Notes: Friday, July 23, 2010

Just some blog comments by me:

At Mr. Schütz's blog:

Cardinal Pole
July 23, 2010 at 4:37 am

“It is true that we don’t have a collection of secular doctrines neatly arranged as a sort of “Secular Catechism” – but wouldn’t it be helpful if we did?”

We do. Read The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Syllabus of Errors, Quanta cura, things like that.
[http://scecclesia.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/how-useful-would-a-secular-catechism-be/#comment-15995]

Cardinal Pole
July 23, 2010 at 4:53 am

“does secular ethics ever say it is possible to do harm to yourself, even if your action does no harm to anyone else?”

If by secular ethics we mean Godless ethics, and if without God there is no such thing as true and proper moral obligation, and if the absence of moral obligation is moral liberty, then secular ethics tells us that we not only have the moral liberty to harm ourselves, but also unrestricted moral liberty to harm others, indeed, to do anything we please. That’s why, as Fr. Fahey mentions in The Kingship of Christ according to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the secularist ethics axiom which can be stated as ‘do whatever you want, however self- or mutually-destructive, so long as everyone involved consents’, the ‘so long as everyone else involved consents’ bit is baseless. Secular ethics’s first and only principle is: Do whatever you want, full stop. And if you don’t like the sound of that, then, as Professor Dawkins might say, tough!
[http://scecclesia.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/how-useful-would-a-secular-catechism-be/#comment-15996]

At Terra's blog:

Cardinal Pole said...

"compulsory voting was introduced in this country by (various) Governments solely because they believed it would be an advantage to them in an upcoming election."

Prove it. (Not that it would matter; a bad motive on the part of a legislator doesn't necessarily invalidate his legislation.)

"Compulsory Voting unjustly vitiates [your] ‘Right to Participate’ by depriving [you] of [your] ‘Right to Not Participate’."

Absurd. People in a democracy have no more 'right not to participate' than the king in a monarchy has a 'right not to participate'.

Another way to look at it is this: Rights are either natural or acquired. Obviously your supposed 'right not to participate' is not an acquired right, so it must be a natural right. So you need to show how the natural law gives you this 'right'.

"Given that ‘right’ and ‘duty’ are antithetical, the statement is
meaningless."

So you deny that someone with a right can conceivably have, on occasions, a duty to exercise that right?

July 23, 2010 2:54 AM
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[http://australiaincognita.blogspot.com/2010/07/and-it-is-on-australia-goes-to-polls-on.html]

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Apollinaris, Bishop, Martyr, and of St. Liborius, Bishop, Confessor, A.D. 2010