Goettingen, Germany – A baby weighing just 275 grams has been born in Germany and survived, the lowest weight for a viable birth of a boy ever recorded, doctors said Thursday. Doctors normally assume that survival is impossible at birth weights below 350 grams.

The little boy was born in June last year in the 25th week of pregnancy, said Stefan Weller, a spokesman for the University of Goettingen Hospital. He spent six months in intensive care and was finally discharged in December after growing to 3.7 kilograms.

Weller said doctors had checked every available record worldwide of premature births and found no viable birth at a lower weight.

English version found at: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/312505,smallest-ever-baby-born-in-germany-and-survives.html#ixzz0hDwIdApm

In The Netherlands, abortion is legal until 24 weeks of pregnancy. So the difference between ‘a person whose life is worth it to be saved’ and ‘a bunch of cells which can be aborted’ is just one week in this case. Am I the only person who thinks this is mind-boggling?

Link to the image: sfkids.org

Ingredients:

• one cup of buckwheat flour
• one cup of self rising flour
• 3 or 4 medium sized eggs
• a dash of salt
• about 2 teaspoons of vanilla sugar
• milk
• shortening (for baking)

Directions:

Sift the dry ingredients in a deep bowl. Add milk until you get a nice smooth batter which shouldn’t be too thick. It’s best to add most of the milk, and add a bit later to get the right viscosity.

Add the eggs one by one. And then a bit more of the milk to finish it. The batter should have about the same viscosity as syrup, not too liquid, but most certainly not too thick. Dutch pancakes are thin, like crepes.

Take a pan and bake the pancakes on both sides until golden brown. The Dutch have a variety of toppings. You can add molasses, sugar, jelly, cheese, champignon ragout, anything you like.

Since it’s Lent right now, I didn’t make bacon pancakes. But if you want to try that, you need to put a thin slice of bacon in the pan before pouring a soup spoon full of batter in the pan before baking golden brown on both sides. Bacon pancakes taste best with molasses.

Comment from the designer: “Some guy called Desmond told me about a missing plane he once saw on the side of a milk carton. He disappeared, but I recently had a message on my phone telling me it was time to print this concept. Whoever it was didn’t leave their name but it came from 4 8 15 16 23 42.”

“They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another,”

Source: CBS News

It’s not hard to see why Christians would be upset by hearing this. It has nothing to do with the Gospel of Love that Jesus preached. I really wonder what kind of warped view Mr. Robertson has of the Gospel. On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know that either. It’s really sad to see rabiate Atheist blogs picking this story to target their guns at those ‘ignorant, superstitious Christians’. At the same time it’s hard to find Christian blogs endorsing Mr. Robertson’s view. I felt very sad about it, but a letter to the editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune made me smile. Someone hit the nail right on its head:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll. You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune

Thanks Lily for sending that one in! Brilliant!

I just finished making this sketch for a lecture my parish priest has organised. Someone’s coming over on February 9 to talk about “Believing in Merriness” about Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) I wonder what emotion the flyer is summoning.

If you have thoughts, please comment below.

With a hat tip to Fr. Tim Finnigan.

I retweeted the tweet and asked my friends on Facebook for prayers. I said a prayer myself and went to bed. I don’t have a TV so I haven’t seen any footage of the Haiti quake. But I get really sad when I hear that the death toll is rising above 100,000 victims.  I can’t help looking up and ask the age-old question: Why?

Why must people who are already extremely poor suffer a natural disaster like this? What was their sin that they deserve something like this to happen. Rationally, I know all the answers, but my heart breaks and cannot help asking this question: why do bad things happen to good people?

I know 80% of the population is Christian (Roman Catholic), and I know that for Christians death doesn’t mean the end of everything, but still. The situation over there is beyond heart breaking. 80% of the people in Haiti are extremely poor. Most of them live on $2 or less a day. In the Americas, Haiti is the poorest country. Life in Haiti is hard, the quake makes living over there almost impossible. Everything has been destroyed. How on earth are people going to recover?

I wish I could do something to help them, but my budget is tight as well. I’m poor, measured by Dutch standards. I’m in the group with the lowest incomes in the country. But it’s nothing compared to the people in Haiti. I refuse to call myself poor. I may not have the financial means to really give money to the Red Cross. I’m counting on other people to do that. Instead I pray and want to ask the patron saint of Haiti, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, to care for the people of Haiti.

O Mother of Perpetual Help, patroness of Haiti, grant that I may ever invoke thy most powerful name, which is the safeguard of the living and the salvation of the dying. O Purest Mary, O Sweetest Mary, let thy name henceforth be ever on my lips. Delay not, O Blessed Lady, to help the people in Haiti whenever they call on thee, for, in all my needs, in all my temptations I shall never cease to call on thee, ever repeating thy sacred name, Mary, Mary.

O what consolation, what sweetness, what confidence, what emotion fill my soul when I pronounce thy sacred name, or even only think of thee. I thank God for having given thee, for my good, so sweet, so powerful, so lovely a name. But I will not be content with merely pronouncing thy name: let my love for thee prompt me ever to hail thee, Mother of Perpetual Help.

Lisa Hendey published an article on her blog and encouraged us to share it to spread the word on helping the people in Haiti, I will quote from it:

Emergency Brief 1; Haiti Earthquake

Situation:

A 7.0 magnitude earthquake has ravaged the island nation of Haiti. The quake occurred 10 miles southwest of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince just before 5pm EST (Haiti is also on EST). Port-au-Prince, with a population of over 2 million, has been devastated. CRS Country Representative Karel Zelenka reports that “Port-au-Prince was covered with a plume of dust from damaged buildings. We should be prepared for many thousands of dead and injured.”

The CRS offices were shaken, with some damage to the compound walls, but there were no injuries in the building. Two CRS staff members remain unaccounted for. Communication with Haiti remains very difficult.

There are also recently confirmed reports that the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, was a victim of the quake. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Port-au-Prince has sustained severe damage.

CRS Response:

CRS has made an initial commitment of 5 million dollars for immediate use in the relief effort. Our agency is geared up for a major emergency response to this severe disaster. CRS is mobilizing food and gearing up our emergency capacity, and deploying prepositioned emergency shelter and hygiene kits in Haiti, as well as bringing supplies in from the neighboring Dominican Republic.

From the Field:

Karel Zelenka, CRS Country Representative in Haiti: “I’ve been in earthquakes before. This was a major hit. And it was direct. Thousands must be dead.”

[…]

How to Help:

Donate via phone: 1-877-HELP-CRS
Donate online: the CRS website
Write a check: Catholic Relief Services
P.O. Box 17090
Baltimore, Maryland 21203-7090
Memo portion of check: Haiti Earthquake

Please consider helping. And if you have a blog, you might want to write a blog post about this too and ask your readers’ attention and make a plea to donate to the many organisations who are sending help at this very moment.

Links:

• Wikipedia article on Haiti
• EWTN website: prayer to Our Lady of Perpetual Help
• Lisa’s blog over at CatholicMom.com
• List of Catholic Organisations accepting donations for the Haitian Earthquake Relief

Peer pressure is a psychological mechanism in which we compare our likes to others. Humans are behaving like herds in this respect, because people tend to like what their peers like. That’s why the advertising industry goes into great pains to promote an article to very targeted audiences. They want to convey the message that peers like this article, so you like it, too. Therefore you want to have it, too.
In the wired article, an experiment is described in which a group is confronted with music they can download. It’s a database of songs which the subjects can rate and download. Other people in the group will be able to see the ratings and the downloads of all the songs. By repeating the same experiment a number of times with different groups of people, you can investigate if people like certain songs because of their quality or because their peers also liked it. The latter seems to be the case. Also when you manipulate the ratings and downloads, people still are going to like the songs they think their peers do like too. However, this only worked for a short time, in the long run the songs being lied about became less popular. So lying only works for a short time.

I wonder how this works with the different social networks we have got now. I know listening to last.fm  and having access to my neighbours’ playlists made me discover and enjoy new music I still listen to, despite the fact I’m not using last.fm anymore because it’s not free anymore for my country. I also notice how people try to use the social media for marketing, advertising. People pioneering in it do that so blatantly and aggressively that I started to unfollow people who posted ads on Twitter, thus polluting my feed.

I don’t think tweets like “Wanna get rich fast, click on this link and find out how” are effective. I do think Twitter and other social media as marketing tools can be effective. It will cost more time to invest in, so possibly advertising on Twitter will cost a company more money, but the effect will be much bigger than TV and radio commercials. It’s more expensive because the agents who advertise products will need to genuinely engage in conversation with their target group, they need to make real online friends. And then they can start twittering on how they are drinking a can of Brand X soda and how good it is. Or that they are investigating insurance companies and ask for input only to reply later that they found out that Insurance Company Y has the best deal. If you’re a hub (someone with a lot of followers) these tactics can be very effective just because they don’t look like ads. They’re very subtle.

On the other hand, I don’t know how ethical this would be, because people would need to pretend they’re friending people on networks out of interest in the other person where they are not. They are only smart marketeers. We’ll see how this turns out.

Links:

• The article on wired.com
• Wikipedia on groupthink
• Wikipedia on peer pressure

- For my family members, who are not religious and struggling on their own.
- For the Church in The Netherlands, that they may find trust in their shepherds and courage to rebuild a missionary Church.
- For the elderly who have a hard time coping with the untypical winter we’re facing now.
- For my priest and monk friends, for strength and courage to do the work God asks them to do.
- For SQPN, that they may find financial means to sustain themselves in the upcoming year. (You can donate here, by the way)
- For my friends who face a challenging time both financially and socially.

The rules are really straightforward and because of the tiled board setup, every game is different. You need to use strategy, but also depend on luck. I really like the different variants of Carcasonne because of that and the fact it looks nice. The artwork of the game, the drawings are nicely done and after playing everything fits back in the box without everything getting messed up.

I think of all the versions of Carcasonne I played, I like The Discovery best, because it’s more interesting because of the variation: a lot of different factors have to be weighed in. Do you choose to be a sailor and count on the tiles of the sea and the harbour cities, do you count on the mountains and only get points for the cities in the mountains and on the neighbouring plains or do you choose to play for plains and get points for the tiles of the plain, but not for the cities. A big mountain ridge can score a lot of points, but if you draw tiles without cities on them, your mountain range will be worth nothing. However, if you go for the plain, you know you get at least one point for every tile that makes up your plain. If I had to rate the game on a five point scale, I’d give it 3.5 points out of five. I like the game a lot, but it’s not the best game I ever played or a favourite game.

Link: Carcasonne – Discovery (links to boardgamegeek.com)

For those folks who weren’t able to watch this hitseries I strongly recommend doing so. You may not want to read the stuff after the jump, because it will contain spoilers. I just guess that by now everybody who ever wanted to see LOST season 1 has done that by now.
What made the series promising for me is the fact that it is from J.J. Abrahams, which for me stands for good SF. I was somewhat surprised to see that the whole series is set on a tropical island here on earth with no space ships or aliens in sight. I totally love series in space, so this was something I need to grow used to. The series timeline seems to be set in the present too, so I’m still a bit confused as what the whole ScienceFiction part of the series is going to be.

In short, the summary of the story is that a bunch of people is stranded on a remote tropical island after a plane crash. Their initial efforts revolve around getting found, getting of the island. As they are getting around doing that, they notice some strange things are going on and they start to realise that this island may not be your typical tropical island. There are strange sounds, the trees are swooshing when ’something’ is going after them. It’s obviously some kind of gigantic monster and the fact you can’t see what it is makes it spookier than it already is.

Secondly, it appears that in the jungle on the island some weird creatures have found their habitat. Creatures you don’t expect on a tropical island, like polar bears. At one point they manage to repair a transmitter only to find out that there’s already an emergency signal being transmitted from the island for 16 years by a French lady. Interestingly, when the French lady turns up in the series, I was surprised to recognise her. At first I didn’t know who it was, but the face was familiar. I knew I had seen this actress in another SF series before and it took a while before I realised where because it had been a while. People who have seen Babylon 5 will undoubtedly recognise her as well as Delenn of the Minbar (ambassador for the Minbari on Babylon 5). I liked the actress back than and seeing her again was a pleasant surprise for me.

As time goes by, different people work on different projects, one group wants to stay on the beach, another wants to seek permanent shelter in the caves and some individuals go out in the jungle working on their own projects. In the beginning of the series one of the survivors is featured in every episode. In a series of flashbacks we learn more about this person and how her or she got on the plane. As the season evolves, we see also that the survivors appear in each other’s flashbacks. I was very surprised to see in the story of Jin, the Korean man who doesn’t speak English, the fat guy Hugo appears on a TV screen in the background of a scene in a living room in a house Jin visits.

When the realisation starts to sink in that the survivors are stuck on this island and rescue could take a while, if ever, a number of characters start to theorise on why they are here. As Locke remarks: the plane broke into three pieces in mid-air, all the survivors have only minor injuries. Normally nobody could have survived a crash like this. This is something that struck me in the very first episode as well: some people just woke up, got themselves together, got up and walked away. Another thing they have in common is that they have unfinished business in their lives and get confronted with their inner demons while on the island. Some of the characters believe fate has brought them there to punish them for the things they did and the lies they told. It comes as no surprise that the theme of redemption is arching over the series as a main topic.

I know it’s a SF series, so the LOST universal could have parallel timelines even parallel dimensions. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen Battlestar Galactica before, but I think that’s what’s happening here. They are in a different dimension on the same planet as we are. They are here, but they are also not here. I also believe the survivors of the crash are dead in reality in a similar way Starbuck died in Battlestar Galactica but was seemingly alive some time later. I also believe that the French woman, Danielle Rousseau isn’t telling the truth on how she got on the island and how she was the only survivor of her team. But I could be totally wrong as well, but I need to find out about that by watching seasons 3 to 5. So it’s a busy month for me if I want to be all caught up when the final season will be aired. It took me a while, but I’m totally sold on the series right now, it’s intriguing, it makes me think and plot out possible explanations. I like that. So my initial verdict on this series is that it’s an okay show. Still no space or spaceships, so it’s not beating Battlestar Galactica right now. But who knows…

A lot of neuroscientists think that what we call consciousness are, in fact, some weak electrical currents in the brain which create a sensation, a projection, of what we call reality: they take a purely materialistic approach. Some go as far as denying that there is such a thing as the Self, or even that reality, as we experience it, actually exists. The author apparently leans towards the other extreme by arguing that consciousness isn’t in the brain at all. According to him confining it to the brain and to neural activity is an oversimplification of the whole phenomenon of consciousness. It sounds a lot like the questions posed in the Matrix.

It sounds complicated, especially when wrapped in scientific yada yada, but it is not really a new discussion. Way back when, the ancient philosophers would call it differently: they would call it soul. This is not the same concept as our idea of soul: back when Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were talking about the soul, they meant something different, the idea of a life force that “animates” the body would maybe a better translation. The Latin word for soul is anima. In other words: the soul is the force that makes stuff moving. We still use that word when we refer to drawn cartoons set in motion in an animated film. Aristotle talks about three kinds of souls: plant souls, animal souls and human souls. The soul is what makes them living beings. An animal soul is more sophisticated then a plant soul and a human soul is more sophisticated than an animal soul.

The ancient Pythagoreans made a very clear distinction between body and soul. According to them the body was material and the soul metaphysical or spiritual and eternal, that is it has a beginning but no end. They thought that people should strive to free their soul from their body, as matter was viewed as something bad. Socrates and Plato too argued that there was a distinction between the body and the soul, the soul being attached to the body. When the body dies, the soul would go over to a new body. They thought that the soul had a separate existence besides the body. Aristotle, a pupil of Plato, wasn’t agreeing with that. He disputed that the soul had a separate existence from the body. In the same way you cannot separate a knife and cutting, you cannot separate body and soul. When a knife is destroyed there’s no more cutting and when the body dies, the soul is gone too.

To bring this back to the whole debate about consciousness, I want to draw the similarities between the debate of the ancient Greeks and later the debate among Scholastic scholars in the Middle Ages. Consciousness and the whole notion of Self are in my opinion very related. When I sit on a chair in front of my computer and I’m thinking, I’m aware, conscious of who I am, what I am doing and what emotions I’m feeling. When I start to behave in an uncharacteristic way, people tend to say I’m not “myself” anymore. So apparently there’s something “extra” present besides the material part of my body. I’m not a robot, I have a kind of life-energy which people call soul. Psychologists would call this consciousness, since the notion of soul isn’t in use in modern day psychology anymore.

Science, however, didn’t get stuck with the way the ancient Greeks or even the medieval scholars were thinking. From the ideas of saint Augustine of Hippo, who lived in the fourth century and saint Thomas Aquinas to the enlightened thinker René Descatres ideas on the soul evolved. Along one of the lines the line of thinking in the school of Plato can be found and at the other side people are thinking along the lines of Aristotle.
Saint Augustine was trained in the Platonic School and sees the soul as a seperate entity as does Descartres, but saint Thomas Aquinas is thinking along the lines of Aristotle. According to him, thinking along the lines of Plato causes philosophical problems. When we look around we don’t see it that way. When someone died, we see a dead body which has lost it’s soul. It just looks and feels different from a sleeping body. It’s not a coincidence when relatives say after they view grandma in her casket that it’s not “her” anymore. In a dead body, nobody’s home.

This leads to my idea of consciousness. I would say that scientists need to be cautious not to focus on the brain only. I know this is weird, since my major is in neuropsychology. I’m not saying that consciousness is  not in the brain, but want to point that our brain is only part of our nervous system. Sure it processes all the information, but that doesn’t mean consciousness has to be there somewhere, somehow. In my field, cognitive psychology, we work a lot with the computer analogy. The brain is like a computer.
I would say that storage, RAM, CPU together are not a computer. They are computer parts. If you take a logic board and put all the hardware in, but don’t attach input devices like disk drives, and a monitor, a keyboard an a mouse, it’s not of much use. I think consciousness is in the whole body, in same way the peripheral nervous system is everywhere. You have nerves in your whole body, not only in your brain. I would say that all parts together, all the body parts and consciousness make you to what you are. The problem with science is that the metaphysical realm cannot be researched since the scientific “toolbox” doesn’t have ways to research it: it’s not material. Therefore it’s very tempting to start investigating the parts we can research and then forget about the rest. But the body is more than the sum of its parts (Aristotle, Metaphysics).

Links:

• The article in New Scientist
• Wikipedia article on the soul
• The soul according to Aristotle
• St. Augustine on the soul
• Thomistic Psychology (after St. Thomas Aquinas)
• René Descartes and his Passions of the Soul
• Antireductionism is a reaction to the phenomenon of researching bits and pieces in science.

With a hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

According to Wikipedia, the picture depicts the event narrated in the Gospel of John, chapter 13 verse 21, where Jesus announces that one of the twelve apostles would betray him. I will quote Wikipedia’s entry on the grouping of figures:

The Last Supper specifically portrays the reaction given by each apostle when Jesus said one of them would betray him. All twelve apostles have different reactions to the news, with various degrees of anger and shock. From left to right:

Bartholomew, James, son of Alphaeus and Andrew form a group of three, all are surprised.

Judas Iscariot, Peter and John form another group of three. Judas is wearing green and blue and is in shadow, looking rather withdrawn and taken aback by the sudden revelation of his plan. He is clutching a small bag, perhaps signifying the silver given to him as payment to betray Jesus, or perhaps a reference to his role within the 12 disciples as treasurer. He is the only person to have his elbow on the table. Peter looks angry and is holding a knife pointed away from Christ, perhaps foreshadowing his violent reaction in Gethsemane during Jesus’ arrest. The youngest apostle, John, appears to swoon.

(Jesus)

Apostle Thomas, James the Greater and Philip are the next group of three. Thomas is clearly upset; James the Greater looks stunned, with his arms in the air. Meanwhile, Philip appears to be requesting some explanation.

Matthew, Jude Thaddeus and Simon the Zealot are the final group of three. Both Jude Thaddeus and Matthew are turned toward Simon, perhaps to find out if he has any answer to their initial questions.

I wonder if the people who made the images of the casts of various films / tv series had a similar idea? I know how I have been speculating over the Battlestar Galactica Last Supper picture, together with Jeff and Zina from the Secrets of Battlestar Galactica Podcast.

It reminded me of a painting I had seen in which the Star Wars cast appeared earlier:

Do these pictures add information to the story? Is it a hint to the public to acknowledge that underneath all great stories that have been told in Western Culture lies a lot of Christian themed mythology? I don’t know, but I do know they intrigue me and that’s probably what the creators want. This morning my imagination was sparked again when I saw two LOST Last Supper photos posted on /Film, together with the earlier ones I already saw before. What do you think of them?

With a hat tip to /Film, where you can find the pictures and also the bigger sized versions.

PinkStinks aims to counteract the slurry of media obsession on women who are ‘famous’, ‘thin’ ‘rich’ or ‘married to famous men’, by celebrating those women that we see as inspirational, important, ground-breaking and motivating. On these pages we’ll point you in the direction of some of those women … some from history, some just starting out, from all walks of life. It’s amazing how great they are, and when they’re brought together in a list like this there’s a real power to them, that can only serve as an uplifting inspiration.

Also, they showcase a number of “new role models” for girls, while ranting against the feminine stereotyping of girls, dressing them in pink, selling them pink toys and most of all “force them” into stereotypical girly role models. They argue, maybe not explicit that society forces girls with a model on how to behave and how to think and how wrong that is, the current situation that is. What they don’t seem to realise is that they themselves try to do exactly the same, with other role models, other toys and other ways of dressing. It strikes me maybe because it’s all to familiar with me, with my mom being rather feministic trying to avoid the gender stereotyping. It almost seems like they have some issues with girls wanting to be girls, wanting to wear any colour pink, wanting to play with dolls and when they grow up they want to be a teacher, a nurse or wife of some famous person.

Because that is how little girls are. It seems to be something innate, because psychologists have researched this. They tried to find out how much of these behaviours occur by themselves (they call that “nature“) and how much of these behaviours are taught by upbringing (they call that “nurture“). There’s a whole nature-nurture debate going on among psychologists. During the time when behaviourism reigned, many psychologists believed everything people did was hard-wired, nature. In the seventies this position changed, in society the free individual became popular which also influenced the way psychologists were thinking. So from black ‘nature’ they went into the other extreme ‘nurture’. Everything, they argued, was “modifiable”, the “modifiable society” came into existence.
This concept is still popular in socialist and social-democratic circles, at least in the Netherlands. People would be able to change everything according in what they wanted and thus create a perfect society. Along the same lines psychologists started to argue that our concept of gender was created by our upbringing, and thus altering the way of upbringing could help create more equality among genders and rethink gender roles. To summarise it with the words of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”

Needless to say this new way of thinking stirred a controversy, partly because it goes against intuitive reasoning. A whole new scientific field of the Gender Studies was founded, but sadly a lot of people engaged in it, do that with a certain agenda. Feminist scientists want to prove there is no difference between genders, others want to prove it’s all hard-wired  and a third group of people is only toning down things. The interesting thing is, that psychological research on gender fails to “prove” there are no gender differences. They just are there, and that’s just being shown in research time and time again. One study comes to my mind, which was used to showcase the topic during social psychology class, was that they tried to monitor kids whose parents were raising them without “gender bias”. Interestingly, most boys seemed to have an interest for “boyish” things like playing with cars and the more adventurous games whereas girls engaged in more “girly” things without anyone forcing them to do so. Of course this doesn’t mean that all girls and all boys display this behaviour, but most of them do.

To return on the topic of the “pinkification” of girls’ toys. The people behind “Pink Stinks” argue this is because toy manufacturers and de evil society does this to subdue girls to their way of thinking, but what I think is that it’s the other way around. Girls want pink stuff. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s appealing because its pink. And therefore pink toys are being made, because it increases the likelihood that girls want to have it because they are pink. It’s the other way around. I understand their concern, but I think it’s too bad they are going into the other extreme. What about the idea to allow girls to develop in whatever they want to be themselves? To allow them to develop into a genuine, authentic personality. Yes, some of them may want to become WAGS (wives and girlfriends of professional football players), others may want to become scientists. I genuinely believe it’s not in the girls’ best interest to tell them how to think and what to desire, no matter how sincere your motivations are.

Links:

• Pink Stinks
• Why Pink Doesn’t Stink (Guardian)

I only add ‘positive’ blogs to the blogroll, which means they need to contain constructive language. There are enough people bashing other people and try to cry out as loud as they can in the hope to get attention, since negative attention is also attention. That’s not my cup of tea. Oh, and since this blog is in English, I want to keep most of the content in English as well.

St. Charles wasn’t a great preacher, but managed to touch the hearts of thousands of people, proclaiming the gospel using St. Francis’ motto: “Preach the Gospel always, if necessary use words.” Instead of lecturing people he lived the life, shared his passion in more than one way. What he did was showing Christ’s love for us, by meditating on His Passion and from their answer calls of distressed people promptly. He always was engaged in helping those who were suffering, sick, poor or broken-hearted. People used to call him “the Saint of Mount Argus” when he was still alive. It is said he healed hundreds of people during his lifetime and continued doing this after his death on January 5, 1893.

He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on Oct. 16, 1988 but needed still one miracle to be called a saint. Mr. Adolf Dormans, who lived in St. Charles birthplace Munstergeleen suffered from a serious medical condition and prayed for the intercession of the Blessed Charles of Mount Argus and was healed. Doctors could not explain why he was healed, stating there was no scientific explanation for it. On June 3, 2007 Fr. Charles of Mount Argus was declared a saint by Pope Benedict XVI.

More information:

• Wikipedia
• Introduction by Paul Francis Spencer, C. P.  on charlesofmountargus.org

It started snowing on Wednesday, December 16, the day I went to Amersfoort to go to a Penance Service with Confession. I didn’t think much of it, because we do get snow and it wasn’t snowing hard. In Amersfoort there wasn’t any snow at all. When I returned back in Groningen late at night, I was surprised to see that at least 5 centimetres snow had already accumulated and it apparently had not stopped snowing all day. With a smile I took the bus home and went to bed. When I opened the curtains again the next morning my jaw dropped: there was A LOT of snow and it was still snowing. On the news I heard all public transport stopped their service because roads were inaccessible.

Therefore I tried to venture out a bit, just out of curiosity. I’m on the fourth floor of a condominium and it didn’t look that bad viewing it from my window. Downstairs I was surprised to discover the snow reached until half way my calves and after measuring it, there was 25 centimetres on the ground around noon. And it was STILL snowing. It would grow to a pack of snow measuring 50 centimetres, fallen within 48 hours. Some parts had over 60 centimetres of snow. Public life had come to a grinding halt. It was crazy.

On Monday, December 21 I was lucky enough to find that the buses were driving again, be it with heavy delays. I had to go to renew my passport, but seeing how difficult it was going around and seeing the weather forecast, I started to worry about Christmas Eve. Luckily it started to melt away before then, but glazed ice made it impossible for us to go to Midnight Mass. The snow lasted until Dec. 27, so yes, indeed we had a White Christmas, the first one since 1981.

I was happy to see the snow disappear before New Year’s Eve, but guess what? It’s now January 5 and we got 10 centimetres of fresh snow. When it rains it pours, apparently… I will add a small slideshow of some pictures, to view all of them, go over to my photo-album. By the way, I’m adding more pictures in the coming days and also will post new blog posts more frequently, now everything is set again.

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Yesterday evening the jocks were playing requested music like they always do, but outside on the square something unusual happened: a serious flashmob! It turned out that local dance studios teamed up and made a choreography to Snow Patrol’s “Just say yes”. They had just been waiting until it would turn up and start the flashmob and raised money.
Unless you’ve spent the last years under a rock: a flashmob is a spontaneous act of people dancing and then they merge in the crowd again. Usually this takes place on train stations, but we had one yesterday evening on our main square. Look at the video to see the reaction of the 3FM jocks. It’s in Dutch, so you won’t understand what they are saying, but I think the video says more than one thousand words:

You’re a vile one, Mr. Facebook.You have termites in your smile. You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile.

Maria Johnson (@bego)

Who would have thought a stowaway would live in the crawl space of his kitchen?

The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

(Genesis 3, 14-15)

There is a lot of confusion about the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. A lot of people think that ‘conception’ refers to the actual conception of the virgin Mary in the womb of her mother, St. Anne. But that’s not what the church teaches. I refer back to the links at the bottom of this post for more details. What is being meant is the infusion of the soul in the body when it is conceived in the womb, according to Catholic Encyclopaedia:

The subject of this immunity from original sin is the person of Mary at the moment of the creation of her soul and its infusion into her body. The term conception does not mean the active or generative conception by her parents. Her body was formed in the womb of the mother, and the father had the usual share in its formation. The question does not concern the immaculateness of the generative activity of her parents. Neither does it concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body. Mary was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin at the first moment of her animation, and sanctifying grace was given to her before sin could have taken effect in her soul.

This is why the angel Gabriel says this to her, when he brings the message of God: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” Mary is full of grace, which is in Greek “kecharitomene”. The tense that’s being used in Luke 1,28 suggests that it is a permanent state. In other words, Mary is full of grace and always has been. Our word “charity” comes from the same root. When we continue reading in Luke, in verse 41 and 42 it says “And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”” In Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Aramaic) “among women” means the highest in a group. So what Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, says here is “You are more favoured (or graced) than all other women (because she was carrying our Saviour). This means, she is more graced than even Eve. She is like the second Eve, in the same way Jesus is called the second Adam elsewhere in Scripture.

In other words, it’s not true that our doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is not to be found in Scripture. It clearly is in the same way as other doctrines are found there, like the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union, adopted by all orthodox Christian, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. Scripture doesn’t speak about “the Trinity” or about an “Hypostatic Union”, but both doctrines are considered to be Scriptural because it’s written in such a way it testifies from the Trinity, for example. In the same way you can see in the Scripture verses I just quoted that Scripture also testifies from the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. Yet it was only in 1854 that the doctrine was made a formal doctrine. The reason for this lies partly in scientific progress in medicine that was being made. Because scientists found out that the woman does not play a passive role in reproduction (as was previously thought), this discovery helped the Church to understand Mary’s role better.

I already quoted Catholic Encyclopaedia before, to show what the doctrine teaches, but let me make clear what is NOT meant. The fact that Mary was conceived immaculate, doesn’t mean she was of virgin birth. That’s not what the Church teaches. It also doesn’t mean that Mary didn’t need a Saviour. The Church also doesn’t teach that. In Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX affirmed that Mary was redeemed in a manner more sublime. He stated that Mary, rather than being cleansed after sin, was completely prevented from contracting Original Sin in view of the foreseen merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race. This means, that theoretically she could have sinned, but she did not because God’s grace was protecting her against sinning, in order to prepare her to be a worthy mother to Our Saviour.

The feast day of the Immaculate Conception is on December 8, nine months before the feast of Mary’s birth on September 8. In the same way the feast of Jesus’ conception (The Visitation) at March 25 is nine months before the feast of Jesus’ birth (Christmas), December 25. The reason that Christmas is on December 25 has nothing to do with the Winter Solstice (for which December 25 would be the wrong date anyway), but to the mere fact that it’s nine months after the date on which we celebrate the Visitation.

I hope this blog post was helpful in understanding more about this Solemnity, in many parts of the world a Holy Day of Obligation, so go to Mass today if you can. And I hope it helps to appreciate our Blessed Virgin more.

Links:

• Catholic Encyclopaedia about the Immaculate Conception
• Wikipedia: Immaculate Conception
• EWTN about the Scriptural basis of the Holy Rosary (and the Hail Mary)
• Wikipedia: Hypostatic Union

A few weeks ago St. Nicholas’ official arrival with the steam boat from Spain was broadcast live on Dutch TV. Nobody knows why the Bishop of Myra in Turkey – whose remains lie in Bari, Italy – went to Spain. In the same way Santa comes from the North Pole and has a lot of elves to help him out, St. Nicholas comes from Spain by steam boat accompanied by many helpers: Black Peters. Before World War II there was only one Black Peter, but the allied forces “invented” a lot of extra Black Peters, so they could help out bringing the Saint in with many helpers and have a lot of fun with it. The original Black Peter was an enslaved devil who was very scary for kids, but after World War II that picture was revised by the Allied Forces. In other words: Black Peter was only black because of the sooth of the chimney and maybe because of the fires of hell. He is not of the black race. At least originally.

This changed when the Dutch lost more and more of the Catholic tradition and the feast started to secularise more. Because Black Peters were perceived to be Black Slaves, rainbow coloured Peters were invented to be more politically correct. They were a big failure, kids didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They wanted the “real” Black Peter. It’s adorable to see the brutal honesty of kids who are still oblivious to the idea of being political correct. After the plans of the enlightened, political correct organisation committee regarding the rainbow-coloured Peters failed, they targeted the old man himself: since the cross is a sign of Christian oppression in their eyes, people would most certainly offended by it and it had to be removed from the poor man’s mitre. Instead, they added the emblem of the welcoming city on it: Amsterdam’s coat of arms has three St. Andrew’s crosses as its main feature, so they added the Patron Saint of Fishermen’s trademark on the mitre. THREE times instead of the one ‘normal’ cross.

This plan also failed, the organising committee was the target of a lot of criticism in the days that followed. Indeed, people WERE offended… by the stupid coat of arms of the city of Amsterdam on THEIR St. Nicholas. Be real. If you REALLY want to de-christianise St. Nicholas, you should let him ride his horse naked, or at least in his underwear, because if anything about the man refers back to Christianity, his clothes are. He walks around dressed up as a bishop who is about to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost or at least one of the martyrs feasts, with his bright red chasuble. He’s very classy wearing the Extraordinary Form (old fashioned) vestments. That cross on his mitre doesn’t make him look Christian, it’s everything the man wears! Believe me Dutch bishops look VERY Catholic when they are wearing their vestments and they don’t have a cross on their mitres. At least mine hasn’t. So it’s just ridiculous what they come up with in these times were political correctness makes peoples’ brain deteriorate or something. I wonder what they come up with next year.