Thank You For Smoking Plain, Vanilla Liberty

One of the most unjustly neglected film releases of 2006 is now out on DVD. Thank You For Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's novel of the same name, offers a wry look at lobbying and counter-lobbying in the tobacco industry. The devilishly clever protagonist, spin doctor Nick Naylor, fights for poor, disenfranchised corporations while combating the smoking opponents led by a sanctimonious Vermont senator. In addition to this difficult role, he tries to reconnect with son Joey, who lives with his divorced mother.

Early in the film Naylor appears at little Joey's classroom for a presentation on his career. He cheerfully proselytizes for his cash crop, this exchange in particular catching my notice:

"It's good to listen to your parents--Joey.
All I'm suggesting is that there will always be people trying to tell you what to do and what to think. There probably already are people doing that, am I right?"
"yeah," the class mumbles.
"I'm here to say that when someone tries to act like some sort of an expert, you can respond: 'Who says?'"
A little boy pipes up: "So cigarettes are good for you?"
"No, that's not--that's not what I'm getting at. My point is that you have to think for yourself. You have to challenge authority!
If your parents told you that chocolate was dangerous, would you just take their word for it?"
The students raise their voice: "No"
"Exactly! So perhaps instead of acting like sheep when it comes to cigarettes, you should find out for yourself!"

Some have taken the film as a defense of freedom. Later in the film, Naylor indeed hits the favorite phrases of lifestyle liberalism: he declares that the world is a dangerous place and inveighs against treating mature adults like children.

Yet his earlier classroom escapade recounted above undermines such a libertarian reading: if children are taught from an early age that they already have the competence for such decisions, that "who says?" really is an argument winner, it is difficult truthfully to claim that they have the foundation for mature decision-making which makes paternalistic government unnecessary. Uncritical anti-authoritarianism is being preached by a confidence man who is boosting the self-regard of students in hopes they will become pliable, reliable consumers. The children are being indoctrinated into incompetent skepticism, being too poorly-formed to note the contradiction in their instruction.

"So what happens when you're wrong?"
"Joey, I'm never wrong."
"But you can't always be right."
"Well if it's your job to be right then you're never wrong."
"But what if you *are* wrong?"
Okay, let's say that you're defending chocolate, and I'm defending vanilla. Now, if I were to say to you 'Vanilla is the best flavor of ice cream', you'd say:"
"No, chocloate is."
"Exactly, but you can't win that argument. So, I'll ask you: 'so you think chocolate is the end-all, be-all of ice cream, do you?'"
"It's the best ice cream, I wouldn't order any other."
"Oh, so it's all chocolate for you, isn't it?"
"Yes, chocolate is all I need."
"Well I need more than chocolate. And for that matter I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom, and choice when it comes to our ice cream, and that, Joey Naylor, that is the definition of liberty."
"But that's not what we're talking about."
"Ah, but that's what I'm talking about."
"But... you didn't prove that vanilla was the best."
"I didn't have to, I proved that you're wrong, and if you're wrong, I'm right."
"But you still didn't convince me."
"I said I'm not after you, I'm after them."
Points to surrounding crowd

This reduction of liberty to a choice between ice cream flavors is a sad but honestly funny reflection on our general inability to debate the superiority or inferiority of certain specific choices.

It is an artful cop-out, this sly change of subject. For Naylor's chumps, ways of life are neither higher nor lower, just "different." So different are they that the only thing they have in common is immunity from not just governmental action, but even critical engagement. That the content of our character is related to the quality of our choices in life, that we must be trained well to be fit to choose well, is rarely suggested.

When I saw this movie in an artsy theater, the crowd--a boisterous audience, to be sure--remained oddly passive during this scene. I was the only one who laughed. The humor behind Naylor's pandering is perhaps too subtle for those nursed on the thinnest form of freedom, a liberty that is all style and no content. Though he ends his so-called argument with grandiose emoting about sweet, chocolatey Liberty, It is quite fitting that Naylor started out defending vanilla.

It must be test time at the University of Southern California. I am getting several visitors from there looking for my summary of Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed.

That book is too good to be summarized, kids. Get to work!

62% of Catholics: "No King But Caesar"

What Pew actually did over two weeks in May was ask 820 self-identifying American Christians "Do you think of yourself first as American or as Christian?" And in this case, 42% of Christians did actually answer "Christian first." Another 48% answered "American first," while 7% ducked and said they thought of themselves as both.

Not surprisingly, the "Christian first" response emanated disproportionately from self-identified Evangelicals, 62% of whom said "Christian first." By contrast, the figures for other major Christian sectors were nearly reversed, with 62% of Catholics and 65% of Mainline Protestants saying "American first".
David van Biema, God or Country

The author tries to score "controversial" points by comparing these responses to American Muslims. How pedestrian.

If van Biema had wanted to start a titanic media firestorm, he could have tried to find a poll asking about Jewish loyalty. Heck, even an inconsequential blogger like myself can't even speculate about that hypothetical situation without worries I'll be lumped in with the nuts.

The nationalist sentiment reported to be strong among my coreligionists is typically disconcerting, but not surprising. As usual with such surveys, I would like specific statistical breakdowns considering mass attendance and other measures of Catholic practice.

"Sayyid Qutb: Freedom Fighter"

This din [religion] is a universal declaration of the freedom of man from slavery to other men and to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude. It is a declaration that the sovereignty belongs only to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds. It challenges all such systems based on the sovereignty of man, i.e., where man attempts to usurp the attribute of Divine sovereignty. Any system in which final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are men, deifies human beings by designating others than Allah as lords over men.
-Sayyid Qutb, Milestones

The source essay for this quote seems a bit sketchy, with a few strained analogies. I wonder whether the line about "final decisions" can be assumed into Christian warnings against the divinization of the state without doing violence to Qutb's vision. Likewise, there's the possibility that Qutb could endorse forcing others to be freed from their enslavement to desire.

Denver Megachurch Under Scrutiny

The Denver Post today published a front-page article on Heritage Christian Center, a large Pentacostal church run by one Bishop Dennis Leonard. It alleges certain financial improprieties and neopotism in Heritage's leadership:

Project Heritage, a nonprofit founded by the church, was faulted for squeezing too much profit out of a government program to help low-income families buy renovated homes. Leonard's daughter-in-law and the daughters of the board chairman earned real estate commissions on the home sales, which the government flagged as a conflict of interest.
The Gospel of Prosperity

For Further Language Studies

The Foreign Service Institute foreign language instructional texts are now on-line. I'll have to check them out when I begin studying Spanish in earnest. The texts don't look amenable to being used at semi-fluent.com, but there are plenty of audio instructional tapes available for download.

via Papa Familias

Where Have All The TradCons Gone?

Leaders are necessarily elites. The elite of this country have no problem with homosexuality. None. Even if they oppose gay marriage politically, they have no problem hiring and socializing with homosexuals and their partners.

Heartland conservatives, the kind of folks who vote GOP, in contrast to their immediate economic interests, have no idea what their leaders are really like and what they abide culturally.

This is where Foleygate will impact voters in the Heartland and homosexual staffers and politicians in Washington. There is, and always has been, a disconnect between the values of professional conservatives and the people they profess to lead.

Professional conservatives live the life of Washingtonians. They don't go to church as much as the rest of the nation and they don't behave like the rest of America, at least not those they represent. They live a life much like their liberal counterparts.

They make the case for social conservatism in Washington but when they go out into Middle America and rail against the liberal elites, they are railing against themselves.
-A.C. Kleinheider, Volunteer Voters
via Daniel Larison

There are few men lonelier than a social conservative at a College Republicans meeting. If he is vocal, he will likely never get a leadership position, or a even a date. At most, he may receive a few patronising words. Functional libertarianism is the order of the day among these aspiring politicos. I would be interested in learning whether the same culture is manifest among the abused page corps. Did they, too, pride themselves on their acceptance of alternative sexual orientations while they looked the other way?

Considering the party's feeder organizations, it's little surprise that the GOP leadership shied away from criticizing Foley's "private life" until its crapulence spilled into the public eye.

Catholic Philistines?

"And then there are all the Catholic figures who have emerged in the various worlds of public discourse over the past twenty years. At the political magazines, at the think tanks, in the law schools, in the judiciary, on the television talk shows, on the book circuit, across the nation there's a way Catholics have of recognizing one another: a wink and a nod, a figurative handshake that declares joint membership in a particular intellectual culture."
-Jody Bottum, When the Swallows Return to Capistrano

Claes Ryn has attacked movement conservatives for having been politics-centered philistines, "political intellectuals [drawing] attention and respect away from efforts whose relevance to politics was not immediately obvious."

Bottom's essay sometimes exhibits this political philistinism, over-focused on politics at the expense of cultural and theological concerns. Note how his examples of the "revival" are either in the punditry or in law. Where are the fabulists, artists, and musicians? Mel Gibson, probably a schismatic, is the only notable Catholic in Hollywood. I know Bottum is working to rectify this sorry cultural situation, but the focus of his piece seems to compound the problem.

I am unsure how much this philistinism is his and his colleagues' fault and how much the fault of the activists to whom they are reacting. The radical, or even the liberal Catholics he describes themselves often eschewed cultural concerns in favor of political action--indeed, they often presented iconoclasm and talentless egalitarian aesthetics as necessary for their revolution against the bad old days.

Perhaps it is not surprising that conservatives mirror their opponents in this respect, but it is sad.

Louis Dupre and Pope Benedict: A Connection?

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.
-Pope Benedict XVI, Regensburg Lecture

Louis Dupre's expert study Passage to Modernity was among the first books I discussed in the second month of this blog's existence. (see here and here) It is an expanded discussion of those medieval philosophers and theologians who would inspire the amputated rationality of modern philosophy. Matthew Fish has written an excellent discussion of these medievals and their interpreters, including Dupre quoted here:

Seeking a foundation for the order of cognition, Descartes has redefined the ultimate ontological principles in the function of the epistemic order. The foundation both of the mind and of the world is conceived in accordance with the conditions and needs of knowledge…. While Greek philosophy of the classical age had defined being in terms of form and its dependence primarily (though never exclusively) in terms of participation, modern thought conceived of nature as a causal interaction of forces and of transcendence as a supremely powerful divine will which created and ruled all things by means of efficient causality.

Matthew Fish expands further:

God being relegated to an extrinsic influence, who no longer effects the cosmos formally, is left ghostly absent; where classically the cosmos had an interiority that always pointed to its participation in the Word, now nature was a neutral sphere, in fact a canvas for the mind to impose meaning upon, that the mind must inform since reality has now become void of intelligibility, and therefore any higher ordering or purpose. All meaning and purpose has been exclusively reserved to the inscrutable divine will.

I had not yet noticed the connection between Pope Benedict's and Dupre's analysis, nor have many others, but it is certainly an interesting link to explore. Matthew Fish's full essay excerpt is quite the worthy read.

Robert P. George Contra Perdurantism

Robert George and Patrick Lee write another substantial essay about the ethics of stem cell research. Their take on the view that human consciousness is the sum total of quantum experiences:

The first difficulty is that, according to this view, a human being (or any ultimate subject of existence) is the sum of time-slices suitably connected (say, by biological or psychological continuity). But what is a time-slice, and, how could time-slices give rise to a human organism's (or any organism's) extension through time? If the time-slice itself does not have temporal extent, then the addition of any number of time-slices to each other will not give rise to a temporally extended series -- just as the addition of any number of unextended points will not produce an extended line. On the other hand, if the time-slice of a human being does have temporal extent, then no explanatory gain has been achieved by denying a persisting human being, since one will then (by necessity) have admitted that an individual as a whole can persist through at least some extent of time. But if one must admit persistence through time at one level, why not admit it at the level that common sense and explanatory practice seem to demand -- that is, the lifetime of a human individual who persists through time?

I am under the impression that David Hume, with his theory of sense impressions, inspired the view they criticize here. If any reader can confirm or deny my impression, please do so.

George and Lee's essay does not cover the phenomenon of twinning, which seems to be what their target has in mind at points. Their literal use of the word "individual" would of course run into a bit of trouble when applied to twinning, for at that point there really are at least two possible individuals within the whole organism. I am also curious how they would interpret the concept "human organism," and relate it to "human being."

Retro Walker Percy

Clark Stooksbury presents the '80s-era cover art of Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman

Injecting Some Decency into the Foley Fracas

For the past two days, a conservative blogger has ginned up publicity for his work outing a 21-year-old young man--a former congressional page and current deputy campaign manager for a heartland Republican congressman--who received sexually explicit instant messages from disgraced Florida GOP Rep. Mark Foley when he was 17 and 18 years old. I have received several e-mails from the blogger and readers flogging the post.

I refused to link to the blogger then and even though the Drudge Report has plastered screaming headlines about the blogger's scoop, I refuse to link to it now. There was absolutely no good reason to expose the former congressional page's name and identity. Seizing on ABC News' redaction failure and reporting errors (more on that in a moment) to play gotcha in a feeble attempt to avenge Foley is not a sufficient reason to obliterate the young man's privacy. The young man was the prey, not the predator.
Michelle Malkin

Denver Minutemen Assaulted; "They had it coming" says ex-Pol

The local Minuteman group was filming an informal day-labor pickup station where employers pick up cheap illegals. I do not know the precise reason why the men were filiming, though I presume they were preparing film for anti-immigration activist purposes.

Robert Copley, Jr., was one of the cameramen. He was assaulted by several illegals, and another cameraman almost had his camera stolen. I am unable to find a written account of the episode, but there is video coverage at Fox News.

Former state senator and Hispanic activist Polly Baca implies they had it coming: "The minutemen are acting in a totally unamerican fashion... it is not their place to enforce our laws, it is the place of our police officers, our safety officers to enforce our laws."

I do not know whether Fox News significantly misrepresented her remarks, but talking that way about an assaulted citizen journalist is despicable. I don't follow the Minutemen, but when their efforts at perfectly legal amateur information-gathering are classified as unamerican the message is loud and clear: "Shut up!"

I actually met Polly Baca at my home parish's immigration forum a few weeks back. Her speech contained plenty of cant, but was hardly so offensive as her remarks on Fox News. She proposed a Marshall Plan for Mexico, a proposal which seemed to me a recipe for corruption. Pressing her on this point, she said we needed to get good people into office. Flatteringly, she suggested I get involved. I made a joke about the joys of apathetic anarchism, yet I was really laughing at something else. If only she knew that Pat Buchanan is one of my favorite pundits...


Addendum:
A Freeper rewrites Senator Baca's statement:
"it is not their place to not enforce our laws, it is the place of our police officers, our safety officers to not enforce our laws."

Christians and Modernity: A More Optimistic View

The St. Elizabeth of Hungary Theology Lecture Series is proceeding nicely. Here are some somewhat messy notes on Father Chrysostom Frank's lecture "The Politics of Liberty in a Postmodern Era":

Pre-moderns: trusted in authority passed down through tradition
Moderns: lost confidence in authority, confident in human reason
Post-moderns: maintain diffidence towards authority, but also have lost confidence in human reason.

Crisis of meaning: how do we ground meaning if transcendence removed? Father Chrysostom related a shocking story describing how some of his students at Regis U outright admitted that the only difference they saw between Mother Theresa's hospices for the dying and the concentration camps was personal preference.

At present, it is difficult to defend politics of liberty other than maintaining it is simply a personal preference.

Meaning is a problem only because we already have an intuitive sense of the fullness of the reality towards which we are being pulled. By searching for the infinite in the finite(as in the modernist project) we set ourselves up for failure and despair.

The death of the modern project is reawakening us to eternity; meaning can only be found in its relationship with the transcendent.

The central illumination of the modern age, what has emerged as a viable social and political order, is grounded on conviction that individual human being has inviolable liberty and dignity. That conviction is the spark of transcendent meaning on which Christianity and modernity can make common cause against the cynicism of postmodernity and the barbarities of political Islam. While only Christianity can best ground that meaning, Liberalism still having immanentist temptations, Christians nonetheless dismiss Liberalism at our peril.

Father Chrysostom expresses nervousness when Catholics on rare occasion bad-mouth liberty and the individual. From having lived in South Africa, and having spent time in post-Soviet Russia, his opinion is very understandable.

By way of further reading Father Chrysostom recommended the works of David Walsh, who has flown under my radar.

On the whole, the lecture was a very good summary of the history and philosophies involved. I don't think there was anything particularly new to me, yet its delivery was compact and far more hopeful than other examinations of the postmodern condition.

Book Review: James Webb's Born Fighting

To state the obvious, white ethnics are rarely described in any substantive manner. Whites are either a race whose counterparts are delineated in equal opportunity checkboxes or an ethnic group vaguely defined by Hispanics as "Anglos." While it is accepted practice to dilate upon the real and imagined virtues of minority groups, Americans of European ancestry are lumped into one homogenized mass. Italians and Swedes, Poles and Englishmen, Irishmen and Germans are all subsumed into racial categories. With this kind of categorical homogenization now dominant, it is easy to find refreshment in James Webb's history-cum-family memoir Born Fighting, a history of the Scots-Irish in America.

Originally colonists in sixteenth-century Northern Ireland, these Scottish Protestants found themselves and their Presbyterianism despised by their English lords almost as much as by the native Irish. Already a migratory people, many set off for the New World and settled in what would become the American South. Frontiersmen and pioneers, Webb believes these kinsmen of his to be independent, egalitarian, pugnacious, and tribal. These characteristics, forged in the wilds of the American frontier, have forged a major part of the American way of life.

Webb's history is somewhat derivative, especially his treatment of the Scottish-English conflicts for which he relies far too heavily upon Winston Churchill's history. These chapters read like a lazy student essay: long excerpts interspersed by a novice's summary. Yet his reliance on older generalist historians frees his analysis from the trendy shackles of specialization. He rightly treats ethnic formation as the product of numerous factors: geography, history, war, religion, each is discussed at some length. Though I am hardly widely read in the genre, I find this focus unusually competent compared with other contemporary popular histories.

Being a retired Marine, his discussions of the Scots-Irish at war are particularly energetic. American frontiersmen, he suggests, learned their radically novel tactics from their engagements with the Indians. While reading his energetic treatment of the Battle of Kings Mountain, I first realized that the legendary Rebel Yell could have originated in those pitched battles between the old Scots-Irish and the Indians, where Scottish battle cries fused with native war whoops.

Webb's characterization of the Scots-Irish as independent men who only respect proven leaders seems at odds with his depiction of their prowess in the organized national military. Their alleged disdain for hierarchy would, it seems, undermine military functioning whenever an undeserving officer takes command. As a former Marine and secretary of the Navy, Webb's unapplied expertise on this point is especially regrettable.

Webb complements his large-scale history with stories from his own family's past, remembering his forefathers and their lives. Being a Southerner, he includes a pretty typical defense of the Civil War: the North wasn't as abolitionist as it appears in retrospect; poor Southern whites weren't fighting for slavery but resisting an invading army in defense of the land they loved; competing ideals of national and state sovereignty; and so on. There is little unique to his arguments other than a more ethnic and class-based sympathy with poorer Southern whites. Yet upon encountering such apologetics still another time, the thought occurred to me that conservatives' precious habits of playing the tiresome find-the-racist game might derive in part from Southerners declaiming Yankee racism and hypocrisy.

Though a newcomer to the Democratic Party, Webb does not shirk from playing typical identity politics on behalf of his people. Webb recognizes that, as is typical with a long-neglected ethnicity, the Scots-Irish people have been long-neglected. They suffered at the hands of Yankee domination during reconstruction; they are tarred as violent, bigoted, and dumb rednecks in popular culture; they disproportionately do the front-line fighting in the military, with little credit; they are underrepresented in the American university. But noble people that they are, they don't complain. Much.

I realize the previous paragraph have been harsh towards Webb. I should note here that Born Fighting is nowhere near as flattering towards its targeted readers as Cahill's sickeningly oleaginous How The Irish Saved Civilization, a regrettable pop-history primed for Irish-American viewers of Oprah.

As regards academic representation, Webb marshals some statistics that do indeed suggest a problem. The Harvard graduating class is twenty percent Asian, twenty-five to thirty-three percent Jewish, and there a fifteen percent minority quota in admissions. Subtract legacy and prestige admissions, and the openings for a Scots-Irish Southerner, like many other Americans, are few indeed.

Besides such underrepresentation, he also suggests reasons that Southerners sympathized with populist concerns: white Southerners, impoverished by Reconstruction, could enthusiastically support FDR's new deal. They could easily believe the wealthy did in fact acquire privileged positions through injustice and fraud because their own ancestors had told them as much about rich Yankee carpetbaggers. The populist elements in the Democratic Party therefore lost significant support as the Southerners switched to the GOP after decades of hostility to the party of Lincoln.

While certainly of special interest to those of the tribe it celebrates, Born Fighting manages to engage a wider audience, especially by claiming the Scots-Irish as a major source of typically American values. This is a traditional appeal of the special interest genre, and one wonders to what extent it distorts the nature of its subject matter, the wider nation, or both. Yet while hardly a masterpiece, Webb's book provides a sturdy springboard for further reflection on the deeper currents of American history. For that, we can be thankful.

Cruise Lines Support Dissident Catholic Clerics

An old story about cruise lines taking on "Rentapriest" clergy. Rentapriest blog wrote some disingenuous comments on the story.

Supposedly such priests would go on cruises with their wives, only to have duped laity discover their relationship during the voyage.

Being Criticized is a Sign of Relevance

"The most profound changes emanated from the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, the most problematic of all the Council documents at least in its implementation. This constitution quite properly called for dialogue with the surrounding culture rather than condemnation and urged us to emphasise what was common rather than to begin immediately with our differences. This is fundamental to the way we now see ourselves as an integral part of Australian society, the main reason why the majority accepts us as such and why all educated Australians now automatically and rightly presume that they have every right to comment publicly on distinctively Catholic teachings on e.g. the impossibility of womens' ordination, or contraception or the mandatory celibacy of priests. Most Australians are much slower to do this with e.g. the Orthodox or the Jews and Moslems."
-Cardinal George Pell

Clio's Revenge

The main intellectual defect in current American foreign policy is the lack of any sense of history, particularly as the British historian Lewis B. Namier defined it: a trained intuitive sense of the way things do not happen. (How they actually happen depends on the evidence.) America's leaders and their advisers, including some so-called historians and political scientists, not only are ignorant of history and insensitive to it, they despise and repudiate it. Their favorite epithet for opponents is to accuse them of having a pre-9/11 mentality, of believing that history before September 2001 still tells us something.
-Paul Schroeder, Liberating Ourselves

Of course this ignores the experts stuck in 1938, but the larger point stands. Our degraded knowledge of history, composing caricatures unworthy even of comic books, has crippled us.

Arabic Bravado, meet American Brawling...

An anthropology student at Rants and Raves has posted his reflections on Arab culture after a stay in Saudi Arabia:

In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do.

Thus an ultimatum is often not taken seriously and the reality comes as a surprise. Remember the "Mother of all Battles"? Like many other Mediterranean peoples, Arabs don't seem to mind making a scene in public and have a high blown sense of drama. Paul Harvey once described how he had spent the Suez Crisis hiding under the bed in his hotel room because of the blood-curdling radio broadcasts, before he learned that Arabs talk like that when they're arguing over a taxi. "This is my taxi and I will defend it to the death!" "You lie, it's mine and rivers of blood will flow in the street before I give up my taxi!"�

An Arab will scream at you, get into your personal space and sometimes kick dirt on your shoe -- and they react with utter surprise when an American up and decks him. "What did I do?" To say the least, this makes negotiations difficult.

It makes me wonder whether the nuclear saber-rattling in Iran is quite different from the nuclear saber-rattling going on in some Western cricles.

The Paulist Press in 1945

via Gashwin Gomes, a reaction to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Here we come upon the essential evil. The American people have for some years been indoctrinated with the heresy that there is no such thing as a universal everlasting law. Professors of ethics say there is no Absolute, that is to say, no God and that if there were, we have no means of knowing His mind or even if He is a person and has a mind. That there is no such thing as natural law; that laws are temporary and arbitrary, made up, so to speak, as we go along; that the law that served our ancestors may be obsolete in our days. If that kind of ethics prevails, our Christian civilization will dissolve in gas like the bodies of the 100,000 to 300,000 victims of the first atomic bombing. No discussion of this question can neglect the argument that the atomic bombs were used to bring about a quicker surrender of Japan and thereby in the end, to save lives. The end does not justify the means. It is not permissible to do evil that good may come. If obliteration bombing is evil -- and this is the question -- it cannot be made good by the supposition or even the certainty that it will in the long run be more merciful that a surely legitimate way to make war.
-Rev. James Martin Gillis, CSP, Editor, The Catholic World, September 1945

The standard apologists for atomic bombing often dismiss those who judge "with the clarity of hindsight," implying that the strikes enjoyed unanimous approval back in the good old days. Let them read Rev. Gillis.