After weeks of having nothing but writing on the brain, it's occurred to me that I do have something else to talk about aside from writing.
Politics!
Thankfully, I don't have anything particular to talk about. I just want to talk about politics in general. Especially since politics are over half of the top ten posts on my blog.
Some of you may not know this, but my faith informs my politics.
Quell surprise, right?
This means I'm pro-life, pro-death penalty, pro-gun, pro-closed borders, anti-taxes, anti-communist, pro-community, pro-capitalist, anti-consumerism, pro-charity, pro-isolationist, pro-just war, pro-assassination, anti-regulation.
How's that for a fun time?
"How can I be any of that?" you ask. "It seems a little contradictory."
Because I follow the catechism of the Catholic church as laid down by the magesterium.
Meaning that I follow the Catholic Church, not whatever random crap is spewed out by the Pope's latest wingnut interview... or whatever the media tells us the Pope's whims are this week.
The magesterium is basically "what the church believes." It does not include "the opinion of the Pope on non-theology matters."
So, no, I don't follow "the Pope," I follow "THE CATHOLIC CHURCH." If you don't see that there's a difference between the Church and the Pope, then you can't tell the difference between Trump and the Presidency, either.
So, let's break this down.
Do I need to explain that part? I like to play it safe and say that life begins at conception. Democrats like to play it fast and loose, and think that life begins whenever the paperwork is issued to give a baby a social security number.
There are ramifications of this that are non-political. As children are best raised in a two-parent environment, I kept it zipped until I got married. Since that is best, I waited until I found the perfect woman to get married to. Etc, etc, blah blah. I guess this is also theological and political, but eh.
When you consider how little I like other people most days, you'll see that this is a tough one for me.
Some idiots like to think this is a contradiction. If you're one of those people, you're a fool. Protecting the unborn is protecting the innocent, who have committed no crime and deserve no punishment.
The death penalty is as close as we can come to justice, in certain cases. Life sentences, and no death penalty, is a nice way of saying "Murder all the guards and inmates you like, the next kills are free." There is no justice there; it's merely a license to slaughter.
"But oh, we're so much more enlightened now." Bullshit. Life sentences are for suckers. They are a luxury afforded by how good we have it right now, and we have it better than everyone else who has ever been born. If you're going to base your theology on current conditions, you are the fairest of fair weather faithful.
For 2000 years, the Church has been pro-death penalty. For over five thousand years, Judaism concurred. If you think that doesn't fall under "tradition informing the faith," then you can just throw out tradition entirely. And if you want to see the size of this baby you're throwing out with that bath water, it's called the Baltimore Catechism. It can stop bullets.
Self defense is a fundamental, God-given right, and we need the proper tools for it. The political implications of this is simple -- everyone needs to be armed. It should be part of metalworking shop classes and PE. First you build your own gun, then you fire your own gun. When you graduate high school, you get your owners permit. You fuck it up, it's revoked.
Though if I had my way, people would own machineguns, but no one asks my opinion.
This may be a little strong on my part. Largely because the Church (1) insists on welcoming refugees, BUT (2) also insist that the immigrants FOLLOW THE LAWS OF THE LAND THEY'RE MOVING TO.
Obviously, there seem to be some people having a problem with #2.
In America, sorry, but we need to lock the border, create an opening that's more narrow, and check everyone's paperwork as they come in. Frankly, we need to lock down the border and make sure no one comes in until we know what to do with everyone in the country illegally already.
THEN we need to revise the stupid immigration process, because last time I checked, people have bitched about how screwed up it is for 30 years, but no one wants to do anything about revising them.
I'm against theft. It was on a collection of stone tablets. And government spending seems to be an endless series of excuses for why the government needs to keep taxing you.
And frankly, the tax system is either rigged to make certain that no one pays their "fair share"-- it's all an excuse for politicians to exert more control over more people. Thank you FDR, you pig.
There's an entire encyclical dedicated to why Communism is evil under Catholic law.
Short version -- again, we're against theft. And stealing someone's work is theft. Wage slavery is bad. Communism is worse. Because it's slavery while dressing it up in language of "communal good," and lately "social justice."
The longer version is here.
Catholics invented capitalism. Don't believe me, ask the Medicis.
And why? When done right, it creates the fairest exchange rate for man's labor.
When done wrong, you get crony capitalism, where only the people with money rig the economy in their favor.
Every time you see something on Catholic economics in the catechism (seriously, check the magesterium, not news articles), they're largely about making certain the capitalism we have is as not as rigged as Socialist dumbasses whines it is.
One should not worship anything that isn't God -- this includes worship of the Home Shopping Network.
Yes that could just boil down to being shallow, but I've known people who worshiped their precious things like Gollum and his ring. (Not only have I known them, I've been related to them.)
That's one of the problems with things broadly labeled "capitalism." It has been used as an excuse to cover greed instead of good business. And when I mean good business -- consider that most of the "robber barons" didn't actually rob anybody, but envy will will slap a label on any success as "greed" and "theft,"
On the other hand, I will admit that "capitalism" has been used to cover a multitude of sins. That's why there's laisse faire capitalism, and there's crony capitalism.
Charity isn't government enforced. It comes from below, not above. Meaning we can and should be helping one another. It's one of the many reasons taxes are an abominations -- how can anyone be charitable and help out their fellow Man if we spend more than a quarter of the paying off our slave owners in the government? It's pretty damn hard unless you have a lot to start with.
I, like the church, believe in solidarity. "Hey, look, we're going to treat each other like human beings." You work, you get paid. You sell, you get paid for it. You're neighbors, you help each other out. You see someone in trouble, you help them. The goal is to work out every problem on the most local level. If you can work it out within the family, you do. If you can work it out within the parish, great.
... I think it was once called "living in a community."
Not these forced "diverse communities." Please. Actual community has been heartily discouraged, replaced by photo ops of "look at how diverse we are." Please. I want to show off my "diverse" acquaintances, I'll take a photo of the masses I go to.
The Catholic church -- we take in everybody.
This should also apply to "pro-small government."
I largely believe in leaving people alone. Including other countries.
The church likes to talk about international solidarity, where other countries live in peace with each other. Doesn't mean they give up their sovereignty.
Of course, the IMF, the EU, the UN all like to believe that there is no sovereignty, but they're a bunch of dictator friendly schmucks.
As the old saying goes, War is not the answer... unless it's about freedom, slavery, communism and Nazism.
Pardon me, I just eyerolled so hard, I strained something.
Sometimes, the evils of war are the lesser evil, especially when doing nothing allows evil to persist.
(And the first schmuck to insist that industrialization would have ended slavery without a war, the American South was already looking into training slaves for factories, so I doubt that.)
Sometimes you don't need a war. Sometimes you just need a bullet. It's call tyrannicide. I believe Thomas Aquinas was all for it.
Now we're just back to, "If you're against the death penalty and Catholic, you're a heretic."
No, seriously, how can the Catholic church be against regulations?
Because the more regulations you pass, the more you abridge individual rights and freedoms.
And most regulations passed in the past few decades have all been about punishing people for ... well, breathing, really.
I think that's it for now. Most of the ranting and raving can be held off for another day. If anyone wants to go "but you could have done more about X!" ... well, yeah, I could have done a blog post on each of these bullet points. Or I could have added more bullet points. I still might. But for right now, thanks, but this has been more politics than I like talking about at any one sitting.
