From Chesterton to Glencoe, mainly quoting and linking

The Dagger with Wings from Incredulity of Father Brown

Come now, don’t you think there’s a lot in those old wives’ tales about luck and charms and so on, silver bullets included? What do you say about them as a Catholic?”
“I say I’m an agnostic,” replied Father Brown, smiling.
“Nonsense,” said Aylmer impatiently. “It’s your business to believe things.”
“Well, I do believe some things, of course,” conceded Father Brown; “and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.”
...
" ... Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a center where men melt into Man and Man into God?”
“No,” said Father Brown.
...
"... Perhaps his only mistake was in choosing a preternatural story; he had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.”

I was so reminded of this when I came across one video I shall not link to. I shall not say what blasphemy it stated about the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph, but it started out with Edgar Cayce and Lemurians and Atlantis and involved a gigantic gibe at malehood as well as to the Church. And a gigantic flattery (in more than one way) to Akhenaton. Not to mention Osiris and Thoth.

I may believe what Pierre de Bérulle (Oratorian priest) thought about Hermes Trismegistus and Pythagoras without believing Atlanteans inhabited their land on some "fourth dimension" without therefore leaving any physical traces. And without admitting Thoth/Trismegistus lived in Atlantis and found his way to immortality ...

I was also rewarded for looking up the story. It referred me to the massacre of Glencoe:

Corries: Cruel is the snow that sweeps Glencoe and covers the graves o' Donald

Though the command of superior officers be very absolute, yet no command against the laws of nature is binding; so that a soldier, retaining his commission, ought to refuse to execute any barbarity, as if a soldier should be commanded to shoot a man passing by inoffensively, upon the street, no such command would exempt him from the punishment of murder.
inquiry commission on the Glencoe Massacre (1692)

enotes, Bella Caledonia, COMBAT Magazine Department: Verbal Shrapnel (upper half of page), New World Encyclopedia, Duncan Law, and of course: good old wiki which refers (yes, it sometimes does give a reference, hooray!) the section inquiry to source Prebble, John. Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-002897-8.

Now, when I in previous quarrels have said I was right to oppose a policeman for doing an emprisoning which he realised (at least according to his own words at the time) was wrong, and which was not for any crime, real or purported, but only "for my own good" as his superiors had put it, when time after time I have referred to the natural law as condemning not only abortion, contraception, legalised sodomy, but also school compulsion, child welfare state-nappings, Janissary recruitment as done by Ottoman empire as their parallel, and of course most emprisonings that are done in psychiatry, I was not remotely referring to some "Christ consciousness" unique to me, I was referring to a principle known as well to St Thomas Aquinas as to the enquiry commission after Glencoe. Nothing unique to me at all. Doing a crime, even if less than murder, which can land the victim for years in mental hospital, is no right of the state and has never been so, and is obviously not excused by referring pragmatically to his own best interests against his rights and his preference in using them. One really needs no exceptional "Christ consciousness" to realise such a basic thing, rather one needs to be an exceptional man of Dalrymple's moral cut*, or possibly of William III's in order not to recall it.

Unfortunately my country has decided it is in its children's best interest that their parents and the churches of their parents have very little say in what school syllabus they follow. It is of course a "law" and "a superior officers order" which is in the same position as the Massacre of Glencoe on the words of the Inquiry Commission.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Mouffetard Library, Paris
St Jean-Marie Vianney's feast day
4-VIII-2012

*A sarrow man who had taken unusually deep thought about certain things (Tolkien readers will know what I mean), and I hope to God I am not.