Is to think that one should be free from sadness a feeling of entitlement or its result, only a symptom of narcissism or disordered self-love? Is sadness an evil, not just a sensible reaction to some evil or to a privation/deprivation? (Let us focus exclusively on the privation of necessary goods, rather than what is superfluous. We would not feel sad if we did not attain something we desired that was not truly necessary for our well-being.) Did God desire for us to feel or experience sadness? In a creation rightly ordered, would there be sadness? Everyone would be acting virtuously, and there would be no physical evils. There is no feeling or experience of sadness in heaven. What of feeling sad because of social discord or enmity? Are friends luxuries rather than a good that is necessary to us and our flourishing?

Presuming God's approval

If God doesn't will it, then wouldn't he stop it from happening? "I asked for His aid, and it was successful; why shouldn't I give Him the creidt." Could this line of reasoning be twisted in those who seek to uphold the status quo, rather than questioning their basic assumptions about the political economy (e.g. perpetual growth)? How counter-cultural do we have to be as Christians? Will the Holy Spirit aid us in being critical of our assumptions about what the good life requires? Or is this only for a few, while the rest He leaves in ignorance? If we do not struggle for community, is its absence not a fitting punishment?

Only He can judge who is guilty of pride and blindness and who was only muddling by in a fallen world.

Matthew 7: 21-23
Non omnis, qui dicit mihi: “Domine, Domine”, intrabit in regnum caelorum, sed qui facit voluntatem Patris mei, qui in caelis est.
Multi dicent mihi in illa die: “Domine, Domine, nonne in tuo nomine prophetavimus, et in tuo nomine daemonia eiecimus, et in tuo nomine virtutes multas fecimus?”. Et tunc confitebor illis: Numquam novi vos; discedite a me, qui operamini iniquitatem.

The Devil, a tinkerer with life?

If the devil has a thorough understanding of life and development, would it not be possible for him to manipulate the parts of organism and thereby generate new forms of life? (Dinosaurs? Large insects? And so on?) Monsters? What for? Perhaps to mock God. Perhaps to wage war against other living things, or... could it be, even human beings? There is so much we do not know about what happened at the beginning, and the consequences of the rebellion of the demons on the material universe.

While the devil cannot create ex nihilo, if there is a natural mechanism by which new species/body types can be generated from pre-existing ones, then cannot the devil by his power to act upon bodies and move them cause the same effects?

What to do about illegal drugs?

1. Massive public education program on the effects of drug use, particularly the negative effects on health, self-control/real freedom and responsibility. (Prevent sellers from having the excuse that they didn't know how bad the product is, they're just meeting the demands of the market. In actuality they are taking advantage of human weakness and exploiting others in order to make a living.)

2. Increase of economic opportunities that will provide a decent alternative to selling drugs.

3. After the first two steps have been taken and some time has passed--the introduction of harsher penalties, including possibly the death penalty for those at the top of the pyramid?

The corruption of the youth

Libido dominandi E. Michael Jones

Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of echnologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.

I have not read this book, or Dr. Jones's The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing, but I did read his John Cardinal Krol and the Cultural Revolution, and he advances many of the same theses in this earlier work, though more limited in scope, applying them to the history of Philadelphia. In The Slaughter of Cities he includes Philadephia, along with Boston, Detroit, and Chicago. From a flyer for the book:

In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to dowith design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last-gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of acountry that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be “Americanized” according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and “integration,” the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood gottransformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people as a threat to their control. Jones concentrates on four cities – Philadelphia, Chicago,Detroit, and Boston – in a book whose conclusions will be shocking and controversial. The destruction of the ethnic neighborhoods that made up the human, residential heart of these cities was not an unfortunate by-product of a well-intentioned plan that somehow went awry; it was part of the plan itself.

I think he makes a persuasive case in the Cardinal Krol book; I don't know if he overextends in the other two; certainly one gets the vibe of a conspiracy-mindset from the author, but perhaps the case for a conspiracy is stronger than it may appear to the average American, who is rather ignorant of elites and the arrangements they make among themselves.

As Aristotle noted, reason can be corrupted by desire (unrestrained desire adopted in vice). Is it easier to control someone who does not possess the use of reason and cannot function as a citizen in a polity? Perhaps. An Aristotelian might even make the claim that such individuals are naturally fitted to be slaves. St. Paul, St. Augustine, and undoubtedly many of the Church Fathers talk about something like being a slave to sin, and how sin prevents us from being truly free. But how far will a corrupt generation be willing to serve its masters? Wouldn't it be difficult to give them direction? It seems that the application of force would be necessary sooner or later.

Still, pandering to their appetites succeeds in distracting them from the real problems at hand, and puts them in such a state that they have no interest in effecting real political and social reform. If people are too busy chasing after sex, they won't have much time and energy for anything else, nor will they have the character to seek higher goods.

But perhaps Dr. Jones focuses too much on the 20th century and on sex. Does not society have a host of other vices, including excessive consumption and materialism? Was decline already put in motion through industrialization and the rise of a centralized, no longer Federal, government? He might argue that the elites used the tools they had in order to gain control, and thereby making the problem worse. Only God knows the complete truth.

With the destruction of local communities and local culture, the entertainment industries produced "art" and marketed it to the people.
Dr. Jones would argue that music and the mass media have corrupted the people, and how many conservatives would disagree? The change in music and social dance forms indicate that some sort of change in the character of society has taken place. As I listen to trance while I am writing this, I should remark that trance and electronic are sensual, just like certain forms of Latin American music (and I would argue that the sensual quality is not due to the Spanish character, but to the assimilation of African culture and music). If the festive music of a community is closely linked to fertility celebrations and rituals, we should not be surprised if it features certain characteristics and invokes certain responses in us. Can the music itself make chastity more difficult? It seems that it can. (If we add to the music an environment where alcohol is present, such as a club, and people mix freely without supervision and can indulge in their desires so long as there are consenting adults, chastity easily goes out the window. What would St. Francis de Sales say about our contemporary dance clubs and bars?)

Some Americans tend to have the view that youth culture started in America and spread elsewhere, including Europe. Certainly, American popular culture has been marketed overseas and had an impact there. But it also seems to me that a youth culture (and the fragmentation of communities into different generations having limited social contact with one another) arose independently in Europe. Only if someone acquainted with European social history could describe what was going on in Europe during the late 19th century and early 20th.

As industralization and urbanization has spread to other countries (particularly countries in Latin America), we witness the same sort of trends with regards to the culture and mores of those societies. In a city that is too large, traditional culture cannot survive long.

Master

Used to translate dominus or kurios (and a synonym of lord in this sense).

But also used to translate magister (but not exactly a synonym of teacher).

Which sense is being used to refer to one's teacher? I would think the second. I believe master in the second second is what translates the degree and title conferred upon those who received the appropriate university education in the middle ages and thus had a license to teach.
One is a teacher of some science or skill or art, having 'mastered' it.

It is not the same as being called a master because one is the master of some person. Today in our egalitarian age this meaning of master is unpleasant. I should look up the meaning of si, as in si fu.

Ckhnat has a post on the use of master or lord to refer to one's husband (after the example of Sarah in the OT. This would make me a bit uncomfortable, and seems to me to be an example of illegitimate or sinful patriarchy. A wife is not a slave or maid of the husband. Still, the Church teaches that is a rightful exercise of authority by the husband over the family (as a social unit).

John Finnis critiques Aquinas' account of the husband-wife relationship in his Aquinas, Moral , Political, and Legal Theory, pages 171-5. What would Finnis make of Fr. Check's The Authority of the Husband According to the Magisteruim?

From Christian Order, Karol Wojtyla and the Patriarchal Hierarchy of the Family by G.C. DILSAVER

Edited, 5 April 2007:
Holy Thursday at St. Columkille was a mixed English-Spanish Mass. During the Mass I was thinking of master again, and was look at the Spanish maestro, which seems to be derived from magister. Though the etymology of master is not as obvious to me, I came home to check and see what info was available online. This is what I found at Online Etymology Dictionary:

master (n.)
O.E. mægester "one having control or authority," from L. magister "chief, head, director, teacher" (cf. O.Fr. maistre, Fr. maître, It. maestro, Ger. Meister), infl. in M.E. by O.Fr. maistre, from L. magister, contrastive adj. from magis (adv.) "more," itself a comp. of magnus "great." Meaning "original of a recording" is from 1904. In academic senses (from M.L. magister) it is attested from 1380s, originally a degree conveying authority to teach in the universities. The verb is attested from c.1225.

I don't think Master should be used as a synonym for Lord (Kurios, Dominus), but if the etymology dictionary is correct, it gained the sense of "one having control or authority" rather early.