The Christian Vanguard

Someone on Facebook asked me why I think contraception is immoral. This is what I wrote. When asked, “Why think contraception is wrong” we should lay out what our metaethical theory is. What is it that makes a thing wrong in the first place? St. Paul employs the Natural Law approach to ethics in Romans 1:26-27 when he writes, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that when men and women exchange their natural desires for unnatural ones, they do something vile, and they commit a shameless error. So, St. Paul is using basic Natural Law to explain the condemnation of homosexuality. But St. Paul doesn’t explicate the underlying metaphysics, so, allow me to do so. Why is it that when something is unnatural, it is wrong? It has to do with two metaphysical commitments within the Natural Law, first is essences, and the second is teleology. An essence is what makes a thing the kind of thing it is. It is in the essence, or definition, of a triangle to have three sides. It is in the essence o...

Years ago, when I was still a Protestant, I attended a panel discussion at my school on the topic of homosexuality. One woman, a mother of a lesbian, and a professed Catholic, said that a topic that the Catholic Church does not like to bring up concerning homosexuality is that of conscience. Since the Church teaches that we should obey our conscience, and for some, and participating in the homosexual lifestyle is in accord to ones conscience, one should continue being homosexual. This clearly would make some Catholics uncomfortable. So, what's going on here? First, terms. Conscience is our judgment of what is right and wrong, and it is our only contact with the moral realm. This is why we must always obey our conscience, because to disobey our conscience is to disobey what we judge to be right. It is saying that we will to do evil, and we should never will to do evil. If conscience is a judgment of what is right and wrong, it is possible that our judgments can be incorrect. It ...

I often hear this line. "Homosexual attraction itself isn't sinful, but acting upon it is." This is incorrect. It is sinful to act upon homosexual desires, but so is having those desires. For one, it would be strange to say that it isn't sinful to desire something, but it is sinful to satisfy those desires. If it isn't sinful to desire my wife, why would it be sinful to have my wife? It isn't. If it isn't sinful to desire donating goods, why would actually donating goods be sinful? If an act is sinful, then so must the desire for that act. Scripture is clear on this. Romans 1 reads,  Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator ... For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also...

The following is a handout I made for the Newman Bible Study. Use it as you see fit. What Does the Bible Say About: Homosexuality Definition: Homosexuality is the sexual attraction of one person to someone of the same sex. Biblical Data: Genesis 1:27-28 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Genesis 2:21-24 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. Old Words: The expression “male...

So I decided to go see Milo Yiannopoulos at UCSB yesterday. I was really hesitant to do so, and decided not to go, but a few of my friends wanted to go, and they're all losers who don't drive, so, I had to take everyone. I didn't know much about Milo, and I still don't, but I did learn some things. In some of the more, ahem, colorfully conservative pages of facebook that I follow, Milo has been something of an iconoclast, destroying the feminist narratives left and right. But I also know that he is an active homosexual and he is a rabid Trump supporter (even calling him "Daddy"). So, for those reasons, I was never interested in what he had to say. He was, to take a phrase from Lenin, a useful idiot. That was my impression. But I was wrong. A few days before the event, I had read somewhere on these pages I follow but wont name, that Milo believed himself to be a Christian, and a Catholic at that. I dismissed this immediately, and my opinion of him stoppe...

For whatever reason, I've had a lot of dialogue with people who can be generally identified as White Supremacists. They tend to be Catholic Radical Traditionalists, unfortunately, and have this strange fervor for Donald Trump. A part of their philosophy (if it can be dignified by being called such) is that the races, whatever that may mean, should not mix. They justify this by saying it is a preservation of European culture, but of course, European culture, which is Western civilization called Christendom, has no ties to any skin color. These are accidental features. If they mean they prefer people of the same race, that would be fine. In fact, I might even agree with that. I've written before why people tend to marry within their same age group, and I would extend that to class, intelligence, and race. I don't mean we should limit ourselves, but if we have preferences, then we are allowed to act on that.  But what if someone said, "I won't date any non-white...