Science as an Emperical Activity

Science is an emperical activity. One does an experiment and sees how things work. Prehistory can not de facto be emperical. We can hypothesize but we need to be very careful about stating things as factual when we simply can not know. That is the point of my post, not the actual numbers cited to the student. The point was they were installed as accepted facts which they are not. One can say, "We believe such and such..." but not "Such and such happened" when such things cannot be verified emperically, even if a pope is "on your side".

The Tutor's Questions

At the library I overhear a tutor feeding questions to a high school student. The questions were worth noting as having a worldview hidden in them. For instance, instead of the neutral question: "How old is the earth?", or better, "Can we know the age of the earth?", the question was on the order of "What reptiles were roaming the earth 7.2 billion years ago?" Another: "Among our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon ancestors what primates resisted the evolutionary branch to remain as they were?" or, "After the cataclysm clash of continents eleven billion years ago which of our ancestral primates crossed the road bridges to bring about the diversities in human typology that we see today?" These questions possessed chronological and anthropological background assumptions that were, in fact, mere theory and conjecture. Thus the student was made an uncritical Darwinist without his knowing it.

The Two Snapping Turtles

You never know when you enter the sanctuary of the woods what you will encounter. Today it was two snapping turtles. The one breast-stroked from one end of Hawthorn Pond to the other at the edge of the marsh grass in the still black water. When they were close enough...well let's just say it was quite a quick courtship.

The Advent of April Rain

With the advent of April rain the chlorophyll has climaxed and green has erupted on rose stems, grass, honeysuckle, the precocious maples. How beautiful the dead earth when its gray goes green and the lifeless limbs leaf out. Each year I can't help but be astonished. If we hadn't seen this repeated every spring wouldn't we be incredulous if someone were to whisper this possibility of resuscitation of life arising from the white wasteland of winter?

Today in the Woods

Today in the woods. A hawk being pestered by a crow, a honeybee, a white-throated sparrow pecking about in the maze of green rose stems, the whistle of a titmouse lost somewhere in the gray trees, two married mallards descending to a swoosh on the water.

One of the Great Strengths of My Dad

One of the great strengths of my dad was his unwillingness to be a man of the times, a man that was swayed by fashion. It didn't matter so much that the idea was old but that it was true. He was stubborn for truth that way. I really believe he had the strength of mind to withstand a novelty even if the whole world believed it as long as he held that it was contrary to the truth, the truth that for him did not lose its luster just because of age. I like to think I have just a little of this solidity. In my father there was a lot of the boy in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes". He would tell the emperor what so many were afraid to.

Dad, may you rest in the peace of Christ. Requiescat in pace Christi. 15 April 2019

Woman's Work

The point is that these "menial" tasks are done for the love of home. Chesterton says it beautifully in his "Emancipation of Domesticity" in which he says that the feminists coining of the work in the home as "drudgery" is something difficult to understand because the work is not dull and lifeless when done with love. Chesterton goes on to say that the women drudges in the home as a man drudges at the Cathedral of Armiens or at the Guns of Trafalgar. We have unfortunately been so conditioned by feminist ideology that even these tasks in the home are "demeaning". Are they? I think in the end we will find out when done with love they outshine all the "glorious" positions in the world. Would pictures of women cleaning their cubicles in a sterile corporation or fighting hand to hand combat in a foxhole, or underneath a car fixing an oxygen sensor be any more glamorous? Maybe in this new era of vacant homes we could put these new images up and they would be accepted more readily?

Even I Must Stick Up For Joe

Not that I am a fan of Joe Biden's. Oh, not because of his person but because of his politics. That being said, I have to wonder at all this hyperbolic hysteria coming from the ME TOO Females. Weren't these Helen Redy "I Am Woman Hear Me Roar" lionesses? What happened that these liberated roaring women have become such whining wimps? I don't believe this was in the Feminist Catechism. Wasn't it rather that women can take care of themselves? Wasn't it that they could be equally vulgar to the vulgarity of men? That they could just as well be exiles that would leave the imprisoning home to the freeing workplace? That they could spit and punch and go on a racy rant as well as the next guy? So why now the hysteria just because a good old Joe wanted to investigate the shampoo residue of a woman's hair? In the old days the traditional lady might have pushed the man away or even last resort slapped the man's face and that would be it. But I suspect it is rather the socialist catechism being consulted which has found witch hunts to be quite successful ways of engineering the Brave New Offended World?