Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Pray tell how much I should tolerate you?

After completing the most  recent BadCatholic blogpost I began, per usual, to peruse the comments. Some new internetly anonymous had commented, but also those usual ones who tend to comment on all Mr. Barnes articles. 


A conversation ensued in which a certain commentee decided for his own personal use of ad hominum attack, to mock Franciscan, referring to it as "Stupidville". 


One of the regulars, who goes by "Alexandra" replied, 
                    "I know! I was talking to my husband about this yesterday and we both agreed. Resumes from universities like Franciscan will always go off of my desk and straight into the shredder." 


Wow...that tolerance for you. To add icing to her tolerant cake she later qualified, 



"I'd prefer to work with people who went to college in the real world."
It would appear that those who so vehement-ally wish everyone be open to everyone's way of living and "tolerance" is not actually tolerant. 
When people consider someone coming from an Ivy League school, its because they know they will be qualified because they went to an academically prestigious school, not because its liberal, or conservative. When people consider someone coming from a conservative school like Franciscan University they should probably, as concerns the hiring process, look to the actual academics of the school, not the person's beliefs. 
Really what Alexandra here is stating is that she wants to be around only like minded people, who agree with her on most every point. 

Sunday, May 20, 2012

On a brave University's response to HHS mandate...

Its old news by now, but many are beginning to forget the gravity of the situation concerning the HHS mandate.
To prepare for this, true Catholic organizations are gearing up and making changes. 
Recently Franciscan University announced its new policy, the only response allowed by conscience, and furthermore, it will not allow the secular forces of all that is Kathleen Sibelius(strong proponate of aforementioned mandate, and self proclaimed Catholic) to permeate its staunchly Catholic saturated campus. 

Read this great piece by Marc Barnes. 


Monday, April 16, 2012

Ignorance is bliss...

...especially if you want to get angry and lash out about the subject about which you are initially ignorant.

Two weeks ago the Pro-Life club at my school, of which I am a member, organized an event to raise awareness about the murderous act of abortion.

The display, which pictured baby clothes strung out on a clothesline with a red x through every fourth, was put up on a Monday morning, early, by myself and my groups wonderful President.

Tuesday morning the display looked like this,

Ah...very mature fellow University compadres. If by mature, I here mean puerile and froth with pusillanimity(I just wanted to use that word sooo bad today). 

In response to this, our group simply put it back up. 

This display was very important to our group.To have someone rip it down showed to us something many of us already realized: the dissent of thought, and more specifically, a dissent from truth. 

Further confirming this dissent were the things I heard whilst sitting next to said display, to get a feel for the reaction, which it most assuredly spurred.  

"1 out of 4 dies; that means 3/4 lives! Thats enough."

"O my gosh! Haha, according ot Guttmacher."

"Abortion is hilarious."

"If you really care about babies then donate those clothes to the babies."

"What the fuck?"

"Thats a lie."

"Tear them down."

"I don't want to see that, I don't want to look at that."

"This isn't what we should be worried about."

The musings of the ignorant and confused- but lets not give them the benefit of the doubt, shall we? 
Correction, 
           The musings of the willingly ignorant. 

At the core again I find a dissent from truth to be a problem. Not only am I convinced that dissent from truth is the problem, but an apathy towards finding out the real truth of a situation, before silly judgements are made, or vandalism acted.

None of those who claimed our statistic to be wrong moved to correct it, or to seek actual knowledge of the subject. 
None of those who for several nights vandalized the display, shrouded by the darkness, had the gall to openly oppose the message in the light of day. 

When ignorance leads to uneducated statements and actions, it is no longer bliss. 

I respect my University's dealing with these problems, and even applaud their interactions with my group as having been most helpful. It seems ironic though, with the ideology of the University being "tolerance", that students would partake in actions that are contrary to this ideology. 

In the words of Martin Luther King, 
          "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."


Monday, April 2, 2012

Psychology Inherently Stupid

                                                                 
I have a propensity to be rather crass concerning items which to me seem to be both blatant and of themselves, stupid.

Psychology is only one of them, I am sorry to say.

Of all the classes that I have taken in this fine year, and I have enjoyed many of them, Psychology is by far the utmost revolting to me.

The offense this time around,
A stage in development, as noted by textbook, that we all must go through to be characterized as adults,

"Postformal thought: recognition that truth may vary from situation to situation...that ambiguity and contradiction are the rule rather than the exception, and that emotion and subjective factors must begin to play a role in thinking and formulating truth."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
The first two phrases follow the stream of most of the technical jargon the book is bursting with.

The last one, however, screamed at me.
Literally(not really literally) SCREAMED at me.

Thoughts of hunting down the books authors and demanding an answer to the atrocity began to possess my mind. 
It was rather fortunate for all parties concerned, then, that I did not take this course of action, and instead decided to refute the silly claim, as what it is, stupid, right here, right now. 

First of all, it is quite a loaded claim if you disagree with it.   
            Here, I mean that you either lose by falling into the rationalist's trap, coming to their conclusions, or you lose because clearly, if you do not experience this stage, you do not think like a sophisticated adult. 

Au contraire,  fortunately for the more logical of us, this is simply not the case. 
  Determining outcomes and coming to conclusions using emotion and subjective factors is both fallacious and stupid. 

Though I would love to expound upon this, I have already spent hours composing a rather concise post 
concerning this very issue, namely, the role of feelings in determining truth. 
                                            Nota bene part three. 

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Stupid Professor Quote of the Day


Ah...the joys of my college Campus.
Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying this term at college exceedingly, my favorite so far. I feel as if I have a better support system, my own study program, classes for the most part that I thoroughly enjoy, and motivation and drive.
I have to admit though, it peeves me to hear when professors blatantly misinform entire classes with unnecessary and insipid bits of information. Despite the seeming harmlessness of the statements that they make, the implications are not without consequence, and such professors are sending a message(often false) and either furthering their own agendas, or stroking their own egos.

 The statement in question came in my "Human Development" course. We were going over the stages of development from Conception, to Birth.

Without further ado, the statement,
          "By the way, a woman in not considered pregnant until implantation occurs."

Wait....what? Okay did the research. After extensive googling(yes, I just made google into a transitive verb) and finding about 10 websites with articles on this very issue I found multiple answers. About half agreed.
The predominant one I found with this opinion had some other fun stuff(note sarcasm) to say on the issue.


"When Does Pregnancy Begin?

Although widespread, definitions that seek to establish fertilization as the beginning of pregnancy go against the long-standing view of the medical profession and decades of federal policy, articulated as recently as during the Bush administration. In fact, medical experts—notably the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)—agree that the establishment of a pregnancy takes several days and is not completed until a fertilized egg is implanted in the lining of the woman's uterus. (In fact, according to ACOG, the term "conception" properly means implantation.) A pregnancy is considered to be established only when the process of implantation is complete (see box, page 8)."

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/08/2/gr080207.html

Its the Guttmacher Site. This nonsense and propaganda jargon is to be expected. I expect my professor had these implications in mind when he made this statement, that contraception is alright, because its only causing death to the baby by not allowing it to implant. It then goes on to redefine conception and the like, to fit the agenda that the morning after pill, and other abortafacients and contraceptives, are alright.

Another site I found said something quite opposite. When the term of the pregnancy is considered, in order to calculate development of the baby, it is calculated from the point of the first day of your last menstrual period.
http://www.babyzone.com/pregnancy/week/article/1st-week-pregnancy

Let me get this straight, you're not pregnant until implantation, but your doctor will calculate your pregnancy as starting from a time period that is significantly before that? That just doesn't make any sense.

Dear Professors,
  Stop spewing forth lies, and if you are not sure on the subject, you probably shouldn't pronounce your opinions to the world, and especially not to highly impressionable college students, as if they were facts.

Dear Abortion Mills and Your Kind,
  Stop spewing contradictory nonsense. We see right through your agenda, and in due time, even those with their eyes firmly locked shut, will see through you as well. 

Wednesday, January 11, 2012