse is involved, this risk diminishes significantly with medication and treatment. Still, fear of violence and the unspeakably tragic examples of mass shooting by untreated mentally individuals perpetuate a stigma that threatens public support for continued movement toward a community-based model of treatment.


This phenomenon is not new. In 1980, following a societal shift toward de-institutionalization, the New York State Catholic Conference released a policy statement on the care and treatment of those suffering from mental illness. What is striking about this document 34 years later is how much of it continues to be relevant today as we have the same debates, try to counter the same fears, and witness the same human suffering.


“In keeping with its prophetic mission, the Church and its agencies identifies itself with the poor and rejected persons in society,” the Conference wrote three decades ago. “In our present society the discharged population often fits into the category of poor and rejected. In fact, in some places they suffer from every sort of poverty and lack basic human services.”


That document lamented the fact that communities were ill-prepared for influxes of people released from large psychiatric hospitals. In many cases they were met with fear and rejection. Lack of adequate programs led to many becoming homeless “street people,” as the document called them then. In response, the Catholic Conference offered several proposals. These included:


Focusing on a public-private partnership, with the Church playing a major role in providing services;
Educating our Catholic people on the needs of the mentally ill and on developing “attitudes of acceptance and compassion;”
Integrating persons with a history of emotional problems into the community, coupled with adequate and appropriate programs; and
Preserving a service system focused on intervention and prevention.
These recommendations remain relevant today, and we reaffirm them, even as the New York State Catholic Conference, in consultation with the Behavioral Health Committee of the State Council of Catholic Charities Directors, puts forward new, updated policy proposals acknowledging the passage of times and current realities.


Meanwhile, it is incumbent on us as bishops to highlight in a special way the second point from the 1980 document, with regard to developing “attitudes of acceptance and compassion” in our Catholic population. Let us be clear, it is our duty and the duty of every pastor, every chaplain, every religious education director and Catholic school principal, and all others in positions of Church leadership at every level to welcome with openness and affection those men, women and children who are afflicted with any form of mental illness and to integrate them into the life of the Church to the fullest extent possible.


Furthermore, all Catholics are called to be welcoming of this population in their churches, schools and communities. We must ask ourselves, have we always been as charitable as can be when we encounter those with mental illness? Have we sought to include them and make them feel welcome? Have we avoided the temptation to shun those who are different? Have we been open to residential housing or community mental health centers in our neighborhoods? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then we must again look to the example of Jesus given to us in the Gospels, repent for when we have failed, and resolve going forward to mirror His love and mercy for all God’s children.


In closing, we note our solidarity and our spiritual closeness with victims and families of victims of violence committed by all persons, especially persons with mental illness. As painful as such incidents are, they are magnified even more by the realization that had the offenders received effective ongoing treatment prior to the violent acts, many of these tragedies may well have been avoided. We must continue the important efforts to keep firearms out of the hands of mentally ill individuals, and all individuals prone to violence. At the same time, we must focus ever more attention on the care and treatment of such individuals. Treatment does work, and it is our fervent prayer that as our state explores new models of care, we can come to live in a society where those who suffer from mental illness can get the help they so desperately need, for their own peace and for the peace and safety of all.

http://www.nyscatholic.org/2014/02/for-i-am-lonely-and-afflicted/

Daniel McInerny

The title of this article is not meant to be facetious. Catholicism is in love with theories of evolution and the Big Bang. We have no reason to join the recent protests by our fellow Christians, made in the name of Biblical accounts of creation, against FOX’s new documentary series, “Cosmos.”

Those who would expect Catholics to join other Christians in condemning the show, hosted by the American Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, might well be wondering why we want to make our love for evolutionary and Big Bang theories plain. 

I’ll try to explain in a moment. But first, consider these brief excerpts from two important documents:
 “Today...new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.  It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge.  The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.”

That’s Pope John Paul II, from a 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, in which he affirms evolutionary theory “as more than a hypothesis,” and indeed the best account we have of the emergence and material development of species.

Consider now this passage from a homily Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gave on the Feast of Epiphany 2011:
 “We must not let our minds be limited by theories that always go only so far and that — at a close look — are far from competing with faith but do not succeed in explaining the ultimate meaning of reality. We cannot but perceive in the beauty of the world, its mystery, its greatness and its rationality, the eternal rationality; nor can we dispense with its guidance to the one God, Creator of Heaven and of earth.”

The context of this passage--a meditation on the star followed by the Magi to the manger in Bethlehem--strongly indicates that Benedict, when he mentions “theories that always go only so far,” is thinking about Big Bang theory. And at first blush he might seem to be rejecting Big Bang theory. But read on. He goes on to say that such theories “are far from competing with faith.”

Which brings us to the reason why Catholics not only have no problem with, but positively love theories of evolution and the Big Bang. It simply comes down to the fact that Catholics are in love with truth, and that they believe truth is fundamentally unified, and therefore that scientific truth,as truth, cannot contradict theological truth. 

In other words, Catholics believe in the absolute harmony of faith and reason. 

Which is why we’re absolutely unafraid of, in fact embrace, the best-supported scientific theories out there.

Another key thing to understand about the Catholic view of science is that it understands theories of evolution and the Big Bang to operate on the level of “material causality.” Evolutionary theory, for example, explains how species come to be and, at times, pass away. Big Bang theory explains how matter first got banging around the universe. Both theories, however, fall short of saying everything that might be said, in particular about human beings. 

As Pope John Paul II observes in the message to the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences noted earlier, evolutionary theory doesn’t explain how man is made in the image and likeness of God with an intellectual soul that can survive the death of the body. And that’s okay, because such explanation is a philosophical and theological task, not the task of the scientist. 

Similarly, Big Bang theory doesn’t explain the most important thing about the universe, namely, why it exists at all, as opposed to not existing. Big Bang theory says nothing about the loving activity of God in creating the cosmos out of nothing. And that’s okay, because such explanation is a philosophical and theological task, not the task of the scientist..........................................................


The Rest Here............http://www.aleteia.org/en/society/article/why-catholics-love-evolution-and-the-big-bang-6401032594653184

 by Dr. Peter Kreeft
Filed under The Existence of God

 Most philosophers think Pascal's Wager is the weakest of all arguments for believing in the existence of God. Pascal thought it was the strongest. After finishing the argument in his Pensées, he wrote, "This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it." That is the only time Pascal ever wrote a sentence like that, for he was one of the most skeptical philosophers who ever wrote.
Suppose someone terribly precious to you lay dying, and the doctor offered to try a new "miracle drug" that he could not guarantee but that seemed to have a 50-50 chance of saving your beloved friend's life. Would it be reasonable to try it, even if it cost a little money? And suppose it were free—wouldn't it be utterly reasonable to try it and unreasonable not to?
Suppose you hear reports that your house is on fire and your children are inside. You do not know whether the reports are true or false. What is the reasonable thing to do—to ignore them or to take the time to run home or at least phone home just in case the reports are true?
Suppose a winning sweepstakes ticket is worth a million dollars, and there are only two tickets left. You know that one of them is the winning ticket, while the other is worth nothing, and you are allowed to buy only one of the two tickets, at random. Would it be a good investment to spend a dollar on the good chance of winning a million?
No reasonable person can be or ever is in doubt in such cases. But deciding whether to believe in God is a case like these, argues Pascal. It is therefore the height of folly not to "bet" on God, even if you have no certainty, no proof, no guarantee that your bet will win.
To understand Pascal's Wager you have to understand the background of the argument. Pascal lived in a time of great skepticism. Medieval philosophy was dead, and medieval theology was being ignored or sneered at by the new intellectuals of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Montaigne, the great skeptical essayist, was the most popular writer of the day. The classic arguments for the existence of God were no longer popularly believed. What could the Christian apologist say to the skeptical mind of this age? Suppose such a typical mind lacked both the gift of faith and the confidence in reason to prove God's existence; could there be a third ladder out of the pit of unbelief into the light of belief?
Pascal's Wager claims to be that third ladder. Pascal well knew that it was a low ladder. If you believe in God only as a bet, that is certainly not a deep, mature, or adequate faith. But it is something, it is a start, and it is enough to dam the tide of atheism. The Wager appeals not to a high ideal, like faith, hope, love, or proof, but to a low one: the instinct for self-preservation, the desire to be happy and not unhappy. But on that low natural level, it has tremendous force. Thus Pascal prefaces his argument with the words, "Let us now speak according to our natural lights."
Imagine you are playing a game for two prizes. You wager blue chips to win blue prizes and red chips to win red prizes. The blue chips are your mind, your reason, and the blue prize is the truth about God's existence. The red chips are your will, your desires, and the red prize is heavenly happiness. Everyone wants both prizes, truth and happiness. Now suppose there is no way of calculating how to play the blue chips. Suppose your reason cannot win you the truth. In that case, you can still calculate how to play the red chips. Believe in God not because your reason can prove with certainty that it is true that God exists but because your will seeks happiness, and God is your only chance of attaining happiness eternally.
Pascal says, "Either God is, or he is not. But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. [Remember that Pascal's Wager is an argument for skeptics.] Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance [death] a coin is being spun that will come down heads [God] or tails [no God]. How will you wager?"
The most powerful part of Pascal's argument comes next. It is not his refutation of atheism as a foolish wager (that comes last) but his refutation of agnosticism as impossible. Agnosticism, not-knowing, maintaining a skeptical, uncommitted attitude, seems to be the most reasonable option. The agnostic says, "The right thing is not to wager at all." Pascal replies, "But you must wager. There is no choice. You are already committed [embarked]." We are not outside observers of life, but participants. We are like ships that need to get home, sailing past a port that has signs on it proclaiming that it is our true home and our true happiness. The ships are our own lives and the signs on the port say "God". The agnostic says he will neither put in at that port (believe) nor turn away from it (disbelieve) but stay anchored a reasonable distance away until the weather clears and he can see better whether this is the true port or a fake (for there are a lot of fakes around). Why is this attitude unreasonable, even impossible? Because we are moving. The ship of life is moving along the waters of time, and there comes a point of no return, when our fuel runs out, when it is too late. The Wager works because of the fact of death.
Suppose Romeo proposes to Juliet and Juliet says, "Give me some time to make up my mind." Suppose Romeo keeps coming back day after day, and Juliet keeps saying the same thing day after day: "Perhaps tomorrow." In the words of a small, female, red-haired American philosopher, "Tomorrow is always a day away." And there comes a time when there are no more tomorrows. Then "maybe" becomes "no". Romeo will die. Corpses do not marry. Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul. Saying "maybe" and "perhaps tomorrow" cannot continue indefinitely because life does not continue indefinitely. The weather will never clear enough for the agnostic navigator to be sure whether the port is true home or false just by looking at it through binoculars from a distance. He has to take a chance, on this port or some other, or he will never get home.
Once it is decided that we must wager; once it is decided that there are only two options, theism and atheism, not three, theism, atheism, and agnosticism; then the rest of the argument is simple. Atheism is a terrible bet. It gives you no chance of winning the red prize. Pascal states the argument this way:
"You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. That is one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you win, you win everything: if you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then: wager that he does exist."
If God does not exist, it does not matter how you wager, for there is nothing to win after death and nothing to lose after death. But if God does exist, your only chance of winning eternal happiness is to believe, and your only chance of losing it is to refuse to believe. As Pascal says, "I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true." If you believe too much, you neither win nor lose eternal happiness. But if you believe too little, you risk losing everything.
But is it worth the price? What must be given up to wager that God exists? Whatever it is, it is only finite, and it is most reasonable to wager something finite on the chance of winning an infinite prize. Perhaps you must give up autonomy or illicit pleasures, but you will gain infinite happiness in eternity, and "I tell you that you will gain even in this life "—purpose, peace, hope, joy, the things that put smiles on the lips of martyrs.
Lest we take this argument with less seriousness than Pascal meant it, he concludes: "If my words please you and seem cogent, you must know that they come from a man who went down upon his knees before and after."
To the high-minded objector who refuses to believe for the low motive of saving the eternal skin of his own soul, we may reply that the Wager works quite as well if we change the motive. Let us say we want to give God his due if there is a God. Now if there is a God, justice demands total faith, hope, love, obedience, and worship. If there is a God and we refuse to give him these things, we sin maximally against the truth. But the only chance of doing infinite justice is if God exists and we believe, while the only chance of doing infinite injustice is if God exists and we do not believe. If God does not exist, there is no one there to do infinite justice or infinite injustice to. So the motive of doing justice moves the Wager just as well as the motive of seeking happiness. Pascal used the more selfish motive because we all have that all the time, while only some are motivated by justice, and only some of the time.
Because the whole argument moves on the practical rather than the theoretical level, it is fitting that Pascal next imagines the listener offering the practical objection that he just cannot bring himself to believe. Pascal then answers the objection with stunningly practical psychology, with the suggestion that the prospective convert "act into" his belief if he cannot yet "act out" of it.
"If you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so. Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God's existence but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith, and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief, and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have...They behaved just as if they did believe."
This is the same advice Dostoevsky's guru, Father Zossima, gives to the "woman of little faith" in The Brothers Karamazov. The behavior Pascal mentions is "taking holy water, having Masses said, and so on". The behavior Father Zossima counsels to the same end is "active and indefatigable love of your neighbor." In both cases, living the Faith can be a way of getting the Faith. As Pascal says: "That will make you believe quite naturally and will make you more docile." "But that is what I am afraid of." "But why? What have you to lose?"
An atheist visited the great rabbi and philosopher Martin Buber and demanded that Buber prove the existence of God to him. Buber refused, and the atheist got up to leave in anger. As he left, Buber called after him, "But can you be sure there is no God?" That atheist wrote, forty years later, "I am still an atheist. But Buber's question has haunted me every day of my life." The Wager has just that haunting power.


Excerpted from Fundamentals of the Faith. Copyright 1988 by Ignatius Press, all rights reserved, used with permission.
(Image credit: Michelle Neujhar)


http://www.strangenotions.com/recovering-pascals-wager/

The Catholic Church: Home for Sinners
by Regis Martin

 Perched majestically atop courthouse buildings in almost every land, there stands the Roman goddess Justitia, armed with sword in one hand, scales in the other, exercising her fine art of giving all and sundry exactly what they deserve. Often depicted wearing a blindfold to emphasize the pure impartiality of her judgments, one cannot help but admire the sheer unbending objectivity by which she executes justice. Such a satisfying prospect it must be to punish the wicked, to acquit the innocent.


And haven’t we all longed to settle scores along the lines of some ideal paradigm of justice? Indeed, to adjudicate the fate of those we secretly pine to punish? When asked once to weigh the comparative evils of Rousseau and Voltaire, Dr. Johnson asked, “How does one determine the proportions of iniquity between a flea and a louse?” How we should all relish the job of doing something like that.


But forget for a moment the tablets of human justice, what about the exercise of justice on, say, a divine scale? Wouldn’t that be great fun? Suppose, for example, you’d been asked to drive a stake right through the heart of Christianity. Go ahead now. Just do it. Would not the invited incision provide a perfect separation of sheep and goats? Wouldn’t a clean surgical strike straight down the middle, forcing everyone to the margins, pretty neatly drive the wicked and worldly to one side, the upright and godly to the other? Is that the line of division, do you suppose, prescribed by faith?


Because from a certain angle, it does look wonderfully, seductively simple to pull off so neatly packaged a solution to the problems of good and evil. Precise as a pin.


Simple as soup. At least that’s how it looks on paper, where all complexity can be so easily flattened out like a map. In the real world, of course, none of us would survive the pruning shears. If you insist on a standard of membership in Christ’s Body so pure that only saints could qualify, the unwashed masses having sunk too deep into the morass of sin for God to salvage them, then you might as well write off the entire human race as being hopelessly reprobate. Where then would you locate the love and the mercy of Almighty God? It would have nothing whatsoever to work on.


“It does not matter what level of perfection you reach,” writes Luigi Giussani in his book The Psalms. Nor does it matter, he adds, “what others think or don’t think of how much you do.” In fact, it scarcely matters what you think. “All that matters is that mercy has taken you for ever, from the very origin of your existence. Mercy called you to love, because mercy loved you.”


Isn’t this, he asks, precisely what holiness of life looks like? “Holiness means always affirming—before everything else, in everything else—the embrace of the Father, the merciful, pitying movement of Christ….” Who is not galvanized into action by the brightness of our behavior. It is rather our failure to meet the fulfillment to which we have long been called that moves him to take pity upon our nothingness, to fill us with forgiving grace.


How terribly sad that so many who belong to the Church, she having long since baptized them into the mysteries of her life, now profess to being sick unto death of her. She who is Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher) and whose sole business is to dispense the very medicine on which their lives depend. So what’s stopping them from simply going out and establishing a better and more perfect church? So perfect in fact that only the virtuous need apply? Would that please them? Of course it is useful to remember that from the first instant of they’re having found such a church, all of its vaunted perfection would at once be diminished by their membership in it. Wherever you go, as they say, there you are.


“I would hate to belong to a club,” Groucho Marx once famously quipped, “that would have me as a member.” Thank God the standards of his Son are far less exacting. Indeed, criteria for admission to Christ’s Church are so loose as to appear positively promiscuous. Which is to say, anybody can join.


So what’s the litmus test? Well, have you got a heart? Does it beat with the need and desire to be happy? What about beauty, or peace, or joy, or love—do these immortal longings define your life? Do they float your boat? Does the hope in your heart spring eternal? Then why aren’t you on board yet? Is it because the seating arrangements aren’t up to speed? Or do you really not wish to become a New Creature? “The final mutation in the evolution of the human species,” is what Pope Benedict has called the Rite of Baptism. Who wouldn’t want that?


How freeing the insight of that incomparable Christian, Charles Peguy, who often noted that at the heart of the Catholic Thing, which for a thousand years and more formed the culture of Christendom, provision is always to be made both for the saint and the sinner. In other words, when you come to the real line of demarcation between Church and world, the fault line runs not between the righteous and the wicked, as if those armed with virtue stood athwart those steeped in vice. No, the dividing line is always Christ, whose sole consuming passion is to be with sinners (breaking bread with the bad, you might call it), in order to transform them into saints.


“When God looks at a sinner,” Father Vincent McNabb used to say, “he is no longer a sinner; he used to be a sinner.” How we need to remind ourselves of that fact, especially amid the repeated failings of our own lives. Because for all the apparent distance separating us from those godly specimens we appear so haplessly to try and emulate, we really are creatures of the same God, annealed therefore to the same Christ by virtue of our common Baptism. We stand thus in equal need of the medicine of mercy. Every hour of every day. There will never be a time when in our nothingness we need no longer turn to Omnipotent Love in order to feast on God, and so to soldier on in the direction we most want to go. Could it be that what really distinguishes us from the saints is that, unlike these great athletes of the spiritual life, we just don’t ask so ardently for it?


In a letter sent to a woman who, despite having just turned Catholic, was already bent on becoming an ex-Catholic (no doubt having stayed just long enough to meet a few Catholics, perhaps in the parking lot), Flannery O’Connor, whose stories were the reason she was drawn to the Church in the first place, wrote the following:


I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make
the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing
that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the Body
of Christ and that on this we are fed.


How wonderfully prophetic that is. It expresses with great wit and precision exactly the attitude we are to have if the offer of salvation—first bestowed by Christ, then ratified and imparted by his Church—is to make any difference in our lives. And because of that mysterious bond we share with the whole Body of Christ, saint and sinner alike, we can be confident that the event of Christ will certainly be found wherever the People of God gather to celebrate the Mystery. What a joy it is when, popping into any Catholic church anywhere on the planet, one instantly feels right at home with all the other sinners who have come for the same reason, hungry for the same food.


Editor’s note: The image above entitled “The Confession” was painted by Giuseppe Molteni in 1838.


Tagged as: Church Membership, Flannery O'Connor, Fr. Vincent McNabb, Justice, Luigi Giussani, sin


The views expressed by the authors and editorial staff are not necessarily the views of
Sophia Institute, Holy Spirit College, or the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.


Regis Martin


Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Martin is the author of a number of books, including, most recently, Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God (2012). He resides in Steubenville, Ohio, with his wife and ten children.

 Sex-Selection in the West
by Rebecca Taylor on Jan 16, 2014 

 Everyone knows that sex-selection is rampant in the places like China and India where ultrasound and legalized abortion mean that roughly 160 million women are “missing.” What many people do not know, or refuse to acknowledge, is that the practice of aborting girls just because they are girls is growing in the West as well.

A study done by Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund, of UC Berkeley that looked at U.S. 2000 Census data. They found that among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents there is a male bias especially in third children. They report, “If there was no previous son, sons outnumbered daughters by 50%.” And they concluded, “We interpret the found deviation in favor of sons to be evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

A study of 2 abortion clinics in the San Francisco Bay area that service a high South Asian immigrant population found shocking evidence of sex selection. Forbes reported that not only did 89% of pregnant women who were carrying girls abort their child during the study period, but there was evidence of coercion, sometimes violent, by husbands and in-laws to do so.

This is would be expected in the United States where sex selection is completely legal in most states. But in the UK, sex selective abortion is illegal. Surely, the law is enough of a deterrent.

It does not seem so. The Independent looked at the UK’s recent census data and found that in certain immigrant groups, girls have gone “missing”:

The illegal abortion of female foetuses solely to ensure that families have sons is widely practised within some ethnic communities in Britain and has resulted in significant shortfalls in the proportion of girls, according to an investigation by The Independent.

The practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that it has affected the natural 50:50 balance of boys to girls within some immigrant groups and has led to the “disappearance” of between 1,400 and 4,700 females from the national census records of England and Wales, we can reveal.

A government investigation last year found no evidence that women living in the UK, but born abroad, were preferentially aborting girls. However, our deeper statistical analysis of data from the 2011 National Census has shown widespread discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families, which can only be easily explained by women choosing to abort female foetuses in the hope of becoming quickly pregnant again with a boy….

“The only readily available explanation that is consistent with a statistically significant gender shift of the sort observed in the census data is gender-selective abortion,” Dr Anagnostopoulos said. “In the absence of a better theory, these findings can be interpreted as evidence that gender-selective abortion is taking place.”

Nearly everyone decries sex-selective abortion. No one thinks this is good. At the same time, nearly everyone points to the wrong solution: restricting access to (or the information from) ultrasound and other pre-natal testing:
Some experts have argued that the baby’s sex should be withheld automatically until much later in pregnancy, when abortions are more difficult to obtain – as some NHS hospitals have already started to do.

Why this the wrong solution? Because it is the abortion that kills the baby girls, not the ultrasound.

Sex-selection is already illegal in China, India and the UK, and yet it still occurs. In some places, it is rampant. Ultrasound machines are important medical equipment, not just in prenatal care; it would be crazy to totally outlaw those. So there will always be access to technology that can determine the sex of a fetus and parents willing to lie to kill the girl they don’t want.


As long as abortion is widely available, girls will pay the price.

The only way to protect girls is to strike at the heart of the problem. Ban abortion. That would fix sex-selection and a bunch of other evils as well.
The REAL war on women is being waged in the womb. The thing that many hold up as the liberator of women is the very thing that is killing us by the millions.
And pro-abortion feminists would rather protect the idea of “choice” than the lives of actual women. They would also prefer we be distracted with restricting ultrasounds instead of banning abortions.


Originally published at Creative Minority Report.


http://catholiclane.com/sex-selection-in-the-west/

Rebecca Taylor is a clinical laboratory specialist in molecular biology, and a practicing pro-life Catholic who writes at the bioethics blog Mary Meets Dolly. She has been writing and speaking about Catholicism and biotechnology for six years and is a regular on Catholic radio. 

 John Locke: Liberal, Libertarian, or License to Kill?
 By DANIEL MCCARTHY

 Matt Bruenig of the liberal think tank Demos recently enlisted John Locke’s First Treatise in making the case for “freedom from want,” which provoked a combox and Twitter rejoinder from Cato’s Jason Kuznicki. Here’s the passage Bruenig quotes:


a man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity to force him to become his vassal, by with-holding that relief God requires him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and with a dagger at his throat offer him death or slavery.


Kuznicki responded by invoking the Second Treatise as a development of Locke’s thought—which Bruenig finds problematic, noting that the First Treatise was actually composed later. (A full account of how and when the two treatises were written gets complicated.) In any case, Kuznicki need not have looked so far afield, when Locke’s elaboration of his thought is to be found just one paragraph later:


Should any one make so perverse an use of God’s blessings poured on him with a liberal hand; should any one be cruel and uncharitable to that extremity; yet all this would not prove that propriety in land, even in this case, gave any authority over the persons of men, but only that compact might; since the authority of the rich proprietor, and the subjection of the needy beggar, began not from the possession of the lord, but the consent of the poor man, who preferred being his subject to starving. And the man he thus submits to, can pretend to no more power over him, than he has consented to, upon compact.


Read on and you’ll find that Locke brings this back to a refutation of those (like Filmer) who ground political authority in God’s grant of the earth to some particular lineage. What Locke is at pains to explain here is that owning land does not mean one owns the people on the land—they may not be reduced to slaves; they also may not be reduced to feudal vassals—but rather whatever legitimate governing there is must derive from the subject’s consent at some level.


Libertarians who don’t like contractarianism object to Locke precisely because of this myth: whether or not real-world consent is given, Locke builds his system so that consent is invoked as a justification for authority. These passages show Locke pulling the same trick with respect to economic power: the renter is subject to the owner not because the owner has inherent absolute power over his land and what’s on it but because the renter is in effect consenting by renting. The renter or the citizen may be under the authority of the owner or government, but he is only under that authority because he consents to it—thus the weaker party remains free in the way that matters most to Locke, if not to us. This right of consent (or not) is inalienable, which has implications for Locke’s larger scheme of politics and political economy, and it’s not nothing. But it’s far short of guaranteeing what a modern liberal is likely to mean by “freedom from want.”


Locke obviously is concerned about material needs, however, and believes that every man has a right to have those needs met, including by other people. The thing that has to be considered carefully is how those needs are to be met. There are at least two possibilities: other people can set aside enough wilderness—in North America, say, or the English commons—that any man whose needs are unmet at present may have use of open resources and thus provide for himself. Another possibility, however, is the one brought to the reader’s attention as Locke points out that the vast lands of North America are rather poor, whereas the very limited, already homesteaded lands of England are rich. To supply a surplus sufficient for everyone, then, what’s important is not open land but enclosed land: private property whose surpluses may be obtained by the needy through consensual exchanges. How big a role political arrangements (which are another outcome of consent) may play in this, either in Locke’s own view or in a modern adaptation of his theory, is open to some interpretation.


Without delving into much more detail for now, suffice to say that libertarians and modern welfare-state liberals alike may be troubled by a closer examination of Locke’s views of government and property. Consider, for example, Joseph Stromberg’s provocative reading of Locke as arch-imperialist:


No stranger to mercantilism and colonial imperialism, Locke nevertheless argued that land is not rightly acquired by conquest unless it has been lying idle. This exception is extremely important, since Locke artfully fitted his “natural” right to property to English Protestant practices. Non-Europeans need not apply. Locke conceded that God had given land to mankind in common. On the other hand, the “industrious and rational” can—indeed must—prevent its being “wasted.” They can “mix” their labor with land to acquire it but must maximize the product. Anyone failing to maximize could rightfully be dispossessed—Indians in America, non-enclosing peasants at home. In effect, Locke promoted freedom for a minority of industrious Englishmen—a freedom to be paid for through constant growth premised in part on overseas empire.


(A similar interpretation is developed in great detail is here.)


There was a religious side to this colonialism as well. Recall that Locke’s toleration did not extend to Catholics. This was in part ye olde English prejudice—think Titus Oates and that kind of thing—but there’s also a deep Protestant sectarian basis for Locke’s ideas about consent and legitimate institutionalization of authority. Catholicism was not just historically incompatible with English ways, but Locke’s theory is very particularly a politics wedded to a religious tendency.


All of which is to say that there are many layers to Locke. His notions of liberty may not, on examination, be for everyone.


Posted in Liberty, Philosophy.  http://www.theamericanconservative.com/mccarthy/john-locke-liberal-libertarian-or-license-to-kill/

 How Superficial Science Can Compromise Human Dignity
by DAVID GELERNTER DECEMBER 13, 2013


 It’s nothing new to find ourselves faced with threats to the dignity and integrity of human life, but these threats are going to be more and more seductive, not only because they offer to do fancier and fancier jobs for us - leaving us lazier and lazier - but they exist in a world in which religion is increasingly suppressed among educated people.


Religion is not suppressed politically or legally, but my students at Yale as students in colleges across the country, have no concept of what the Bible is, or what’s in it, think of it as a toxic book, know nothing about Christianity, less about Judaism.

So, at the same time, when the threats to human dignity and integrity are going to be ramped up to extraordinary levels of stress, where we most need wisdom, and moral seriousness, we’re seeing wisdom and moral seriousness come under attack and often from the same people who want to do the genetic engineering.

Crusading atheism is sort of a cause today. It is popular, I don’t want to say among scientists - that's too general - but it is certainly among prominent people in the scientific community. There are prominent people who are religious Jews or Christians in the scientific community, but there are also prominent people who have taken their atheism to the public, successfully, who are crusading atheists who preach atheism in an aggressive way as a consequence of science.

They play on peoples' weakness and ignorance insofar as most people don’t take the trouble to learn science. It’s easy for a scientist to say, “I’m smarter than you are because I know it and you don’t.” “I understand the genome and you don’t. I understand physics. I can do hard calculus problems and not just 12th grade level ones.” "So, you can see how much smarter I am than you are. And when I tell you there are no more absolutes and religion is trash, and furthermore we ought to go ahead with human cloning, we should go ahead with genetic engineering and implants of all sorts which will smudge the line between human and machine."

We’re getting into a moral conflict of interest which is tremendously dangerous. I don’t think we will succumb. I think human beings have faced hard challenges. The Second World War was as difficult a crisis as mankind ever will face. Fifty million people died. Humanity teetered on the edge. State paganism was preached aggressively by Hitlerite Germany, which despised Christianity as much as it hated Jews. Hitler didn’t hate Christians as people, but he hated Christianity.

The Japanese empire revived state paganism in preference to the more sophisticated religion of Buddhism and Christianity that had been popular in Japan. Stalinist Russia was an aggressively pagan nation, suppressed Christianity. That was a crisis. That was an enormous crisis and we rose to the occasion. We defeated it. It damaged us. We still have the scars. I think we’re going to face a crisis in the coming century that will be different in character. We never see the same crisis twice. I know we have the moral strength to rise to the occasion, and I hope and pray that we do in practice.

http://bigthink.com/in-their-own-words/how-superficial-science-can-compromise-human-dignity?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bigthink%2Fmain+%28Big+Think+Main%29

 Joy Pullmann


Something is assaulting millions of American children. It causes them to consider suicide more, stop paying attention in school, and become more likely to become an unwed mother or father. It makes them far more likely to be involved in crime and become dependent on government.

What is this horrific epidemic? Somebody, somewhere, should do something.

But if it were an easy thing to discuss, we'd already have presidential blue-ribbon commissions and government programs galore, and a host of worried experts flooding the airwaves.

But it's not an easy thing to discuss, precisely because this epidemic is so harmful to children and society. The epidemic is called broken homes. That's a broader term for two big realities: Fast, common divorce and accelerating single childbearing.

In his new Values & Capitalism imprint, "Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure," my former boss Nick Schulz takes a deliberately dispassionate look at this cultural and economic crisis. The last time divorce and unwed childbearing was a big public debate, we got the Moral Majority and values voters, and the Democrat who probably started it all nearly tarred and feathered as a racist for noting higher rates of such family trouble among African-American families in the 1960s.

But now, the rates for everyone are far above what stunned Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1960s. This means millions of children struggling to overcome massive economic and social barriers.
Home Economics Figure 2.7 - Percentage of children under 18 living with two married parents
Nick wants to avoid repeating the manic, often distracting culture wars, so instead he focuses largely on the numbers, and lets you draw your own conclusions about the morality involved. One of the most interesting contributions of the book is to the current debate over rising income inequality. Nick presents solid evidence this is in large part due to rising single motherhood, which drastically increases a family's chance of being poor.

Another fascinating discussion concerns how the family, more than any other institution, instills a child with habits and character he hardly knows are shaping him. These "soft skills"—a good work ethic, looking people in the eyes when you talk to them, etc.—profoundly affects a child's ability to enter society and earn a good wage. Nick quotes Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman: "The true measure of child poverty and advantage is the quality of parenting a child receives, not just the money available to a household."

This is a compact introduction to perhaps the most guilt-inducing feature of American life: sex and its consequences. It also explains why marriages matter—not just to millions of children, but also to our entire society. This is not just a private family issue. In two hours, you can review some of the most important research on the conjunction between family and society, conveyed in a non-judgmental, explanatory tone.

We must first acknowledge we have a problem. That's where Nick's book comes in. Then our culture still needs to start saying, "Yes, fatherlessness and broken homes hurt everyone. The fewer we have of them, the better." Like most writers who take time to examine the marriage crisis, Nick concludes there are few government programs—despite trillions of invested dollars—that have shown they can mend these soul wounds. We, the people, need to step up and, like Nehemiah, rebuild our city walls together—through stronger families.

To address this national crisis, we need people to hear both messages. First, children need and deserve a married mother and father. Common sense and research shows that this is indisputably true. We should all do our part to ensure that as many children as possible can benefit from this sort of privileged life. All of us—including those who didn't start in two-parent families—can change the world, one child at a time, with hard work and a commitment to raise our kids in environments that make the American Dream a possibility and a reality.

http://www.valuesandcapitalism.com/dialogue/society/silent-crisis-changing-families-america

http://www.valuesandcapitalism.com/dialogue/society/home-economics-consequences-changing-family-structure

http://www.valuesandcapitalism.com/dialogue/society/why-are-progressives-comfortable-decoupling-childrearing-marriage


Why Are Progressives Comfortable Decoupling Childrearing from Marriage?

David Wilezol

Even in a country like Sweden, where a healthy social safety net mitigates many of the material disadvantages of single-parenthood, Swedish youth from single-parent homes report higher levels of emotional distress:

Source: Gähler, M., & Garriga, A. (2013). Has the association between parental divorce and young adults’ psychological problems changed over time? Evidence from Sweden, 1968-2000."Journal of Family Issues," 34(6), 784-808.


Although the importance of a two-parent family is unfortunately most often the intellectual preserve of conservatives, some liberals also get the picture. In 2001, Jonathan Rauch called marriage "America's New Class Divide," even noting that poverty correlated more closely with marital status than it did (and still does) with race. Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution reiterated Rauch's conclusions in a 2003 study: "In 2001, 81 percent of non-poor families with children were headed by married couples. This compares to only 40 percent among poor families with children." Sawhill has done more work on this, some of which she recently displayed at an AEI event.

In 2012, Jason De Parle of The New York Times masterfully chronicled the differences between two women with children, one married, and one not: "I see Chris’s kids—they’re in swimming and karate and baseball and Boy Scouts, and it seems like it’s always her or her husband who’s able to make it there," the unmarried woman said of the other's situation. "That’s something I wish I could do for my kids. But number one, that stuff costs a lot of money and, two, I just don’t have the time." There's not just an economic benefit for children in a two-parent home, but an emotional one as well.

The evidence for a social norm of childbearing within marriage seems overwhelming. But many progressives wrongly frame conservative insistence on a two-parent home as discrimination against single mothers.

These aspersions are nothing new. When future Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his now-infamous 1965 report "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action" (which documented the emerging breakdown of the black family due to unwed births), critics like William Ryan slammed it as "Blaming the Victim."

When Mitt Romney attempted to articulate the connection between single-parents and crime during a Presidential debate, the Daily Kos babbled that it was indicative of his "willingness to blame women." In reality, the Daily Kos claimed, poverty is the real cause of crime. But guess what has a high correlation with poverty? You guessed it, children in unmarried households.

The gynocentric website Jezebel similarly tarred Rick Santorum with this kind of retort when he (admittedly clumsily) tried to talk about single mothers: "So, ladies, in Santorum's world, unless you're heterosexual, married, and letting your husband impregnate you at will you're doing it wrong."

But perhaps the most unconscionable progressive opposition to establishing a social norm for childrearing has recently been found in New York City. Earlier this year, Michael Bloomberg ran an ad campaign discouraging teen pregnancy. The campaign consisted of pictures of young children, coupled with stats reflecting the truth of teenage pregnancy: "Because you had me as a teen, I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school," said one ad. Yet, as Heather Mac Donald reported, Planned Parenthood blasted the ad as "stigmatizing" teenage parents and "perpetuat[ing] gender stereotypes."

So what is the source of the left's animus against the social norm of a two-parent family?

At the root, it seems to be ideology. Primarily, the philosophical character of the feminism that arose in the late 1960s was quickly absorbed into the Democratic Party platform, which means few Democrats have been eager to alienate what has become a powerful constituency by suggesting that a child is a proposition confined to a married man and woman. A goal of the left-leaning women's empowerment movement has been to abolish traditional barriers to female self-actualization, and if that means having a child without a husband, so be it.

Secondly, much of the discussion about marriage has been focused on same-sex marriage. This has stifled a broader conversation, as there's only so much room on airwaves and in print for discussions about the topic.

To put a value judgment upon someone's behavior, the thinking goes, calls into question one's compassion and "open-mindedness."

Lastly, in "Coming Apart," Charles Murray noticed that many of the cultural-intellectual elites who endorse the benefits of a two-parent family by the way they live their private lives are reluctant to "preach what they practice." The essential feature of post-60s liberalism has been to encourage people to seek emotional self-fulfillment, even at the expense of institutions and traditions that have proved to be agents for societal good. This is especially true in matters of sexual behavior, where anything seems increasingly permissible, provided there is a principle of consent. To put a value judgment upon someone's behavior, the thinking goes, is to be intolerant of it, and calls into question one's compassion, or that favorite buzzword of the left, "open-mindedness." Few want to be cast as a Rick Santorum for suggesting that raising children outside of marriage is a suboptimal idea.

But the data and the anecdotes show a decoupling of marriage from childrearing has been an overwhelmingly negative experience for those who have grown up in such an environment. James Q. Wilson, perhaps the most important conservative social scientist of the 20th century, recalled that Daniel Patrick Moynihan himself grew up in a poor, single mother family, shining shoes on the streets of New York. Moynihan knew very well what his upbringing lacked, a stable family. As a result, according to Wilson, "He never deviated from the view that the family was the core of culture."

Moynihan was one of the few Democrats who crusaded for the preservation of the nuclear family during the late 20th century. Unfortunately, trends that Moynihan noticed in the black community in the 1960s have increasingly become the norm nationwide, a reality that does not bode well for the future of the country.

Family: Crisis or Change?

by John Scanzoni

Dr. Scanzoni is professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. This article appeared in the Christian Century, August 12-19, 1981, pp. 794-799. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found atwww.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.


From pulpit and newsmagazine alike comes the message that the family is in crisis. Concerned clergy and laity are asking, "What can we do to solve its problems?" But to solve a problem, one must first ask the right question. "How many miles can I sail before my ship falls off the end of the world?" was a terrifying question to ancient seafarers, and one that puzzled people until the time of Columbus. But Columbus asked instead, "How far must I sail from my western coast before I arrive at my eastern coast?" And the discoveries that followed made the old question about "falling off the earth" irrelevant.

During the 14th century, millions of Europeans died from the "black plague." "Why is God displeased with us?" they asked. The answer they got was "our sin." The authorities ordered "that everything that could anger God, such as gambling, cursing, and drinking, must be stopped" (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara W. Tuchman [Random House, 1978], p. 103). But to ask why God was displeased was the wrong question. Five hundred years passed before Louis Pasteur asked the right question: "What are the tiny organisms that carry the black plague?" That question led him to the right answer -- an organism that traveled in the stomach of the flea and the bloodstream of the rat. And that answer brought an end to the black plague.

Similarly, to inquire "Why is the family falling apart?" or "What’s wrong with the family?" is as pointless as asking "How far till I fall off the ocean?" or "Why is God sending us the plague?" The question to ask if we want to improve the quality of family life is this: "Why are families changing?"

The Good Old Days

Historians observe that every generation idealizes the one preceding it -- we magnify the good things and forget the bad. And that sort of image-making is prevalent when it comes to the family. Take divorce, for instance. We like to think that in the "good old days," there was little or no divorce -- marriages were stable. But were they? It is true that there were relatively few legal divorces prior to the Civil War. It’s also true that the frequency of divorce has been growing ever since.

But historians are uncovering increasing evidence for the "poor man’s [or "poor woman’s"] divorce," namely desertion (Marital Incompatibility and Social Change in Early America, by Herman R. Lantz [Sage, 1976]). Throughout colonial times and the 19th century expansion of the western frontier, it was exceedingly simple for men especially -- but also for women -- to slip away from their families undetected and never return. And it was almost impossible to trace them. There were no social security numbers, no FBI, no computers, no effective way to track down someone who left a family in Cincinnati and took off for Walla Walla. While the actual numbers of annual desertions are unknown, they are thought to be substantial. And since no one knew you once you arrived in Walla Walla, you could claim to be unmarried, and then remarry without anyone’s ever being able to trace your former family connections.

In this century, there have been many more legal divorces for a number of reasons, but one factor is that it’s harder to "drop out" and resurface without being detected. In short, when we look longingly to the past and say, "My, wasn’t it grand when marriages were stable." we have to face the hard fact that they weren’t as stable as we once thought.

We like to think also that our ancestors had harmonious and happy families, and that the violence characteristic of contemporary families didn’t exist. However, social historians are becoming increasingly aware of just how much violence went on in pre-20th-century families (A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, edited by N. F. Cott and E. H. Pleck [Simon & Schuster, 1979], pp. 107-135). While a great deal of violence occurs today, there was probably more of it during earlier times because there was then greater community support for it. A "good" husband routinely beat his wife to keep her in subjection; "good" parents often beat their children in order to "get the devil" or the "sin-nature" out of them.

In a study of 18th century family life, one historian tells us that walls were paper-thin and houses crowded. One source quotes a woman who said of her neighbors, "We lived next door, where only a thin partition divided us and have often heard him beat his wife and heard her scream in consequence of the beating" (ibid.. p. 111). In short, family violence was not invented during the 1970s -- it’s been around for a long time.

A third "problem area" has to do with children. Certain observers argue that our ancestors cared more for children than do today’s parents. Critics complain that modern mothers go to work and leave their kids with sitters or in nursery schools; and when they’re home, parents plunk kids down in front of the TV. The charge is that parents don’t "relate" to their children the way they used to. Observers also worry about the family’s helplessness to protect young children from exposure to sex and violence.

Here again, historians are helping us sort fact from fiction. Take, for example, the idea of working mothers. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most women were married to farmers or shopkeepers. They worked with their men from dawn to dusk and simply had no time for "full-time motherhood" as it came to be defined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Women and Men: Changing Roles, Relationships and Perceptions, edited by L. A. Cater and A. F. Scott [Praeger, 1977], pp. 93-118). But who took care of children while mothers and fathers -- and all other able-bodied adults -- struggled to survive economically? The truth is that no one gave the matter much thought. Any available adult, or older brother or sister, who happened to be around when the child needed something, did what had to be done for the child.

But the idea that the child is a "special" person requiring extraordinary attention, nurture and care never entered their minds. Only in relatively recent times has there been concern about "child development" and "quality children." One historian describes the experiences of most children during that pre-industrial era as a "nightmare" (Cott and Fleck, op. cit., p. 118). Clearly, many of today’s children suffer a great deal. But along with that suffering is a societal concern to alleviate childhood suffering -- a concern that did not exist years ago.

Sexual Behavior

And then there’s the matter of the child’s exposure to sex. Historians are discovering that because houses were small and crowded, adults could not conceal their sexual activities from children. There were no "private bedrooms," and children understood sexual details at a very early age from watching adults (ibid.). They also watched farm animals have intercourse and give birth. But no one thought that such "sexual exposure" would harm a tender child’s innocence.

A fourth "problem area" has to do with sex itself. Many people -- especially those under 30 -- seem to have the idea that sex came in with the space age: that people didn’t have sexual "highs" before then, that married people didn’t really enjoy the sex they had with their own spouses, that unmarried people weren’t having sex or that married people didn’t have sex with persons to whom they weren’t married -- that somehow all of this sexual behavior is new. Our difficulty in understanding today’s sexual patterns is that we compare them with the 19th century Victorian middle class and stop there. The prevailing idea during the 19th century was that women were passionless. As one writer puts it, women "were [thought to be] less carnal and lustful than men" (ibid., pp. 162-181).

But historians tell us that prior to the 19th century, female sexuality had not been "suppressed," and it never occurred to anyone that women were less sexual beings than men. In fact, precisely the opposite was true. A 15th century "witch-hunter’s guide" warned that "carnal lust in women is insatiable" (ibid.). After analyzing 18th century Massachusetts divorce court records, one historian concludes that the prevailing wisdom was that "if women made advances they were irresistible" (ibid., p.125).

In short, prior to the 19th century women as well as men thought of themselves, and of each other, as passionate sexual beings, and often their passion led them to deviate from existing community norms. Studies comparing marriage and birth records during colonial times show, for instance, that Elijah and Hannah married on January 1, and on June 1, Hannah gave birth to an eight-pound, six-ounce baby girl! That kind of historical evidence has emerged often enough to suggest that rather than having enormous premature babies, ordinary people like Hannah and Elijah were having premarital sex (Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations, by P. Laslett [Cambridge University Press, 1977]).

So when critics today say that premarital and extramarital sex are destroying. the family, what they may have in mind is the 19th century middle-class family, in which women were supposed to be passionless. But before the Victorian era, sex was much less suppressed, and yet families somehow persisted.

The Erosion of Traditions

Therefore, when we consider all four of these areas -- divorce and marital stability, family violence, the unique needs of children, and sexuality -- and then compare yesterday’s with today’s families, the contrast is not so striking as some would have us believe. To be sure, there have been and continue to be significant changes in the family. But the "problems" that observers perceive are simply the surface manifestations -- the symptoms of the underlying changes. Therefore, rather than focus primarily on symptoms -- or family problems -- it makes more sense to focus on the changes themselves. Why is the family changing?

As we think of the four problem areas we have considered, one central theme emerges: a developing concern for the rights, privileges and, well-being of the individual as over against the maintenance oftraditions. That development is brilliantly illustrated in Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye, the village milkman, struggles with tradition versus freedom. "On the one hand," he says, "parents should arrange their children’s marriages." But on the other hand, he sympathizes with the freedom sought by his daughters to choose their own husbands -- to marry the men they love. He experiences enormous dissonance coping with the erosion of tradition; he sees the whole of family and society collapsing around him, culminating finally in the decision of his youngest daughter to marry a gentile rather than a Jew.

If we probe for the why of family change and the symptoms that inevitably accompany it, we discover that the changes result from the erosion of ancient traditions -- traditions that favored the family as an institution over its individual members. During past eras, the institution had priority over the individual; and for the sake of the institution the individual was called upon to sacrifice. Even today some observers continue to perceive family as being larger than life -- larger than people. They see the family as a pattern into which people are fitted. It’s like getting on a bed in a cheap motel -- if your legs are longer than the bed, trim your legs; if your legs are shorter, stretch them. But while some people believe in trimming the person, others believe in trimming the bed.

Something similar has been happening to the family for the past 200 years. We’ve been trimming here, adding there, modifying that, elaborating this, and so forth. If there was any sort of unconscious intention through all of this, it was to make family the servant of people, rather than to have people serve family.

Marriage and Divorce

In the 17th century, John Milton insisted that God did not create human beings for marriage; rather, God created marriage for human benefit. Therefore, said Milton, how much sense does it make to assert that a loving God forces people to suffer in an arrangement that God originally designed for their happiness? "No sense at all," he concluded, arguing that the churches and government of his day should allow divorce on the grounds of what we now call "mutual incompatibility."

In fact, it took more than 200 years for Milton’s ideas to permeate the thinking and behavior of ordinary people. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that divorce became relatively common in America; and immediately, certain critics began to predict the extinction of family and society. Interestingly enough, many critics connected the rising divorce rate with feminism and its goal of suffrage (Divorce in the Progressive Era, by W. L. O’Neill [Yale University Press, 1967]). But, of course, feminism was and is much more than that: it is the right to be an autonomous person -- one who acts out of self-determination and for self-actualization. Milton says that marriage should serve the person; the feminist argues that marriage has ill served women (as well as men) and that marriage must change to better serve the needs of women (as well as men). The logical outcome of the argument is that if a particular marriage doesn’t change, it becomes legitimate to leave rather than to endure it.

As marriage has changed to accommodate individual rather than traditional interests, Milton’s ideas have become increasingly acceptable. During prior decades, for instance, men married for sex, but they also wanted their family’s life style to be a showcase proving to themselves and to the world that they were worthy providers. Women, on the other hand, married mostly for companionship and to have a provider. But since World War II, certain demands have been added to marriage. Women want satisfying sex out of marriage, and they want intimacy -- deep friendship. Some men are beginning to want intimacy as well.

Furthermore, increasing numbers of women want their marriages to facilitate their occupational efforts in the same way that marriages have made it possible for men to pursue their occupations. Many women see occupational involvement as the only sure means to guarantee their autonomy. Given this enlarging range of significant demands placed upon marriage, it’s no puzzle that there are so many divorces. Perhaps we should ask why there aren’t more.

But plainly, divorce is a symptom of underlying changes. It is a painful symptom that no one welcomes.

Patterns of Violence

The same basic reasoning that explains changes in divorce patterns also explains changes in patterns of family violence. Recent research has shown that next to the police, the family is the most violent institution in American society. Most murders are committed by people who know their victims personally, and a great proportion of these involve the killing of a family member. Besides guns, those who engage in family violence use an assortment of other weapons, including knives, boiling water, and just plain old fists. But since men are generally stronger than women, they almost never lose a fist fight. Hence, the term "battered wife" has entered the English language during the past decade. While the term is new, battered wives have been around for a long time.

But why is the term so new, if the behavior is so ancient? The answer has to do with a change in traditions, with the individual coming to be valued as much as, or more than, the institution. While wife-beating has apparently always been common, it was in earlier times accepted as being a "normal" part of family life. As long as most women believed that tradition, they never complained about their beatings, nor dared talk about them openly with other similarly abused women. But that tradition is being eroded. It is being replaced with the idea that protecting a woman’s body is more important than holding a family together, that violence need not be tolerated for the sake of perpetuating a marriage.

Today virtually every city in America has a shelter where battered women can go to flee their husbands. In many cases the husband pursues his wife and wants her back -- not that he intends to stop beating her, but chiefly because he insists on holding his family together. Consequently, because women are rejecting the idea that family itself is more important than one’s own physical well-being, the violence that has been hidden for centuries is finally being talked about, and emerging into public view, And that’s the very sore "problem" called "family violence" of which we’re becoming increasingly aware. But the emergence of the "problem" is symptomatic of underlying changes -- changes away from traditions that made the family pre-eminent over the individual, and gave the man unquestioned authority over his wife -- all in the name of family stability. And in place of those former traditions, the care of the woman’s body and of her human dignity have come to be regarded as more significant than the institution itself.

That same shift -- from institutional pre-eminence to individual rights -- also applies to sexuality. Just as family violence was tacitly accepted during former times, so was violation of community sexual standards -- especially by men. While they had the privilege of discreetly looking for sex both before and after marriage, women were not supposed to have that privilege. That "double standard," along with the Victorian idea that women were passionless, placed 20th century men at a substantial advantage over women. But why did men have these freedoms while women did not? There were many reasons, but the idea that "nice virtuous women" were the foundation of the family and of society had much to do with women’s sexual limitations. These limitations were defended in the name of the family as an institution.

But throughout the past 25 years we’ve seen that tradition being replaced by the idea that women have the same sexual rights as men, Moreover, if sexual liberties are indeed a threat to the family, as some critics maintain, the current idea is that men are as responsible for the situation as women. Increasingly, women refuse to be the sole moral guardians of family -- insisting instead that if the family requires "moral guardianship," then men have to become co-partners with women in that enterprise.

Perhaps the most troubling byproduct of this increasing sexual freedom is the steep rise in the numbers of unmarried adolescent mothers. More and more teen-age females are having intercourse at an increasingly younger age. Yet the males with whom they’re having sex seem to feel little responsibility to protect their partners from pregnancy. These teen-age males seem to be the last bastion in the long history of the sexual exploitation of women. Adolescent women have accepted the idea that they have the right to enjoy sex. Unfortunately, they don’t have the sense of autonomy that would lead them to refuse sex if their own life-chances (as well as those of their as-yet-unborn children) are in danger of being damaged by male reluctance to use the simple means of contraception readily available.

Among adults, a troubling byproduct of increasing sexual liberty is the discovery that sex does not equal intimacy. Gay Talese’s recent best seller Thy Neighbor’s Wife, filled with page after page of extramarital affairs, including his own, missed the distinction completely. While in years gone by the kinds of marriages held together solely by the tradition that "stability is the best policy" often lacked intimacy, relationships held together solely by sex may be equally devoid of intimacy. And yet, as part of the pursuit of individual rights that is changing the American family, intimacy is coming to be valued as highly as sex.

Children’s Interests

The difficulty of balancing differing interests also emerges in the last of the four "problem areas." Critics worry that while adults are busy pursuing their own rights, children get left in the backwash. There are, for example, the alleged negative effects on children of divorce and of working mothers. More recently, the question of children’s own rights has come into sharper focus. What demands can children legitimately make on their parents? Some children in their 20s have gone to court to sue their parents, alleging that they were not raised properly, were mistreated as children, and as a result suffer from poor self-esteem. Recently we have read of the case of Walter Polovchak, the 12-year-old son of Russian immigrants who in 1980 refused to leave America when his parents decided to return to the Soviet Union. The U.S. government granted the boy temporary asylum, but some critics disagreed with that decision. As one put it, "I think it’s a bad precedent to let a 12-year-old boy tell his parents what he wants to do."

Clearly, the question of how to do right by today’s children is an unsettled one. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the basic trend of changing relationships between adult men and women can simultaneously be enormously beneficial to the rights and well-being of children. The desire of growing numbers of women to seek autonomy through activities outside the household can be a great boon to children if, alongside this trend, there occurs a corresponding move to bring men into the household -- to involve them as fully as women in child care and child nurture. Films such as Kramer vs. Kramer help to impress the public with the fact that some men want to be deeply involved in parenting; moreover, they can be just as good at it as women.

The tradition that every male must be a successful achiever dies hard. Nevertheless, some men are coming to realize that for decades they’ve been cheated by being cut off from child nurture. It was thought that the family as an institution would suffer if men gave up their work roles for parenting roles. But once again we observe the force of individual rights changing the family. As men come to believe that theypersonally will be better off if they get more involved in child nurture, and that the children will be better off as well, we can expect greater numbers of men to begin pursuing those kinds of benefits. And if men actually do change their parenting patterns, while women change their occupational behaviors, the positive consequences of that kind of parental symmetry could be profoundly beneficial for the family.

Balancing the Individual With the Family

"But," responds the critic, "with all this talk about individuals having their rights and ‘doing their thing,’ is there any place for the family as an institution? Is there any sense in which family traditions and family obligations remain important in today’s world?" Of course there is, and the trick is to balance the well-being of the institution with the wellbeing of the individuals that make it up.

But how can that be done? Freud said many things that today we totally reject. But now and again, he made statements that remain simple yet timeless. One of these classic insights was his assertion that more than anything else, adults need to work and to love (Themes of Work and Love in Adulthood, by N. J. Smelser and E. Erikson [Harvard University Press]). And we might add that children need to love and they need to learn to work. Therefore, to identify the optimal conditions under which the family can be a prosperous and robust institution, and to establish the kinds of traditions that will best meet the needs of its members during the decades ahead, we need to consider Freud’s insights. The ideal family institution is one that provides maximum opportunities for all its members to love and to work to the fullest extent possible.

Traditional family structures have prohibited most women from enjoying meaningful work experiences. Their labors were generally limited to the home, even if their talents would have permitted them to enjoy the rewards of paid employment. And those same family structures have prohibited men from enjoying meaningful love experiences. They were too busy making money to learn to love and to share themselves, and to participate fully in the nurturing of family relationships. And who suffered from these limitations on both sexes? Women suffered, not only because they lacked meaningful work, but also because they didn’t get the kind of love from their men that they needed and deserved. Men suffered because they couldn’t enjoy the release from financial anxiety that comes from having a co-provider in the household, and also because they were unable to receive and participate fully in the love their wives and children held out to them. And children suffered because they grew up repeating the same dreadful patterns.

Those patterns sprang from traditions in which the whole assumed more importance than its parts. We are heading now toward new traditions that balance individual with institutional well-being. That balance comes about through the total involvement of all family members in meaningful work and intense love and caring.

What can our churches do to help achieve that balance? First, they must resist the temptation to doomsaying: "Never ask ‘Oh, why were things so much better in the old days?’ It’s not an intelligent question" (Eccl. 7: 10, TEV). Second, they should encourage married persons to analyze their own marriages and consider whether they are governed either by traditionalism or by some form of individualism. In either case, couples should then ask themselves whether theirs is a satisfactory arrangement, or whether a richer marriage might be possible through a greater balance of the two poles. For those seeking greater balance, the challenge is to provide practical suggestions for involving all family members in meaningful work and love opportunities.

It is also vital that the local church become a support group -- a caring community -- for persons struggling with these sorts of difficult but not insuperable tasks. Often churches are faulted for following instead of leading society. In this case, however, the church may be the one institution in our society uniquely suited to raise aspirations aimed at new family traditions, and to provide a framework for their attainment.

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1716





Blast From The Past..........August 22, 1959


Chapter One: YOU CAN HAVE A HAPPIER FAMILY

 The purpose of this book--to strengthen your family life . . . Avoiding modern pressures against family life . . . Parents are partners with God in a sacred vocation . . . True Christian home as a church, school and recreation center in one . . . The example of the Holy Family . . . How can you teach your child to know God? . . . You will find your greatest joy in your children. Chapter Two: YOUR JOB AS A PARENT Church and social scientists agree on characteristics of a happy family . . . Parents agree that home and children come first . . . Father and mother are equals--Father the head, mother the heart . . . The importance of clear-cut family rules . . . Everybody should work together . . . Advantages and disadvantages of the large family . . . How children help and teach each other . . . Considerations for parents of small families . . . How to help an "only child" make a good adjustment . . . Four basic traits that make a good father . . . Why a mother is the most important person her child ever knows . . . "Don'ts" for mothers. 

 Chapter Three:

 YOU ARE YOUR CHILD'S BEST TEACHER

 Your child's need for security which only you can give . . . Ways to build his self-confidence . . . Recognize your child's own native talents and capabilities and accept him for what he is . . . "Understanding" is not enough; you must also give him direction . . . How to earn respect for your authority . . . Authority thrives on use . . . How to instill obedience without being a dictator . . . Forming good habits of work, study and play . . . The art of self-denial: Why your child must learn to say "no" to impulses . . . Five principles to help you discipline your child effectively. Chapter Four: YOUR CHILD'S MORAL TRAINING Teaching your child about God . . . How to use stories, prayers and pictures effectively . . . Developing his conscience . . . Early sex experimentation and what to do about it . . . Lying and stealing . . . What about "dirty words"? . . . How children learn them . . . Don't stress sin too much or use religion as a weapon . . . The right attitudes on confession . . . Don't be too scrupulous! . . . When children doubt religious truths . . . Church teachings will withstand investigation . . . Masturbation and homosexuality. 

 Chapter Five:

 WHY SEND YOUR CHILD TO CATHOLIC SCHOOLS?

 You have the first responsibility of deciding how to educate your child . . . Why we have parochial schools . . . How school may influence your child's attitudes for life . . . Moral teaching should hold first place in the classroom . . . Answers to objections by parents who choose non- sectarian schools . . . Is public school education really superior? . . . Graduates of Catholic schools are their most ardent supporters . . . The case for Catholic higher education . . . Responsibilities of parents with children in public schools . . . Newman Clubs . . . Co- operating with your child's teacher . . . Don't nag your child to the limit on his school work . . . Six ways to help your youngster prepare for college . . . Let him earn his own way--at least partially . . . School costs vs. "school palaces"--why Catholics should be interested in the controversy.

 Chapter Six:

 HOW TO TEACH YOUR CHILD ABOUT SEX

 Conflicting advice about sex education confuses parents . . . Five basic principles which should be followed in teaching about sex . . . What parents may do when they "can't talk about sex" . . . How your child first learns about sex . . . The relationship between bowel training and sex attitudes . . . How to answer your child's questions . . . A timetable for sex education, year by year . . . Overcoming "street corner" knowledge . . . Preparing your boy or girl for puberty . . . The different natures of the sexes . . . Ignorance about life is not innocence.

 Chapter Seven:

 WHAT OUTSIDE INFLUENCES CAN DO TO YOUR CHILD

 Influences outside the home, Church and school can harm or help . . . Counteracting the steady sex stimulation to which children are exposed . . . Separating the good from the bad in television, movies, radio programs, books and magazines . . . How you can make your influence felt . . . Pornography on the newsstands . . . Cultivating wholesome tastes . . . The importance of good companions . . . Criticizing your child's friends may have an effect opposite to that intended . . . Community recreation centers, teen-age canteens, etc. . . . Don't be a stern policeman over your child's tastes! 

 Chapter Eight:
 
THE CHILD WHO IS "EXCEPTIONAL

" One child in ten is unlike others in some important way . . . Mental retardation--causes, detection, treatment and training . . . Facts on cerebral palsy, epilepsy, physical defects which restrict movement, neurosis, exceptional difficulties in seeing, speaking or hearing, etc. . . . How parents can aid the exceptional child . . . Pity seldom helps . . . Emotional problems of exceptional children . . . How to prevent over-dependence and rebellion . . . Brothers and sisters of an exceptional child may also need special attention . . . The adopted child . . . What should he be told? . . . How to handle a "genius" . . . Signs of a gifted child . . . Most bright children lead happy lives. 

 Chapter Nine:
 
WHEN ONE PARENT MUST BE FATHER AND MOTHER

 A child without a mother or father needs more security than the average youngster . . . Parents can be "psychological deserters" . . . How a child may react when one of his parents dies . . . A child needs to retain faith in his missing parent . . . How a "substitute father" or "substitute mother" can help . . . Dangers for parents to avoid . . . The evils of "smother-love" and over-strictness . . . Gaining strength through prayer . . . Don't abuse foster homes . . . When should parents let children be adopted? . . . Guidance for stepparents . . . Principles to help the children grow to love their new parents. 

 Chapter Ten: 

WHERE TO GET HELP WHEN IN TROUBLE 

 Almost every family faces serious problems at some time . . . Differences and difficulties must be expected . . . Danger signs of trouble . . . Don't let problems grow until they become unmanageable . . . When to seek outside guidance in solving family problems . . . Where to take your problems . . . What priests and family counselors can do . . . Sources of financial, physical and emotional aid . . . Psychiatry is not a "dirty word" . . . How a psychologist and a psychiatrist handle a case . . . Beware of "psychological quacks" . . . What to do if your family is "disgraced' . . . Care for the unwed mother. 

Chapter Eleven:

 SHOULD MOTHERS WORK?

 How working mothers are causing a revolution in home life . . . Reasons why more married women than single women now hold jobs . . . How a mother who works full-time may harm her child, her husband and herself . . . Why nurseries can't substitute . . . What happens to children deprived of mothers . . . How the family unit suffers through overemphasis of material values . . . Does it really pay mothers to work? Statistics prove employment outside the home often is unprofitable . . . Alternatives to work outside the home for mothers . . . The problem of "moonlighters"--men who hold two full-time jobs . . . How overambitious fathers may harm their families.

 Chapter Twelve: 

WHAT WILL YOUR CHILD DO IN LIFE?

 Every person should decide his own course . . . How you can implant ideals to guide your child . . . Three requirements every career should fulfill . . . How your child can know if he has a call to the religious life . . . Requirements for priests, brothers and sisters . . . Can Catholic parents thwart a religious vocation? . . . Answers to objections by parents . . . The vocation of marriage . . . Reasons why a man or woman might remain single . . . Young men and women in the world can still serve God and man in almost all occupations . . . Even one individual can do great good . . . The child who "disappoints" his parents by choosing an "inferior" career. Chapter Thirteen:

 HOW TO HANDLE YOUR TEEN-AGER

 Modern factors which have produced the "teen-age" crisis . . . Today's youngsters have greater freedom, sophistication and insecurity . . . Teen-age problems almost unheard-of a generation ago . . . Physical and emotional changes of adolescents. . . How they are affected by awakening sexual desire . . . The fight for independence . . . What your child needs to become a successful adult . . . Force him to take responsibility . . . How teen-agers' codes guide their conduct . . . Practical problems of adolescents . . . Why parents are frustrated in dealing with their adolescents . . . Why you should let your child make mistakes. Chapter Fourteen: 

PREPARING YOUR CHILD FOR MARRIAGE

 How you affect your child's attitudes toward the other sex . . . Practical rules for parties and dances . . . When should youngsters begin to date? . . . Effective deterrents to premarital intercourse . . . The importance of modesty in dress . . . But you can still be attractive! . . . Moral dangers of going steady . . . What public- school officials say about teen-age pregnancies . . . Why do Americans marry so young? . . . The kinds of men and women your child should avoid . . . Impediments to valid marriages . . . Qualities they should seek in a mate . . . The serious purposes of courtship . . . How long should engagements be? . . . Preparations for marriage. Chapter Fifteen
:
 HOW TO AVOID A MIXED MARRIAGE IN YOUR FAMILY

 The growing trend toward interfaith unions . . . Why the Church opposes mixed marriages . . . Why such unions often end in divorce and desertions . . . Strains and tensions are common in mixed marriages . . . All faiths oppose them . . . Church rules on mixed marriages . . . Why Protestants object to prenuptial promises--and why Catholics in a mixed marriage are at a disadvantage . . . Do such marriages make converts? . . . How the sincerity of a prospective convert can be tested . . . Three basic ways to help your child avoid a mixed marriage. Chapter Sixteen:

 RELIGIOUS PRACTICES IN YOUR HOME

 Your home can be a little sanctuary . . . Family prayer . . . Inspiring customs from every land to help you celebrate Christmas, Easter and other feast days . . . Suggestions for observing special religious feasts throughout the year . . . How saints' days can be celebrated to strengthen your family's spiritual life . . . Your child's special days--baptismal day, feast day of his patron saint, First Communion and Confirmation days . . . Articles for the sickroom. APPENDIX Naming your baby . . . Church rules on fast and abstinence . . . The Eucharistic fast . . . A Betrothal Rite . . . Consecration of the family to the Holy Family . . . Family Prayer Card: The Confiteor, Prayer for the home, Parents' prayer for children, Children's prayer for their parents, Prayer for a sick person, Blessing on sleep, Prayer for the dead . . . Prayer for vocations to the priesthood and religious life.



The Full Text Here...........http://www.ewtn.com/library/family/famhndbk.txt