Monday, March 05, 2012

The meaning of Words



It is a bit Orwellian, like 1984, or the nightmare of Alice in Wonderland, deeply disturbing story.
What I find deeply disturbing is the trend to develop a "Ministry of Words"; the government deciding words mean, or rather redefining them. Will we soon have government issued dictionaries?

Rightly does Cardinal O'Brien call it madness!

Now it seems that marriage can be whatever a Government decides it is, what word do we use to define that relationship between of two persons of the opposite sex (which seems pretty essential) that is ordered to providing a stable environment for the procreation of children and upbringing of children?
This is a serious question because in redefinition of marriage children are going to be removed from its meaning.

I mean, we might need to distinguish that from a relationship that is merely about expressing lifelong(?) commitment(?) in an exclusive(?) relationship between two(?) persons(?).

The other thing we have redefined it seems is abortion, now some bright sparks are talking about "post natal abortion", now that abortion has become acceptable. At one time it might have been plainly called murder or infanticide but I am rather in favour of "post natal abortion", I have list of journalists, politicians etc who having seen them after birth, well ......, it would be a kindness. Yet obviously the proposal is again directed against children. Is it that our society hates children?

11 comments:

Supertradmum said...

Propaganda has been part of the human conditioning in society since the Fall. Even in ancient societies, governments turned words to their own use and glory. The God of Truth, in His Revelation to the Hebrews, caused a revolution of Truth even for kings. Look how Nathan treated David after his sin with Bathsheba. The problem is the lack of prophets coming from the Catholic Church. In order to defend life and the Truth of marriage, one must stand up and stop being NICE... pun intended. That priest and the laity are not prophetic in Great Britain and in Ireland, where I have been traveling, is a symptom of the loss of Faith. "I have this against you, that you have lost your First Love." Revelations 2:4. Either we love the Church, Christ and the Truth, or we are part of the problem. Did not some of us see this coming? When I read 1984 in high school a long, long time ago, I believed it would happen in my lifetime.

Nicolas Bellord said...

These two "ethicists" who hail from Melbourne University have just picked up what Peter Singer of that same university has been saying for years. It is the consequence of taking utilitarianism to its limits. Nothing is intrinsically evil or wrong per se but one just has to look at the consequences in order to judge whether it is right or wrong. So killing a new born baby has to be judged by weighing its happiness against the happiness of the parents and society at large. Hitler thought Germany would be a happier place without the Jews so....

nickbris said...

Abortion,killing of new-born,bumping off bed-blockers.That must be the new way to save the Planet.

The OPT and our Green Party MP must be cock a hoop with glee.

An Alien entity must have put something in the water or into the air to make everybody want to kill everybody else

FrBT said...

Father

I think that the Catholic Church in England and Wales has come to the 'crunch time'.

Either we stand and speak out and defend what we know to be traditionally God's Laws, God's Teachings, Our Faith and what is acceptable or unacceptable

OR

we allow the enchancement of the destruction of Christianity in our times.

This is as serious as we know it so far.

Cardinal O'Brien is absolutely correct in calling the proposal of same sex marriage, by the Government as 'madness'.

His Emminence has spoken the very truth. It is madness which will lead onto other mad proposals, killing of new born babies etc.

Thank you, Your Emminence for Your words in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph. I and my parishioners are glad that You felt that You had the courage to speak out and defend God and God's ways - which are certainly not man's ways.

I am however concerned that we here, south of Gretna Green, have to rely on the voice of Cardinal Keith O'Brien of Scotland to defend our Faith and what we know to be true and right.

Westminster - +Vincent Nichols - issues a weak letter to be read this weekend at all Masses, supported by +Peter Smith of Southwark.

Your letter, Your Graces is in fact too weak, to late, and too politically correct to stand the test of the Faithful.

I can count on one hand the Bishops who I consider to be robust and actually supportive and PUBLICALLY following Rome, in England and Wales (and I have seen many Bishops in my time).

It is not good enough.

Either be stronger in leadership or step down and let someone else take over who is strong and young and is Faithful to The Holy Father.

We either sink or swim with what is going on around Christianity at the moment.

God made a Covenant with His people with regards to flooding. That can be seen in other ways, not only in water.

We are allowing the Faith to be 'flooded' by this new 'madness' that is covering society in this country.

I have no intention of sinking after all these years of faithful service to our Blessed Lord.

FrBT

Billy Pips said...

Rather than too late, it is perhaps time. But it requires a comprehensive approach that addresses the malady at the centre, which is contraceptive intercourse. Elizabeth Anscombe stated in 'Contraception and Chastity' in 1972: 'if contraceptive intercourse is all right then so are all forms of sexual activity'. If heterosexual people can practice meaningless sex, why can't the homosexuals? And if marriage is just a forum for two people to engage in the pursuit of meaningless pleasure, why not two men? To argue otherwise is actually unreasonable and in the end, bigoted, a prejudice emerging from the (understandable) yuk-factor that homosexuality induces in normally-ordered people.

Anscombe's statement is logically true but, because nobody in the hierarchy (bar O'Brian) says anything about it (fundamentally because they disagree with the Church), and do not defend those who do (see Gillick in the Eighties), they do not have a leg to stand on now. It looks just like bigotry.

And as ever, when the going gets tough the Hierarchy turns to the steadfast, the Faithful, those who didn't contracept and bore the consequences, who raised their children in a robust faith and requests we take the shots, defend the Faith, knowing as it does that those 80% of church-going Catholics who contracept and who they nurtured cannot most likely be counted on.

I love JP2 very much and have been personally assisted by his powerful intercession but +Vin Nicholls? Seriously? +Vin always was a dangerous man. If you don't see it, go to Liverpool where he worked with Worlock and oversaw the decimation the faithful. It's a Catholic wasteland. It takes effort to affect so thorough a destruction.

georgem said...

As I understand it, the skewing of words and the subversion of existing culture has been the goal of the Frankfurt School of Marxists and their followers for the best part of a century.
They fetched up in the US as refugees during WWII and when they realised that economic revolution wasn't going to do it they changed tack and targeted accepted cultural norms, especially through communication; a cynical perversion of lex orandi, lex credendi.
Hence 'political correctness' and all that follows.
You can trace many of the ills of the Church back to them. Pope St Pius X warned of the dangers of modernism in his prescient 1907 encyclical 'Pascendi dominici gregis'.
The clerical modernism that has, perhaps unknowingly, done a great deal of the Frankfurt Marxists' work for them.

Anita Moore said...

Yes. Society has seldom, if ever, hated children more. In our age, we just cover our brutality over with a veneer of sentimentalism.

Delia said...

No wonder your spelling shows such a pleasing variety, with so many dictionaries ranged on your shelf (e.g., 'Arguement' in the heading of the following post)!

Fr Ray Blake said...

Spelling, yes and typing, infinite variety!
It all reflects my Gourniad tendencies.

FrBT said...

My spelling was always sub standard and, it is still.
Sorry to all.
FrBT

Thomas Beyer said...

I think Blessed Pope John Paul II was right, it's not about hating children or marriage or life, it's about hating death.

In a world without grace, for that matter, a world without even reason or truth which at least the pagans had, there is no solution to the problem of pain or death. The only solution that can even be grasped at is sheer avoidance, and avoidance at any cost. As such, men and the culture become obsessed with the very thing they are trying so hard to avoid.

Suddenly, one lives in a world in which the death penalty is unacceptable in any situation at all but euthanasia is just fine (as last Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead preached).

A world in which women put themselves under the knife time and time again in an attempt to prevent themselves from aging, and don't recognize it when they've had so much of their body removed surgically they look more like lifeless corpses than women of any kind.

A world in which abortion is not only a right, but a Rite, dear and sacred to the established pseudo-order.

A world in which death is so terribly feared that the natural development of the children that are produced is besieged by helicopter parents who spend half their salary baby-proofing their house and rubberizing the corners of tables so their designer children don't bump their heads, never realizing that these children are so precious to them only insofar as they serve as, at best fashionable accessories, and at worst an innocent life which they can hijack in order to be young again vicariously through cheerleading camps and video game consoles.

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