Would Catholicism Save America? Discussing the Concept of Why America Will Perish Without Rome

I picked a bad time to try to start being consistent with my blog posts. Life has gotten super chaotic here at Casa BTEG, and I've neglected blogging as a result, especially since it's hard to even get to my personal computer at the moment. However, I think we're approaching the end of the current difficulties, and also, I found something that I really want to blog about! The subject today is two videos on YouTube from the channel of Milo Yiannopoulis, concerning a new book being released by his new printing company, Dangerous Books.

I've been reading and watching Milo's content since before he left Breitbart. I've never been an enormous fan, per se, but his take on conservative life and culture in America, as a Catholic gay man from the UK, comes from a very different place than other prominent conservatives, which makes him interesting reading and listening. Also, he's a lot of fun, which is refreshing.

Since I follow his YouTube channel, I saw two interviews Milo recently did with a man named Timothy Gordon. He is publishing a new book through Dangerous Books entitled Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome, to which Milo has written a forward. I'm definitely not going to touch on everything in the interviews, as the two videos together are almost an hour long total. If you want to watch them, they can be found on YouTube here and here. But there are a few points that I wanted to make, and hopefully discuss. I'll only be covering one today.

The most important issue I took from the videos was the idea that Protestants, from Luther on, do not believe in free will. Therefore, their thinking, Gordon argues, is antithetical to a country like the American republic, which was founded on the idea of Americans using their free will to make, for the most part, their own plans about how their lives should be arranged, with as little government coercion as possible. One of the most important values of the Founders was the right to individual liberty. Protestants therefore, who deny the existence of free will, cannot co-exist with a country of individual freedoms, or so Gordon posits.

From a theological standpoint, the concept of humanity and free will has been argued for centuries before me, and will probably continue to be a point of discussion until Christ's return. For Lutherans, our concept on free will, at least from the point of view of becoming one of God's redeemed creatures, can be found in our catechism: "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength, believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to Him. But the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and keeps me in the one true faith." So in this sense, Luther certainly does not agree that Christians become so merely by personal free will. Rejection of God is another matter, and one on which I am not as well versed. I do know that we do not follow Calvin's doctrine of people being foreordained to go to either heaven or hell. Modern day Protestantism, however, certainly does seem to follow the idea of free will, with the idea of "making a decision for Jesus." For whatever reason, Gordon seems to discuss only the early Protestant leaders like Luther and Calvin. I would like to know what he would have to say about the current views of the many Protestant denominations that do emphasize making a personal decision.

However, is the eternal different from the temporal? Is being unable to use my free will to be redeemed by God, mean that I am unable to use my free will to decide who to marry, for whom to vote, what type of government I want, or even what I will eat for breakfast? I was going to develop this idea more today, but this post has already gotten longer than I intended it to be! Hopefully I'll get some comments to draw on for my next post, and if not, I'll still keep going with the idea of secular free will, for a Thursday post. Maybe I'll be able to find some reading about Luther's views on the role of free will in our earthly lives in the meantime. There are also a few more things from the interviews that I wanted to go over, so be looking for that as well.

Common Core Is Rotten

I'm sure you've already heard a bunch of other people express frustration with how poor the Common Core curriculum is at actually teaching kids. I knew Common Core was not a good educational system, but was hoping that since my daughter was a sophomore in high school this year, she wouldn't be affected much by the issues. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be showing up in her math, science or AP US History classes. She is having to read some worthless non-fiction books for English. Their reading assignment over the summer was The Talent Code. Is that truly useful for the majority of 15-year-olds? What made this book stand out among the sea of self-help books out there, that an English teacher picked it out for my child? Now she has to go through a list of other books of this type, and pick out another one that she would be interested in reading. Fortunately, they are also reading the traditional fictional literature that has been used in English courses. I'm still displeased with what I feel is a waste of my daughter's learning time.

She also informed me tonight that her Spanish class is being changed by this stupid system also. They're not actually concentrating on learning vocabulary or grammar in class anymore, the Dancer says. They're supposed to be magically learning that at home, then spending class time applying it. What? My daughter is luckier than most, in that I studied Spanish for seven years, and my eldest daughter took three years of Spanish as well. We can help her if she runs into difficulties because she's not getting what she needs in class. But I want my daughter to be studying grammar and vocabulary in class! I shouldn't feel like I have to help her, or supplement her education, at home.

At certain blogs, in this era where educational standards are falling victim to political meddling, I've read that not homeschooling your child amounts to child abuse. I resent that bitterly, because I know my daughter better than anyone else. Homeschooling would not be best for her at this time, because of personal reasons that are none of anyone else's business. I'm going to start by talking to some of the other mothers that I know, and see if anyone else is unhappy with the way this school year is starting out. Depending on whether I get a positive or negative response, Mr. BTEG and I will have to think about things from there.

Should I have tried to fight Common Core when our school district first talked about implementing it? Perhaps. To be honest, I don't have any friends that are fellow moms here in my town. I thought about joining the local PTA long ago, but decided not to when I started getting spammed with email from the national PTA, telling me to vote for things I would never have any intention of supporting. Even the PTA is all politics, all the time, and that disgusted me and put me off the entire PTA idea. So I definitely didn't feel like trying to lead what seemed to me at the time a single-handed crusade against our school board and superintendent, who described Common Core in gushing terms. If I can find some parents that are unhappy about how this is working out in practice, instead of theory, maybe we can band together to get something done. Or as I said above, Mr. BTEG and I will have to take a serious look at the rest of the Dancer's high school years.

Compare and Contrast

I'm currently trying to get through a book called Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Life in Victorian England. I'm not sure why I'm not more interested in the book, except maybe because it is certainly very discouraging. Given the way that women were pushed aside, children were viewed as nuisances, and girl children were seen as household servants, in the author's examples, I'm surprised any ideas of anything resembling a modern, intact family survived until today. And this book features middle-class families, not the poor who were busy trying to survive, nor the rich who handed the children to nannies and embarked on affairs. Anyway, the book has made me think about my own role in my family, compared to the role of women then as this book puts forth.

In some ways, you see, my tasks as a stay-at-home mother are not very different from what the book describes as the expected tasks: nurturing the family, running the household, performing any chores one's family couldn't afford to pay another to perform, perhaps even teach the children. Of course, if you look at the stories related by those who grew up inside the Victorian homes described in the book, mothers did not always do the best job, judging by today's standards. Infants were viewed as vampires, feeding off of their mothers. Middle-class mothers preferred to be as ignorant as possible regarding the daily care of their children. Mothers, because of their own poor education, were hopeless at keeping the household books, and made poor teachers for their daughters, and their sons, before the boys left for school. Yikes!

One of the points made in the book, however, was how little time mothers had for themselves, once they finished all the duties they were expected to perform, well done or not. But really, how much free time do mothers have today, whether they stay at home or work outside the home? Precious little, from what most moms say. Even women who don't have children often lament, on places like Ravelry, that they do not have time enough to pursue their outside interests, such as knitting. I often feel like I don't have time myself to do the things that I want, not that I have to do. Of course, Mr. BTEG feels the same way, and I'm sure Victorian husbands often felt they did not enough free time either. I just find that bit interesting. There may be much to pity Victorian women for, but there are things that we hold in common.

Nostalgia For What Wasn't

I am going through some of our homeschooling books that didn't get a lot of use, so I can sell them. I remember all the plans I made and looking forward to using the books with the girls. I am sorry that my plans never really worked out. Oh, the girls did learn somehow, since they were able to transition into public school. But most of the plans I had didn't work out. The girls and I did have some nostalgic moments, however, going through some of their old work, especially the art work. Which is funny in a way because they don't do much creative art work on their own, but they did seem to enjoy what was assigned to them. So I'm thankful for what we did have, but still feeling a bit of nostalgia for what never was.

Bleak

Do you all of you out there know what reborn dolls are? They are mass-produced dolls that are redone using paint (down to tiny veins,) rooted hair, and appropriate stuffing or filling to imitate an actual newborn baby. Magnets can be used to give the baby a pacifier. It's not my thing, but then most people would probably think I was strange for collecting dolls at all, so there you are. But tonight on eBay was a first for me: a reborn baby vampire doll. Creepy! Not to mention, how do vampires have babies anyway? Besides that whole Twilight thing which is probably at fault for a lot of this current vampire craze anyway. I suppose some people would like the sweetness and innocence of a baby combined with the darkness of a vampire--or they want to pretend they have Edward Cullen's love child. It just seems a little too ghoulish for me.

Our culture seems to be ever more fascinated with death, darkness and things that go bump in the night. It may be more of an issue to me because of my illness. If I am not careful, I can get pulled into the abyss easier than most. But thinking of the idea of "the culture of death" that some have thrown around, due to the acceptance, and in some cases encouragement, of abortion and euthanasia, I wonder. Non-Christians have every right to collect a doll created after the Death Tarot card, or be drawn to gloominess and cemeteries. Am I overreacting to wonder if our culture can wonder too far down the path into darkness? What do you see in your world?

Then and Now

The Musician just asked me today if I thought that clinical depression has always been as prevalent as it seems to be now. Of course we can't be sure, but I opined that it has probably always been there at a level at least something close to modern levels. Famous people throughout history are now being diagnosed as having been clinically depressed based on their writings and actions. Abraham Lincoln, for example, showed signs of severe depression, even as a young man. In 1835, according to a biographer, he was so depressed after a death of someone close that he had people with him most of the time to make sure he did not harm or kill himself. But it was probably seen as more of a personality trait than a chemical issue at that time. I'm also thinking of people like the fictional "Mrs. Brewster," with whom Laura Ingalls Wilder boarded as a young teacher. She was definitely heavily depressed at the very least, very likely assisted by gloomy winter days and isolation.

In Julia P. Gelardi's book, Born to Rule, she writes about the behavior of Princess Beatrice, youngest daughter of Queen Victoria, after the death of Beatrice's husband. She would be "crying one moment, raging at a picture of her dead husband the next. After this, the despondent young widow went out to ride her bicycle in heavy mourning. Then she read a book on piety or talked for hours about the small economies being made on all the candles in her homes." Sounds very like bipolar mood swings, or some other mental disturbance.

Then today I also started re-reading Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side. And there is a description of famous fictional movie star Marina Gregg: "It's more that her ups and downs are so violent. You know - far too happy one moment, far too pleased with everything and delighted with everything and how wonderful she feels. Then of course some little thing happens and down she goes to the opposite extreme." In 1962, when the book came out, this was put down to "temperament." Today abnormal highs and lows are bipolar.

John Fixmer asserts in his online article that today Lincoln would very likely not be elected President due to a stigma of mental illness. I'll have to think about this for a while. My moods may fluctuate, but I am still as smart as I have ever been. I read about politics and economics, as well as history and light reading like Agatha Christie. My daughters are turning out to be decent people, based on compliments by others and not just by my biased maternal self. :) Still, stress can severely affect my mood, more than is normal, I think, and I try to avoid it as much as I can. I might want to avoid a press conference or meeting with a foreign leader if I was in a raging manic state. On the other hand, now that I am aware that I do have a chemical imbalance, and the world is not a horrible stinking rotten place even if I feel that it is, I have managed to be in public and not show what is churning inside. Maybe if I felt that leading a country was important enough, and I wanted to do it, being bipolar might not be an issue. I certainly try to control it to be a wife and mother, which I feel are far more important than being a national leader.

Work Smarter

Mr. BTEG is very good at getting new phones for free or at very low cost when it comes time to renew our cell phone contracts. Thus, every member of the Evil Genius family is now equipped with a smart phone. I am amazed at how much I love my new phone. There is so much to do on these crazy things! Right now, I especially love being able to read books on the phone, and the to-do list. I seem to function better when I have a concrete list set up. Maybe it helps me focus. I loved the Franklin Day Planner, but it got too expensive, and while a to-do list handwritten in a notebook is functional, I'm liking the smart phone route better. And one of the things I have on my to-do list is to blog. :)

Questioning

I am going to be posting on higher education, in regards to my family in particular, but as I was planning the post out in my mind, I took a side trip. I have always been disappointed in my college career. I wrote too much trying to explain, so let's just say I don't know why I went to the college I did, or took some of the courses that I did. However, when I get down to it, I always get back to the fact that I met my now-husband there, so I can't completely regret my college choice.

Which leads me to a point where I get theologically muddled: what was God's involvement in this? Dawn Eden, in her book, says that a man's wife is chosen for him by God. How does God plan things for us, however, which involve the actions of other people? How did my husband and I end up going to the same college, and both make friends with the same person who would eventually introduce us? I never felt a "call," or anything similar to go to the college I did. I went because they supposedly had a good program in a major my father pushed towards. I ended up not really being interested in that major, and not seeing the program as that good anyway. I completely fumbled my way through the whole higher education process. God knew all that would happen, since He is omniscient, but did he *direct* any of it? And if so, how?

Summer Reading

"When I was your age, television was called books."

The Evil Genius family is a family of voracious readers. The Dancer is cruising her way through the Lemony Snickett series currently. The Equestrienne has been going back and reading old favorites, but she also has three assigned books for her freshman Honors English class that she has to read this summer: A Separate Peace, Night and A Raisin in the Sun. I need to buy them for her soon! I am glad to see she is reading more classic literature than she got in her 8th grade English class. I myself read the first two books for school as well. Night was assigned while we were studying in Germany, and I got to hear Elie Wiesel speak at Kent State University, although honestly I don't remember much of it! I remember I did evaluate the speech for the public speaking class I was taking that quarter.

Cheryl did a post a while ago which made me think back to all of the classics that I have read for fun or self-enrichment. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Ivanhoe, All Quiet on the Western Front. I read translations of Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera after seeing the musicals. I have a tendency to do this; I read The Princess Bride and even 101 Dalmatians out of interest from the movies. Read The Neverending Story but haven't seen the whole movie. I'm sure once I end this post I will remember more classics I have read on my own.

I will have to come up with a new name for the Equestrienne, as she has lost interest in riding, at least for now. Can't come up with a better name than the High Schooler. Maybe I'll ask her for input.

Wonderland for the First Time

Due to the movie advertisements, the Dancer has actually begun reading the book, Alice in Wonderland. I'm glad she is reading this classic book, glad she reads for pleasure, glad that I put in all the work teaching her to read! I'm also happy in a special way that the book she is reading came from a book collection that we inherited from a dear friend. He was fond of our daughters and I think he would enjoy seeing her discover Wonderland for the first time.

Born to Rule

That's the title of the book I'm reading right now. It's about five women who had two things in common: they were all reigning consorts, and they were all granddaughters of Queen Victoria. The author explores their childhood relationships with their grandmother, which were generally positive, and their enduring love for England and things English, even if they also learned to love their new homelands.

One of the sad things the book covers is that even though four of these women especially did grow to truly love the land of their reign, they were seen by many in their adopted countries as alien and perhaps even a threat to the welfare of the country. The book brings up something I'd never thought of; not only did many royals marry foreign princes and princesses because of the aspect of royalty marrying royalty, but in those times there was competition among the aristocratic families, for power. Marrying into one specific noble house and giving that family extra influence in court was not a wise idea

Despite their wealth and position, you end up feeling sorry for all of these women. Three of them were cheated on, four saw their thrones lost, the Empress Alexandra and her immediate family were of course eventually assassinated, and all of them for their supposed power as queen/empress really lived very constricted lives. Do you see this as a trade-off for the privileges they did enjoy?

Book Review: I Trust When Dark My Road

A Lutheran view of depression, by Todd Peperkorn. I can't give this book the kind of review it probably deserves, since it is written from a pastor's point of view as well as a Lutheran one. He does make excellent points about a pastor's particular burdens that can exacerbate depression, even though I've never lived them. As a layperson who has dealt with depression, I think his descriptions of what depression does to your mind and body are very good at conveying the issues to someone who has never had clinical depression. Clinical depression is so much more than "feeling sad" and Pastor Peperkorn illustrates how this mental illness can take over your life, robbing you of your ability to appreciate the many blessings you have and your ability to enjoy and grow your most important relationships.

I wish I could have tried the two weeks away from duties and responsibilities that Pastor Peperkorn experienced. I ended up hospitalized as a last resort, not seeing any other alternatives. While it did help ease my overwhelming desire to end my life, and the new medication prescribed by the hospital psychiatrist has helped me manage my bipolar symptoms, it was largely mind-numbingly boring and in other ways difficult to live through.

Like Pastor Peperkorn, I received help from several great people during my recovery. I was blessed that my pastors knew that my mental struggles did not stem from a lack of faith, and that my place as a saved and loved child of God does not depend on my feelings, nor my ability to perfectly execute my vocation. Indeed, if one were to take a single thing away from I Trust When Dark My Road, I believe it should be that no matter how dark the road may seem, God is there providing for us. The intense suffering can go away, but God never will.

Books, Books, Books!

Mr. BTEG wanted to stop at the bookstore while we were out today to look for a particular book. The bookstore we visited had many books on sale, and they were also buy two, get the third free. We needed no further prompting to add some books to our home library. One of the books I picked up was Crocheting for Dummies. I would like to try to learn how to crochet at some point, and an extra reference book is always useful. We also picked up an American Girl Mystery Puzzles set. There are four puzzles, and you put the puzzles together to solve the mystery. The Dancer and I are looking forward to trying this out. Perhaps the Equestrienne will join us.

Our main purpose for going out was to get dance clothes and dance shoes for the Dancer. She needed new ballet slippers, new jazz shoes and some new dance wear. That stuff really adds up, but fortunately she doesn't need it all that often. She *really* loves dancing, though, so it's worth whatever we can do to help her.

Book Giveaway!

Principled Discovery is giving away a copy of Exploring Creation with Biology, Second Edition, by Apologia. It includes the Solutions and Tests. It retails $105 total, so I'd love to win it!

Holiday Wrap-Up

We had a gloriously happy Christmas. The Dancer got a new mp3 player, which her father set up beforehand with songs from the Disney triumvirate, High School Musical (1, 2 and 3), Hannah Montana, and the Cheetah Girls. There's even a video, London Tipton's "Yay Me!" You'd have to have a girl the right age to understand all of this. :) This morning we awoke to the Dancer in the living room warbling along to her favorite tunes.

The Dancer also got her American girl doll, at last. She even has earrings! The Equestrienne has two American Girl dolls, so we felt the Dancer had the right to at least one. This morning she has the doll's hair done up the same as hers.

The Equestrienne got a digital camera, but we gave that to her early, so she could take pictures at her birthday party. She also got the mitten gloves she wanted, with a matching hat.
The lobby of the hotel was all decorated for Christmas. For the little ones, there was story time in the lobby at night, which they do all year 'round, and it "snowed" in the lobby too. That was fun.


Our hotel room was very nice. We ended up with the "Kid Cabin". The girls had a separate sleeping area made to look like a log cabin. It had a bunk bed, a twin bed, their own television and a game controller, if you wanted to pay extra for games. I love the themed rooms; it adds to the whole "resort" feel.


Breakfast is especially good. It's an all-you-can-eat family style meal, with scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, pancakes and biscuits. There was also a toast station, an omelet station where a chef makes up your omelet according to your order, and a fruit and yogurt bar. Wish I could breakfast like that every morning!

Oh, and I got some mystery books and two chocolate boxes. The perfect gifts, no?

Free Catechism

I'm trying to go through and find new homes for things for which we no longer have use. I actually haven't had a special use for this catechism since I was in grade school. It is not the catechism I studied from for my confirmation, but one I acquired in about fourth grade at my Lutheran dayschool. It is a little different from other Lutheran catechisms because the Bible verses come from William Beck's An American Translation of the Bible. The pastor at the church associated with my school was a friend of Beck's and revised some of his work, so we used this version of the catechism and also the Bible. This catechism is copyrighted 1971 and was published in 1976. The pages are yellowed, some of the corners are a bit bent, and the pages are a little bit loose. My name (maiden:)) is written in the top left corner of the inside cover.

If anyone wants this catechism I will send it out media mail.

Points of Interest

Orson Scott Card, sci-fi god, wants to have a Constitutional convention and sees homeschooling as a way to get around government subversion. Apparently it's rocking the world of sci-fi geeks. He also asks, Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn on the Lights?

Return to Narnia

Via The Common Room, I see that the trailer for the movie Prince Caspian, sequel to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is now up. Although definitely not for purists, it looks like it will be a good film, that my daughters will enjoy. They liked the first movie well enough, although they are not Narnia crazy like their mother. I read the Narnia books over and over, and I wanted to *live* in Narnia. Or at least visit. Which is funny, really, because I'm not a person who likes the out-of-doors much, where most of the action takes place in the books. Not that I don't find Nature beautiful, and enjoy reading well-written depictions of things in Nature, but a lot of the time I'd personally just as soon be indoors. Just who I am, I suppose. Maybe I just liked the adventures.

Be warned, the trailer took a while to view properly, even with cable internet.

I Don't Think So

It's bad enough that parents who have their children in public schools may have to have them tutored to help them understand the material, or tutor them themselves. It's sad that some parents are afterschooling, teaching them what they want them to learn outside of school, like art or music, or even afterschooling to cover gaps in the public schools learning curriculum. Now it's cool for a teacher to assign parents to read what their children are reading in high school, and have the parents comment on it? Um, no. Read about it here; use Bugmenot if you don't want to create a log-in yourself.

This is not to say I don't read things myself. As a matter of fact, in some areas I feel I've given myself a better education than even college gave me. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Buccaneers for leisure reading, just for examples. But if I'm going to, or have to, go to the trouble to read everything my child reads and discuss it with her and comment on it, I might as well just teach her myself. I can tell you there wouldn't be any "hip-hop poetry" in my dream high school curriculum. And “I take it as giving back to the teacher what he is apparently giving to our kids, a lot of attention and a lot of requirements.” Um, wouldn't that be called "doing his job"? Maybe not.

Via kitchen table math, the sequel.

Chaste Thoughts

Since I've blogged here before about Dawn Eden and her book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On, I'm going to pass on to you this article that looks at women from both sides of the chastity spectrum, from a virgin who is saving herself for marriage, to a woman who claims to have had sex with around 180 men! A lot of the points Dawn makes in her book are brought up here, such as how women generally have a hard time detaching sex from emotion, how parental dysfunction can lead to promiscuity by their children, how having sex outside of marriage can actually derail a relationship. I also wonder if the abortion, which one of the women profiled had, was a further factor in her increased promiscuity, where she was shocked to realize that she had been with 90 different men. I find it interesting that the woman who is saving herself for marriage is quick to stress that she is not doing so for religious reasons, and the woman who has been with only two men and was brought up in a Christian household is emphatic that her parents were not strict. The stereotype still persists that people of religious faith, and specifically Christians, practicing chastity, are strict, no-fun types. Dawn sees herself, as a single woman living the chaste life, as someone who is developing her gifts, taking joy in everything life has to offer, and being a rebel against the current culture. She tries to define her life by what she has, instead of what she does not have. A good way to look at things, wherever you are in life.