Writing Concept: The Crucible

What I find interesting in a conflict has less to do with the conflict and more to do with the nature of the crucible. In chemistry, a crucible is a container for materials that are subjected to heat until they melt or react. In story development, the crucible is the situation that holds the characters in place while they experience conflict. A key quality of a chemical crucible is that it must be able to withstand the temperatures being applied; a crucible of, say, copper would suffice to melt wax, but a wax crucible would fail at enabling the melting of copper. Likewise, a dramatic crucible must be strong enough to withstand the heat and pressure of the conflict and plot.

Conflicts I find interesting involve criminals acting against security forces: burglars tackling a locked vault and video cameras; saboteurs bypassing the night watchmen; assassins taking down the body guards. Another type of conflict is long-term survival against imminent and ongoing dangers: survivors of a zombie apocalypse; castaways without rescue in an untamed wilderness; colonists on alien worlds.

In the former case, the crucible is an assumed set of values. Both the criminal and the security agree that the protected person, place, or thing is of sufficient value to warrant defense. Both sides accept that mere social conditioning is insufficient grounds for the safekeeping of the valuables (the thief doesn't care that stealing is considered wrong, and the security team admits that merely hanging a sign that says, "Stealing is Wrong" would be inadequate). These two conditions are enough to set the criminal and security against each other in a fight that may be balanced or unbalanced on multiple fronts and to varying degrees.

To the extent that the valuables are not worth protecting, or are not regarded by the characters as worth protecting, the crucible fails. To the extent that taboo is a strong deterrent to attack, the crucible fails.

In the latter case, isolation is what matters. The survivors can have no meaningful backup: no cavalry, no rescue team, no supply lines. (They may carry a cache of resources, they may have numbers and skills, but these are not the same thing as having active support.) Mutually exclusive claims on finite, survival-focused resources are important, in both the long- and short- terms. These conditions will set the survivors and their threat at odds. Either side may have, get, or lose the upper hand one or more times over the course of the conflict.

To the extent that the survivors are not isolated, or they refuse to accept their isolation, the crucible fails. To the extent that the resources are not finite, the crucible fails. To the extent that the resources can be done without by either side, the crucible fails.

A significant factor in the design of a good crucible is that neither side of the conflict can escape the crucible. To the extent that the characters can walk away from their situation, the crucible fails.

Conflicts I find dull: romantic relationship strife; family squabbles; friendship betrayals; office politics. The crucibles in these situations are made up of taboos and built on social conditioning. When I encounter a conflict of this type, my initial question is: "Why don't they just leave?" End the relationship, walk away from the family, stop calling the friend, disengage from the job. Find somewhere else to be, alone or with some other people.

To the extent that leaving is difficult, there is a crucible. What's so hard? Finances? People get entry-level jobs for low wages all the time. They aren't fun, and the life they afford isn't great, but it's possible. Assuming any capabilities above the minimal on the part of the character, this fate can be avoided in favor of better circumstances. Social support? People make new friends all the time. Unless the character is so backward or introverted that friends are made once in a lifetime, this is not a major obstacle. (And even so, such a character should be well along the way to being able to go on without a social network.)

And this means that any such interpersonal drama story is merely the lead-in to a survival story, as far as I'm concerned. Leave the relationship, enter a new crucible: survive in a hostile world. Can't get a job? Ostracized by friends and family? Reputation among even strangers is ruined? Isolated, with mutually exclusive access to finite survival-based resources.

Trying to avoid getting into that horrible crucible? That's a crucible based on fear. So the characters are yoked in conflict because leaving their relationship, family, friend, or office is scary. To stay in the conflict is to change (accept the circumstances), suffer (withstand the circumstances), or fight (make the circumstances change). At least one of these options must be easier to face than the scariness outside of the crucible.

To the extent that leaving is not scary, this crucible fails.

Me and My Abdominal Mesh

In the last few years, I've had three surgeries. The first saved my life: my intestine ruptured, and the surgeons hooked me up with a colostomy. The second was meant to improve the quality of my life: a new team of surgeons removed the colostomy and reconnected my innards. And the last saved my life, if less urgently than the first: I'd developed five hernias in the abdomen, and a fresh team of surgeons installed an abdominal mesh.

This mesh surgery was a huge deal. It put me out of commission for six months, during which I couldn't lift, push, or pull ten pounds. As an urban nomad, I need the capacity to carry gear. My backpack is around twenty-five pounds. It has my laptop, headphones, paper, pens, and coffee mug. I'll carry a bottle of water, a handful of quarters, a Kindle, and sundries. (And, of course, my towel.) As a massage therapist, I need the ability to move a table, reposition a body, and output a significant amount of pressure. As a masochist, during a scene, I'll react to being hurt by yanking on restraints and clenching my muscles, and that by more than would be needed to move ten pounds.

So I hung around in one place for days on end, rather than being mobile. My friends were lifesavers: they'd show up, carry my gear for me, and deliver me to my next location every few days. But no matter how nice the place is, after a day or so, I don't want to be there. I want to get up and go. I want to get on a train or a bus, hit a coffee shop or diner, and walk about. I want to camp at a cafe with my computer for few hours. I want to move on a whim.

For six months, I didn't get any exercise to speak of. I'd been accustomed to working out a few times a week. Last year, I ran the Run For Your Lives 5k obstacle course. I want to do it again, and do it better. Alas, there was no running for half a year. And now there's six months' worth of atrophy to cope with, along with the mesh.

My mesh is roughly the size of a piece of paper. It covers the whole of my abdomen, and the surgeon says he stitched it in place with an additional inch of overlap with the surrounding tissues. This made the mesh larger, but it provides more strength. As a mesh, the sheet has myriad holes in it where my flesh was meant to grow. Forget the stitches: in an ideal universe, my mesh is held in place by scar tissue. In order for my intestines to herniate again, they'd need to be armed with buzz saws.

I'm allowed to work and carry things now, and I can gradually get back to workouts. My friends helped me to find a yoga instructor who has the same abdominal mesh that I have. If he can teach yoga, I can do yoga. And I can get stronger, and I can run. The next Run For Your Lives within reach is in September. Can I make that? I'll try. Otherwise, there's next summer.

And I'm carrying my backpack, moving massage tables, and working on clients. I've been to the dungeon. My stamina started off low, but I've regained some of it already. I keep pushing, so I'll get more. I have my life back, and my mesh is doing its job. Really, what else could I ask for?

Kink Aware Professional

I've just had my profile approved at the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom's section for Kink Aware Professionals!

The premise of the NCSF is simple. From their mission statement: "The NCSF is committed to creating a political, legal and social environment in the US that advances equal rights for consenting adults who engage in alternative sexual and relationship expressions."

I'm one of those people. I'm a masochist at a bdsm club, and this is not a secret. My friends know, my family knows, and my coworkers know. All of my private clients know, and a decent number of clients from the health club know. I don't think that I've suffered negative consequences from being open, but I'm in a privileged position. I don't own anything that can be taken from me. I'll never aim to take out a large loan or mortgage. I'm single, have no children, and none of my relationships have legal attachments. I'm not good relationship material, certainly not for marriage and parenting. So nobody can hurt my lifestyle or prospects because they think being a masochist is immoral.

Have I lost clients? Maybe, but nobody has stormed out on me because I freaked them out. If anyone has steered clear of me, or warned others off from seeing me, I've not heard about it. I still keep busy with clients.

Have I lost friends? Not that I can remember. Been cut off from family? I've kept my distance from my family since long before I felt the bite of a whip. I can't say whether my family would have cut me out of their lives otherwise.

Others in my community are not so fortunate. They have families they love, but who might well cast them out for being different. This may even include spouses and children. If anyone learned about something as innocuous as cross-dressing, the cross-dresser could lose a job, a marriage, custody of kids, visitation rights, and so on.

People on the fringe are like everyone else. They need professional services. Lawyers and doctors aren't even the least of it. Imagine you need work done on your house, but your house includes a dungeon. Or you need a massage, but you're into scarification. Finding the right professional is hard enough under normal circumstances. Do you want to run the risk of being outed by reaching out to the wrong contractor? Do you need to have somebody dump their moral outrage on you, when you're already suffering tension?

So check out the Kink Aware Professionals. We're here to do our jobs, not to cast judgment.

I'm Back!

My backpack weighs twenty-two pounds today, and today is the first time I've been allowed to carry it in six months. Six months ago, I had surgery to install an abdominal mesh to correct numerous hernias, and this left me with a ten-pound restriction on what I could carry. My laptop and its adapter were over that limit by themselves.

I'm an urban nomad. I rent a room in some friends' apartment, and I'm rarely there. Perhaps twice a week I sleep there, and I'm apt to pass through now and again to swap out some gear I'm carrying. I'll stay at other friends' places other nights, and I'm prone to not sleeping at all some days. But to make this work for me, I must have my backpack: the laptop and its adapter; my Kindle, headphones, and notepad; coffee mug, water bottle, painkillers; and, of course, a towel. It weighs in at twenty or twenty-five pounds, give or take a few.

The last six months have been depressing. Yes, I'm alive. My friends took great care of me. But being stuck in one place for days on end, not having the ability to carry my gear, is for me the rough equivalent of forcing the average homeowner to live out of a suitcase in a hotel for half a year.

I'm at a coffee shop today. I carried my backpack here, and I'll carry it away when I leave. Tonight is also the first time I'll lay hands on a massage client in six months, which will give me two-thirds of my life back. And Friday, with great care, I'll have my first bdsm scene since before surgery.

It's nice to be back!

Your Religion is False

Yes, yours.

No, which one it is doesn't matter.

Well, fine. If yours is one that somehow lacks any assertion that supernatural forces are real, you might be onto something.

There's nothing supernatural. It doesn't exist. It isn't real.

You disagree with me? Lovely! Please build an argument to prove that I'm wrong.

I'll wait here.

From "Not Writing" to "Writing"

The writers' workshop started up once more, and we've been doing some basic exercises. I've failed at the first requirement so far: write a single scene to 300 words. My pieces have been 1,000 to 1,200 words so far, and they've been a few scenes each. (For this exercise, a single dramatic transition is all that's required to make a scene.)

What's a single transition? Seated to standing might qualify. Employed to unemployed. Angry to peaceful. Conscious to unconscious, standing ready to actively fighting, carefree to on alert. Obviously, any given action undertaken can represent a transition: somebody who has been silent so far in the story, who then says something, has transition from quiet to talking.

So what makes the transition dramatic? I'm going with the stakes. Standing from a seated position might not sound like much, unless it's the culmination of a public event wherein supporters of a controversial position are demanded to rise from their chairs. That moment takes some setup, because the dramatic shift is from lurking to advocacy; otherwise, getting up doesn't carry obvious, intrinsic stakes. Whereas being knocked unconscious is the kind of transition most people aim to avoid, so that the only real setup required is for verisimilitude.

Today's work included making some "from and to" lists. The first was just a bunch of conditions a character might have. The second was emotional states. The last was actions. I evaluated my lists, and I thought: "The first are mostly things visited upon characters by forces outside their control. Healthy to sick, young to old, alive to dead. The second are similar: people don't get to choose their emotions. At best, we can take deliberate actions to shape our environment so that we only experience a limited range of emotional triggers. Otherwise, our emotions just happen, and we get to respond to them. The last list, the actions, are transitions a character can implement by choice."

Then I thought: "Why do I want to dismiss transitions that the character can't control?"

Because that was the tone of my thinking. Writing a story about a character undergoing a transition holds less appeal than a story about a character who chooses a transition. More to the point: I'm actively disinterested in composing stories about characters who are victims of such outside forces. But experience has shown that I need to acknowledge, then move beyond, this kind of reluctance. It's the only way to produce a story anybody will want to read.

I undertook an example:

Dude is homeless in a small town. He wanders the streets until he finds an unoccupied mobile home. He finds the door is unlocked, and the place appears to be disused. He hauls himself inside and is sheltered.

How'd he get to be homeless? I edited:

Dude worked in an office until the company folded, then he stopped working. He started job hunting. He had an apartment, then he was evicted. He carried out his stuff, and he wandered the small town. He was homeless and unemployed this way until he found a derelict mobile home. He hauled himself inside to live while he continued his job hunt.

Things happened to him (unemployment was a force beyond his control), he responded (job hunting). A failure to find a job may have been beyond his control, and better options than eviction may have been beyond his reach. Etc. But the transitions I extracted from the example were lacking the emotional component, so I took another stab at it:

Dude worked in an office, which was boring in itself but gave him plenty of good times with his co-workers. They joked, they griped, they lunched. Then the company folded, and he was unemployed. Almost everyone was: some stayed on with the company to close it down, others joined the new company, but most staff were out. They griped, they worried, they cajoled each other. They hunted, they networked, they struggled. Some found work, but Dude didn't.

Dude felt worthless, because he couldn't get work. Dude felt anxious, because he couldn't support himself without a job. Dude felt embarrassed, because he should have been able to find work easily. Dude quietly despaired until he was evicted from his apartment, then he coped: he gathered up all his stuff, whatever he could pack and carry, and he got rid of what he could for cash.

Then he wandered the small town, searching for accommodations. He felt ruggedly optimistic: there was nowhere to go but up, now. What was worse than homeless and unemployed? Drug addled. Mentally ill. Hunted. He was none of these, and he wouldn't become one of these. He would find somewhere to live, and he would find some way to continue the job hunt, and he would secure some kind of employment.

He searched for somewhere to live, and he found a derelict mobile home. It wasn't exactly what he wanted, but it was serviceable. He hauled himself into it. It looked bad, it smelled bad, and it probably was bad. But he could improve it, and it wouldn't be bad, and it would be free. A hard working Dude could do okay with it, and he was a hard working Dude. So he worked hard to improve his new home, only a little apprehensive along the way that somewhere, somebody really owned this thing and this place, and someday might roust him from it. But he needed it, and that person (whoever it was) wasn't there now, so he would address that future problem when it was present. He felt guardedly optimistic as he cleaned up and resumed his job hunt.

It got a lot longer, and it clearly fails my original assignment for having too many transitions. Just picking a little bit at the start to work with:

Dude worked in an office. He had a good time with his coworkers: they joked and griped at lunch. Then the company folded, and all of them were unemployed. Dude felt anxious, because he couldn't support himself without a job.

Entertained to anxious; employed to unemployed. One event, one transition. And I can probably write it in ~300 words.

(Another part of my assignment is that I'm not supposed to outline my scenes. This doesn't qualify as outlining; this was analysis.)

Errors of Fact: Part One (Edit: ...of One)

About this post:

It's the first part of a few. My sister-in-law, Laura, linked to an article on her Facebook page. I said the article was chock full of errors. One of her friends wanted to see my reasoning, and so did she. I agreed to write an essay showing my work.

The article I objected to is: http://www.businessinsider.com/time-to-admit-it-the-church-has-always-been-right-on-birth-control-2012-2

UPDATE: My sister-in-law and her friend didn't appreciate my critique, as it happens. They abandoned the field, and I was later asked to leave all of them alone. I complied. There was no need to finish the critique.

===

To Begin:



Quoting Sentence #1: "Painting the Catholic Church as "out of touch" is like shooting fish in a barrel, what with the funny hats and gilded churches."

This is wrong in two ways, one more subtle than the other. I'll address the blunt one first.

Yes, the Catholic Church can be easily shown as "out of touch." But this has nothing to do with funny hats and gilded churchs, so the position put forth is not entirely accurate. To demonstrate (with links and references) that the Catholic Church is out of touch...

In common usage, being "in touch" is to be aware of the concerns and values of modern society. I might show that I'm in touch with high school students of a given area by knowing their popular music, movies, and books. I might know what is considered fashionable dress by the culture at large, and how the local culture aspires to match it or reacts against it.

Want a reference? To be "out of touch," according to the Cambridge Dictionary of American English (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-english/out-of-touch?q=out+of+touch) is to be "not informed or not having the same ideas as most people about something, so that you make mistakes."

Who is the Catholic Church in touch with? There are, I think, three distinct groups of people to consider. One: its own congregation. Two: non-Catholic Christians. Three: non-Christians.

Is the Catholic Church in touch with the values and concerns of its own congregation? No, it is not. First up: values.

This article was a response to an earlier editorial, in which the editor provided links to some appropriate studies. The studies reveal that an overwhelming majority of Catholic women use contraception. The Catholic Bishops who retorted against this study did not dispute this fact.

If 98% of Catholic women (who presumably can't be unaware that the Church officially opposes contraception) use it anyway, they are clearly valuing contraception over doctrine.

Second up: Concerns.

Why do women use contraception? According to this article, the only concern of note for the use of contraceptives is to prevent pregnancy from sexual intercourse. This is not the only concern addressed by the use of contraceptives, however.

According to this study (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/Beyond-Birth-Control.pdf), using data from the 2006-2007 National Survey of Family Growth, 18% of all women in the US between the ages of 15 and 44 use birth control pills. That's over 11 million women. 14% of these birth control pill users *do not take the pill to avoid pregnancy*.

Why does a woman take a birth control pill other than to avoid pregnancy? The list of reasons includes reducing menstrual pain, treating excessive menstrual bleeding, alleviating pelvic pain, and preventing migraines.

If 98% of Catholic women are taking the pill, and 14% of pill users are not even trying to avoid pregnancy (9% of users reported not being sexually active in the previous three months!), then some significant number of Catholic women have concerns *above and beyond avoiding baby-making*.

The Church is not in touch with its own congregation's values and concerns, and this has nothing to do with funny hats or gilded churches.

Is the Catholic Church in touch with the values and concerns of non-Catholic Christians? Is it in touch with non-Christian values and concerns? Even less so than with its own congregation, pretty much by definition. To the extent that the Church is knowledgeable (demonstrably minimal: see previous paragraphs) about the values and concerns of non-Catholics, it is often opposed to such values and concerns.

I can see one counter-argument to my stance above. "In the Catholic Church, the rules are dictated by the Pope and followed by the congregation, not the other way around. 98% of Catholic women are obviously sinning."

But a careful reading of my argument would show that this non-democratic organizational structure is not relevant to my point. The Pope can issue edicts to people while being in touch with them or while being out of touch with them, obviously. Whether he knows or cares about the congregation's thoughts and feelings is immaterial to his passing down the will of Yahweh. The article writer said merely that the Church can be painted as out of touch, and this much is demonstrably true.

Which leads me to the subtle way in which this sentence is wrong. The article writer attempts to suggest here, and will elaborate on this point later, that the only reason anybody thinks the Catholic Church is out of touch is because it has quaint rituals, weird garments, and odd notions about interior decoration. This is wrong.

I actually believe that official garments and rituals are able to hold positive value (they do not always do so, but they are able). That the Catholic Church continues to have its hats and to gild its churches is part of what keeps it and its congregations in touch at all, to the extent that it is. Witness the existence of "Cultural Catholics," who do not believe (in whole or in part) in the doctrines, but who are so steeped in the culture of Catholicism that they continue to identify with the religion.

There are many, many reasons I believe that the Catholic Church is out of touch with its congregation, with non-Catholic Christians, and everybody else. I cannot resist the obvious one: Catholic priests who were proven guilty of raping children in their care, who were known by their superiors to be guilty, and who were given shelter by the Church. I do not doubt that the majority of Catholics think raping children is wrong, and there's strong evidence that most everybody else thinks it's wrong, so that the Church's stance, behavior, and declarations show it to be horribly out of touch.

Links for this? The documentary "Deliver Us from Evil" (http://www.deliverusfromevilthemovie.com/) exposes this in excruciating detail.

Another one: Cardinal Egan, who apologized ten years ago for the Church's behavior, recanted his own apology in this interview. (http://www.connecticutmag.com/Connecticut-Magazine/Web-Exclusive-Content/February-2012/Egan-Ten-Years-After/)

Quoting Sentence #2: "And nothing makes it easier than the Church's stance against contraception."

I think I just did this one, didn't I? All manner of things about the Church's behavior makes it easy to paint the Church as out of touch, not just the funny hats, and not just its stance against contraception.

Quoting Sentences #3-4: "Many people, (including our editor) are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn't just ditch this requirement. They note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it divisive, or "out-dated."

Actually true. This is what the original article observes.

Quoting Sentences #5-7: "C'mon! It's the 21st century, they say! Don't they SEE that it's STUPID, they scream."

The editorial doesn't say this, nor does it scream this. The caricature of a modern American gaping in astonishment at the Catholic Church is not in evidence in the editorial, nor (as far as I read) in the comments to that editorial.

To be fair, I can easily imagine real people saying these words. Screaming them, in fact, in exactly the tone the article writer suggests. But to suggest that the caricature was in print, and that this article is responding to an hysterical and/or flippant editor, is false.

Now we get meatier.

Quoting Sentence #8: "Here's the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization."

Oldest? Kidding, right?

Has this article writer ever heard of Judaism? You know: the organized religion that predates Christianity by definition? The organized religion that still exists, despite many efforts to stamp it out?

Hinduism and Buddhism, still major religions, are also significantly older than Catholicism. But I can barely think of them, blinded as I am by the author overlooking the Jews. You know, the religion Jesus was born to.

Biggest? By what measure? We can go by population...

The 2011 Pontifical Yearbook claims 1.181 billion in its congregation as of 2009. That's worldwide, in a world with a shade over 7 billion. Not small, by any means. But India has 1.2 billion. China, 1.3 billion.

Or are countries not "organizations" all of a sudden?

Are we looking for the combination of oldest and biggest, together? I'll still give it to China: older than Catholicism by a fair piece, and bigger.

Quoting Sentence #9: "It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets."

Did Catholicism bury the Romans? Really?

What aspects of Rome's economic collapse was due to Catholicism? The Romans ran into trouble when their currency was debased. (The pay to a soldier more than tripled as the silver content of their coins was continually reduced by the emporers.) An inability to buy food and pay its soldiers led to a weakened army to stand a longer border against a lot of angry, warlike people who (eventually) sacked Rome.

Catholicism buried the Soviet Union? That wasn't an economic problem, either?

Or does the author of this piece mean "bury" as in "I was still standing after they fell, so I'm just tidying up all the dead bodies so they don't rot in the sun?"

Because if that's true, then the Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and China *also* buried Rome and the Soviet Union. And they are arguably older and/or bigger, too, depending on where you draw the line.

Quoting sentence #10: "It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor."

Nearly true, but he had to use the word "literally" in there, which means it's false. ("Literally" means "by precise definition," right?) There are places where the Good Word has not been heard, so it's not literally all over the world. And there are areas of human endeavor untouched by Catholicism (or is the Pope informing, say, MIT's research into Artificial Intelligence and advanced robotics in some way?).

Unless the author meant to say that Catholics are almost everywhere, and thereby Catholicism touches almost everything...then I'd have a rougher argument to make. But he didn't say that, did he? He *literally* said something that is *literally* wrong.

Sentence #11: "It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard."

We're going to have an argument over semantics on this one, aren't we? Let's define greatness in areas of thought, and see how Saint Augustine compares to Galileo (meant: Newton).

Or let's not. I mean, Newton (originally wrote Galileo; I feel like a moron now) invented a whole branch of mathematics (calculus) in order to resolve some discrepancies in the then-current understanding of planetary orbits. *He invented calculus.* Augustine worked to integrate Greek philosophy with Judeo-Christian religion.

Maybe by "greatest thinkers" the author meant to say "most influential thinkers." If so, then I'd only have sundry other religious prophets to hold up against Catholicism's best and brightest. For every Augustine, I can find a Dignaga. (He was fleshing out principles of logic and cognition ~500AD.)

If you're not aware of Dignaga, and thus decide that he's not as influential as somebody you've heard of, then let me say that I hadn't ever heard of Rene Girard. I had to look him up. His work seems to involve a lot of theology. Maybe that's going to give him influence, but not greatness. Against him, I put up Neil deGrasse Tyson. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson)

But the author didn't say influential, he said great. And I disagree with his notions of greatness, and who he holds up as great. So I'll call him wrong, and you can feel free to disagree with me.

Sentence #12: "When it does things, it usually has a good reason."

This author must be operating with some greater source of inside knowlege than I possess. What are the good reasons it has for all the evil things it's done? (I know, not everything the Catholic Church has ever done is evil. But your author says "usually has a good reason," and I just can follow his reasoning.)

Pope Leo IX presumably had a good reason for leading an army into battle himself, which would require killing people. And not killing infidels: killing the Christians among the Normans, who didn't really want to fight against their own Pope, and who sued for peace. The Pope, now regarded as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, *lead an army into war* *in person* *against Christians* *who sued for peace*.

Maybe we could do a detailed tally of all the things the Catholic Church has done, and maybe we'd find some smidgen greater than 50% were motivated by good reasons...but you'll have to convince me.

Sentence #13: "Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages."

Returning to an earlier theme: this is not what the first article said. It's not even what I and many other abrasive atheists and anti-theists say. He's wrong. He's arguing against things that nobody said, at a minimum, and it looks to me like he's misrepresenting other people when he does it.

Sentence #14: "So, what's going on?"

I've got nothing to say for or against this line.

Sentence #15: "The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together."

Maybe the Church does teach that, except...

Sentence #16: "That's it."

...oh, he means to say that this is *all* that the Church is teaching. I see! Then, he's wrong.

They go on to teach that any separation of any two or more of those elements is wrong, which isn't logically required *even if the whole belonging together argument were valid* (which, as we'll get it, it isn't).

Sentence #17: "But it's pretty important."

He says something wrong, and he asserts that it's important. I disgree, and not with as much respect as you might like.

Sentence #18: "And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today."

This is the firework line for me. This author is saying that the Catholic Church, which didn't even get really rolling as an institution until a few centuries into the AD, has been teaching this thing consistently for 2,000 years?

It's not even acceptable on the grounds of being hyperbole.

It's flat-out wrong.

Indefensibly wrong. There is not a shred of evidence that the Catholic Church taught this in, say, 1000AD. Or 500AD.

It's a very recent phenomenon that the Church got involved in marriage at all.

Try this reference: Karen Armstrong, "Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West," which points out that celibacy was more important to early Christians than getting married and having babies. *They were convinced the world was going to end in their lifetimes!*

Catholicism inherited celibacy before marriage from this blinkered worldview, and it cobbled together a notion of marriage that meshed much later with European (and, later, American) culture.

That should be sufficient to prove that the Catholic Church has not, by any stretch of evidence, been teaching this line of garbage for anything like 2,000 years. You might desperately want to think it has, but it hasn't. That's flat-out wrong.

Sentence #19-22: "Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae.  He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

    General lowering of moral standards
    A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
    The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
    Government coercion in reproductive matters."

This is true only on its face. The Catholic Church has that document with that injunction, and those words appear in it, as far as I can tell.

That the Pope was wrong in his warning is not the author's fault.

Sentence #23: "Does that sound familiar?"

No comment.

Sentence #24: "Because it sure sounds like what's been happening for the past 40 years."

What?

It doesn't sound that way to me. It sounds to me like the exact opposite.

Reference: http://reason.com/archives/2008/11/24/are-you-better-off-than-you-we

Quote: "Looking at the whole social picture, it’s hard to tell blacks, Jews, gays, and women that they are less free today than they were in 1968. As a woman, I can enter and leave the work world freely, whether I have kids or not. I can get an abortion, file for divorce, enter into a lesbian relationship, marry a black guy, or have several lovers, all without worrying about legal consequences (or being drummed out of polite society). While some restrictions persist, the breakdown of social barriers, many of them formerly enforced by government edict, has done much to increase my freedom and that of other once-restricted groups."

A woman can *leave her husband* and *have a career*, both of which mean a woman has the option to be more than an "object to satisfy men."

Is that a consequence of birth control? Absolutely.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1983884,00.html

Is that a bad consequence? If you're the Pope, head of a powerful organization that hasn't demonstrated that it's looking out for women's rights, it is.

So, the Pope is wrong. And the author of this article is wrong to side with him and his ideas.

   - emc

More to come.