Faith, Fear and Christopher Badeaux

By Steve Hynd

I think it's a bit rich of Christopher Badeaux to be publishing stuff like this:

Like a real-life, hyper-garrulous Forrest Gump, Sullivan has been present for, or at least has shared his thoughts � stray, organized, rational, and delusional � on most of the major events of the last twenty five years, at a rate that has only increased since he began blogging (before it was cool) and taking long vacations after pledge drives (which has been cool forever). More impressive than his output is his utter lack of fear of self-contradiction, flights of laughter-inducing hyperbole, public obsessiveness, repeated self-contradiction, betrayals of utter ignorance, and failed attempts to mimic the Bard by coining bizarre neologisms to match his wandering moods.

...To say that Sullivan has focused his laser-like mind on human reproductive organs is to engage in an understatement worthy of the master himself. We could simply look at Sullivan�s relentless, years-long focus on circumcision (a relentlessness not well-captured by the internet tubes, as Sullivan�s archives traditionally become difficult to search when he moves from site to site), an unusual genre for a man who will never have children and who is not Jewish or Muslim, though perhaps not so unusual given his general interest in the member in question. One could focus on his decision to start calling a 4,000 year old religious tradition �male genital mutilation,� thus cleverly calling untold generations of Jews child abusers and torturers, a decision that marks the sort of intellectual territory into which only a man bravely unwilling to live in Israel can tread.

When he's responsible for pretentiously written crap like this, in what is ostensibly a simple book review. 

I think it�s fair to say that Cormac McCarthy�s novels increasingly reflect a deeply disordered universe.

That requires some elaboration, and a brief excursion into natural law. A full exposition on that topic is beyond the scope of this essay, and frankly beyond my abilities, but in brief: The Lord made the Universe according to a set of hidden but largely discernable rules, and those rules produce specific, predictable outcomes once the rules and variables are known. Furthermore, all things are made ordered�oriented, if you prefer�to not only the Lord, but also to decent and right outcomes.

This is reflected in little things, like two plus two always yielding four; and in such obvious things that we�ve lost the ability to rationalize them, such as a man and a woman together yield life, where a man and a man together are sterile. In other words, there is not only the obvious physical event, but good things come of the act because it satisfies the underlying order God instilled in things. This order lies not merely in individual acts, but in an interconnected web that binds all things together in ways immediately detectable, often predictable, and usually inexplicable.

Our consciences and our natural inclinations are manifestations of this intrinsic order; disregarding them gives rise to disorder. Indeed, even doing things that are right and good can be taken to extremes that place one outside of that natural order. When we step outside of that order, as anyone who has lived with someone suffering through, say, anorexia or alcohol addiction can tell you, the disorder radiates outward in a spiderweb-crack pattern of pain. Sin itself is definitionally an intrinsically disordered act, because it puts one apart from, and against, God. In a sense, Original Sin is the greatest intrinsically disordered act of all, and we deal with its ripples to this day. [Emphasis mine]

One has to wonder if Badeaux's problem with Sullivan is that he's not succinct enough, not Catholic enough, not conservative enough...or simply not straight enough.

Just Saying.