But you do degrade yourself. That girl had nothing to do with your morality. She merely verbally condemned you. Rather than laughing about her, you decided that you should appropriate her designation of you as your essence, your banner, your armor? Is that not what we should avoid in life—to eschew allowing another person to define how we feel about ourself? You present yourself as a person who thinks she is a slut. Do you believe some people are sluts? (Yes, you do beecause you’ve just defined that girl as a person who sleeps around.) So why do you promote other people’s impression of you by parading that interpretation as your image? You think that the reader/viewer is supposed to see the irony that other people think you are a slut when you iconographically pretend that you are? Is this also supposed to be your saying “I’ll be however I want to be, and you can all bug off if you don’t like it, and if it gets you angry, well here’s another picture of me naked, and here is some more verbal profanity?”
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It isn’t working. You are making an idiot of yourself. You are here on a Roman Catholic site. One of the saints, Thomas Aquinas, valued human intelligence as evidence that God exists. You are obviously intelligent. By destroying yourself online you are disqualifying yourself in God’s and the world’s eyes. Please believe me: what comes over is not your brain, but only your emotions. All day long you have to defend yourself like you are doing now. This plays out as sad. You are meant to be worth more than that.
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I don’t want to know your real name. What you typed is probably not your real name (you are surely too streetwise to risk putting your real name out here on the Internet, which would prove that you do indeed “know” how the Internet “works”), but you typed some made-up name in order to attempt to prove that you have nothing to hide, not the least of which is your identity in order to prove that you are a stand-up person. But if this is your real name, please delete what you wrote. You should never endanger you and your family like this. Doing so shows that you do not “know” how the Internet “works.”

I detect that you want others to believe that you are unfairly judged, like the ex-Wall-Street raider with the sudden heart of gold, who can’t shake off her past because people keep reminding her of it. To show that we have unfair preconceptions of you, you claim that you help many people (more than I could “ever dream to”), while we probably do not. How do you know how many people I influence? That’s mighty presumptuous of you. I am a father of five kids, two of them autistic stepchildren. I am a volunteer relief worker. I have helped thousands of people. You appear to want to be making an argument that Roman Catholics are too wrapped up in doctrine and defending our church that we are too self-absorbed to give charity. I would not be so fast to make such a contention, especially by using your own life as a comparative example. The fact that you advocate for abortion evinces that you are actually *hurting,* not *helping* people. Abortion is murder, and your words say that it is OK to have abortions (ie, to commit murder). You betray yourself.
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Regarding the good things that you do, I am very glad to know about them. Please don’t quote me to say that I said you are a “slut.” You instead present yourself as one. I would not tolerate one of my sisters or daughter presenting themselves in this way. If I take action, it is because I would *judge* myself as malfeasant and uncaring if I did not take action. As a matter of fact, you are the one calling yourself names and showing your image illictly. You invoke Matthew 7:1 (“Stop judging that you may not be judged”). But please understand that if we did not counteract you and expose you here, that we would have to face God for allowing you to proceed her as you have. There are many more Bible verses to overturn your idea that we are “judging.” Here are a few:

“Say these things. Exhort and correct with all authority. Let no one look down on you.” (Titus 2:15)

“This testimony is true. Therefore, rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith.” (Titus 1:13)

“Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.” (Ephesians 5:11)

“Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage–with great patience and careful instruction.” (2 Timothy 4:2)

“Them that sin reprove before all: that the rest also may have fear.” (1 Timothy 5:20)

Why do you portray yourself as being so ugly if your real life is filled with these good deeds that you do? Are you trying to illustrate us as being stupid for “judging” you, while you provide advocacy for murder, and engage in reductio ad hominem and ad absurdum rhetoric in order to sidetrack arguments against abortion into your own online holdings of court?

You stereotype yourself as a “slut.” I agree with you that stereotypes are awful. I never used a single one regarding you. You use them against yourself and your own writing. Sorry, but your rhetoric fails here.

You engage in reiki; you subscribe to the high order of hippie philosophy; you role-play (LARP); you do the legwork for attorneys; you try to change people’s backwards views through political activism; you like video games; you blog; you counsel the adult offspring of alcoholics… But you are pro-abortion. You are doing yourself in.

You call upon your outrage regaring our rebuking you who is so interesting, charitable, and well-rounded. Your good points are not what you have served up to us. You gave us a pro-murder stance, tried to poke holes in our pro-life arguments, and showed your unclothed self as a person fatuously posting the flag of her sovereign will. You think that by illustrating yourself as benevolent post-facto is supposed to shame us for reprimanding you pre-facto? Sorry but you served us up some nasty stuff about yourself in the attempt to expose us as being uncharitable and negative.

And yet here you are imploring me to see you as a good person. Funny, I thought you were worse than that; I thought your fatuousness would have no limit. I mean I didn’t think you would want to be seen as good at all, or just be nasty in your reply. Apparently I have dealt with persons exactly like you on different days when they weren’t so contrite or yielding, or with people who behave altogether evilly. So maybe, like you say, I should soften? Nope. You are still full of mischief. You are trying to impress upon us that our dogmatism and pigheadedness have brought enmity unfairly upon you. But that’s a ruse that is not going to work. You aren’t merely a pro-abortion person. Your modus operandi is not mere rhetoric. You supply the reader/viewer with twists of the truth, profane imagery, and snares that you are just another victim of the unfair mores of society and a lone torch-bearer for the oppressed and underserved. A woman who has sex should realize that the world is filled with the evils you point out in your arguments before giving in to her passions. Her taking ownership of her decision, or even of the unfair circumstances beyond her will (even of rape) that caused her pregnancy is what makes her better as a person. There are many women who have decided to have their children despite horrible circumstances that you and your pro-abortion friends never make mention of. They are better people than most of us, no matter how much you try to urge people that they are only hurting your movement. It is my prerogative to help them, because my religion, Roman Catholicism, urges me to do so. You don’t. You also don’t urge people to adopt orphans whom you would rather were aborted. You don’t urge people to bring children into the world at all. Only to limit population growth. Being that an unborn child is a human life, yes, this little difference of opinion is what makes people—even we burly stuffy males—to try to prevent people from murdering them. If you believed that an unborn child was a human being you would probably be formidable in trying to defend its life. I have a certain feeling about you in that regard. However, you only care about yourself and your opinions, and how people feel about you, and whether we are judging you. You have compassion for nobody but yourself when your back is against the wall. I know a lot of women whose back is against the wall when they decide to have their baby. They are much better people than you or me.

Merry Christmas, by the way. Mary was against the wall when she decided to have her child, too. If you celebrate Christmas, remember that she was a woman who was impoverished, an outlaw, thought to have been impregnated out of wedlock, and a refugee. She was willing. You are not. But many pro-abortioners celebrate Christmas, anyway. That’s really interesting. I think they need more information.

So the road to grace is to escape from responsibility and teaching others how to do it? Just because you had awful parents? Just because some parents don’t have the money or time? Just because you decide that a child’s destiny is going to be unhappy? Who are you to remove the free will from a developing life? I had a lousy childhood, just like you had a lousy childhood. But now I have five children. Would my children’s grandparents say, when they are playing with my kids, that the should have aborted me? No, Tara (or whatever your name is), the road to grace is having grace under pressure. I think you should stop deciding whether other people should be pursuing their road to happiness, including unborn babies you have nothing to do with, and instead embrace that you are primarily concerned with your pursuing your own.

I have no idea how awful it is to be raped or to suffer the confusion and doubt characterizing pregnancy because of a rape. However, the issue of having an abortion does not become a difficult one at all if the mother does not believe that the baby is a human life inside her, or that she *can* improve her soul by having the child despite the difficulty, doubts, and stigma society would place upon her decision to have the baby

You argue from emotion and I am not going to criticize you for it. I think it is actually a good thing rather than a bad thing, although our catechism warns both for and against the use of emotion, which it calls “passions.” In Revelations 3:16, Christ says, “Because you were neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

Roman Catholics are different from other Christians, because we believe that suffering redeems us. There is a poem by G. Studdert-Kennedy that explains that Christ suffers with you when you are in pain, and contends that if you are willing to take up your cross (have the baby), you will understand the meaning of passion—which is actually found in suffering. I know that this is probably foreign to you, but Roman Catholics are greatly misunderstood and misrepresented for being preachy. And yes, there are plenty of Catholics who engage only in comforts, or in what St. John of the Cross called “Spritual Gluttony” (ie, living only to a nice, unprovoking spiritual experience of worshipping, like those Christians who are in the pew next to you who get offended if your child is making even the slightest of gurgling noises, but who never discomfort themselves to help others). Yes, all religions, just like yours, have corrupt individuals in them. But real Roman Catholics go to great lengths to improve the welfare of others while attaining our salvation, but because of Matthew 6, where Christ forbids us to take credit for our good works, we do not show the good that we do. It isn’t necessary. But if you open your eyes, and research on the Internet, you may find that we do more charitable and spiritual things than any religion in the world. I had to say this, because you give voice only to the contentiousness raised by the people who disagree with or even hate us. Anyway, here is the GSK poem:

When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree,
They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.

When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by.
They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.

Still Jesus cried, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do, ‘
And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall, and cried for Calvary.

In other words, He would rather be in agony in Calvary than be stuck among the uncaring.

And so here I am presented with a person who exhorts me to believe she is a good person. Gee, I didn’t think you had it in you to care about what others think—or about how your children and parents feel knowing that the world thinks ill things about their mom and daughter. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

What do you actually know about Roman Catholicism? A bunch of men “pulling various aspects from other religious beliefs,” you say. You are absolutely righ!. We also occupy rooms of houses and buildings to in order to pray in them! We stole that from the ancient Greeks! We eat food sacramentally like the Buddists. We pray a lot, just like Zoroastrians! And we even have funerals and weddings just like the ancient Hebrews and Romans! So are you also going to argue that we misapprpriated all those ideas as well? Christmas was the converting of the saturnalia feast to be sure. Our church even got its structure from ancient Roman bureacracy (ie, the bishopric, etc.). Indeed it was all pagan before we convalidated it all. Sorry if we aren’t creative enough for you. But then again, didn’t founding Reiki master Usui get a lot of his ideas from Shintoism and Taoism? And isn’t a great deal of the meaning of Reiki lost because Hawayo Takata diluted it in order to make the practice more available and palatable to Americans and Europeans? Or do you want to argue that these “pulling [of] various aspects” are merely thefts rather than upgrades and improvements? Are you sure you are practicing true Reiki or a westernized version?
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Please take a look at the following excerpts from the Roman Catholic Bible and also the catechism, when you think about emotion, modesty, and profanity.

PROFANITY:

“Avoid profane, idle talk, for such people will become more and more godless.” (2 Timothy 2:16)

Please, Tara, stop cursing. I beg you. Stop. What gets me is when somebody with a brain gets it lost the flames ignited by her emotion. This leads me to where the Catechism makes warnings and assurances about emotion:

PASSIONS AND MORAL LIFE:
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“1767 In themselves passions are neither good nor evil. They are morally qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage reason and will. Passions are said to be voluntary, “either because they are commanded by the will or because the will does not place obstacles in their way.” It belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be governed by reason.
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“1768 Strong feelings are not decisive for the morality or the holiness of persons; they are simply the inexhaustible reservoir of images and affections in which the moral life is expressed. Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, evil in the opposite case. The upright will orders the movements of the senses it appropriates to the good and to beatitude; an evil will succumbs to disordered passions and exacerbates them. Emotions and feelings can be taken up into the virtues or perverted by the vices.
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“1769 In the Christian life, the Holy Spirit himself accomplishes his work by mobilizing the whole being, with all its sorrows, fears and sadness, as is visible in the Lord’s agony and passion. In Christ human feelings are able to reach their consummation in charity and divine beatitude.
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“1770 Moral perfection consists in man’s being moved to the good not by his will alone, but also by his sensitive appetite, as in the words of the psalm: “My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.”
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I have enlisted the aid of the Catechism to show you that your outrage can be used to good, while it is possible that, although you share the same analyses that a good person has (eg, not wanting a pregnant woman to suffer) that your solutions should become the same as a good person (ie, to keep the baby). Abortion is therefore caused by a person wanting to flee the emotions associated with agony. Instead, agony can both redeem and enrich a person. Why did Christ die for us, after all? Or, why are there Five Reiki Precepts? Wouldn’t it be easier just to steal, fornicate, lie, kill, and get drunk rather than to undergo the agony of resisting these evils when it would alleviate a lot of pain just to be able to practice them? But because you don’t believe that abortion is killing, the Five Reiki Precepts do not apply here, in your opinion. That is sad and wrong.
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MODESTY:
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“2521/2522 Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden. It is ordered to chastity to whose sensitivity it bears witness. It guides how one looks at others and behaves toward them in conformity with the dignity of person and their solidarity. Modesty protects the mystery of persons and their love. It encourages patience and moderation in loving relationships; it requires that the conditions for the definitive giving and commitment of man and woman to one another be fulfilled. Modesty is decency. It inspires one’s choice of clothing. It keeps silence or reserve where there is evident risk of unhealthy curiosity. It is discreet.”
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I didn’t like it when my sister used to portray herself on Facebook as a floozy, thinking that she was only showing off her gym body. Her imagery used to lead to a lot of misunderstandings. She stopped presenting herself that way. And now her life is simpler.
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At this point, you probably see me as some pathetic version of Darth Vader, asking you to “join us” as he outreaches his hand to a wounded Luke Skywalker. But do you remember when Azal tried to destroy Dr. Who? Remember how Azal could not understand that Jo Grant was willing to sacrifice her own life rather than to allow the doctor to be killed? And remember how Azal’s own power was turned against him in his confusion over how somebody could be self-sacrificial? To me this is a metaphor for a mother giving up her own security and comforts so that her baby could be spared. Saint Gianna Berretta Molla died so that her fourth child could be born. She knew she would die in childbirth, but she gave birth to her child anyway. Why doesn’t the media mention people like her when it declares that Christians are waging a war against women. Among Gianna’s last words, spoken to her sister, were said to be, “If you only knew how differently things are judged at the hour of death! … How vain certain things appear, to which we gave such importance in the world!” Sounds like a lot more selfless than what is prescribed even in Buddhism. As a matter of fact, it puts to shame just about anybody who claims that Christianity is anti-woman. People like Gianna are not out parading how wonderful their good deeds are. They don’t have Facebook accounts. They don’t record songs. But their offspring are everywhere. My own mother was told that I was going to die when I was born. As I lay in her arms with my blue skin, and the hospital staff was unable to find a priest, she baptized me herself with some nearby water. This act is unheard of in the Catholic Church. But my baptism actually counted and it is on record in the diocese as a valid one. Gee, that doesn’t sound like the rule-oriented staunch austere priggish church that Henry VIII and Martin Luther and Sandra Fluke have rallied against. My mom’s pregancy was extremely difficult, by the way, and she decided to have me nonetheless. My childhood and young adulthood were horrible. I was abused. I made mistakes and failures constantly. I was near suicide many times. I would have been a good poster child for a “fetus” who should have been aborted. And yet I am here, raising my children, taking care of my wonderful and beautiful Roman Catholic wife, doing relief work for the poor, and meanwhile trying to convince some sad, quarrelsome, contentious, vexatious, profane woman to end her pro-abortion views and come over to my side. I don’t believe that I can do it.
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Can you please make some concession toward me? Just one? Please.
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I’ll make one: You aren’t ugly but you have good inside of you. I can feel it. I just want you to stop presenting yourself this way. I am sorry I called you ugly (but I am not sorry that I meant that your behavior was ugly).
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Now can you please stop doing something—just anything—even if it is just ceasing the naked imagery, or the profanity, or just reflecting what I wrote here rather than spending that time to think up specious arguments to put on this pro-life site. Maybe tomorrow you will start to see a “fetus” as a human being. But maybe you can just start, for now, to change at least something? I am not going to apologize for anything else. You are very rascally and if I give you an inch, you’ll probably take a whole foot!
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Seriously: please?
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- Mike D.

Surprise! I’m back. You know, I made a mental note to reply to your posts from way back in December, but I had a great many things to take care of and I could not even remember your screen name in order to search for these posts. So, what I been doing?

I have been fixing up my house. Working hard. Feeding the poor. You approve of those things, right?

Oh, wait, I also have to confess to performing some behaviors that you find very controversial and which threaten your mindset, and which you attack all the time: Taking care of my five children. Having a wonderful Christmas. Going to church. I even adopted another child. Oh, didn’t you accuse me of never having the morality to adopt a child? And were you not hypocritical enough to say that I ought not to criticize you because I don’t know you? And yet you said I would not be willing to adopt, and yet I am! I guess your logic didn’t pan out.

See, I finally read your last two comments. You love the straw-man rhetoric—you know, that verbal means of distorting or oversimplifying your opponent’s position so that it can be refuted? You accuse me of slut-shaming and forcing my religion on you.

Well, all I did was suggest you read the Bible, and try to enlighten you to the error of your ways. I didn’t even force you to read my posts. I guess you forced yourself.

As for slut-shaming, you shame yourself. You see, nobody here actually agrees with you about your defition of “slut” and your outrage about it; you are on a Catholic Web site, trying to *force* your beliefs on everybody here. You received criticism and disagreement. Your outrage is unsound because you are accusing me of doing the very thing that you set out to do.

Really, what do you actually do all day long that would help you to influence us Catholics to see the error of our ways? You rant—professedly so. Yes, actually I have witnessed this on your Twitter page, because your link is placed at the bottom of the notification about your comments. You also say that you have a lot of sex and that you strip—or used to strip, or something like that. By comparison—although your writing about your way of life doesn’t say the same about you, we help the poor. We adopt children. We refuse to kill human life in the womb. And like it or not, although sex offenders have malingered in our church, and some wars and bloodshed and inquisitions have been caused by us, we have managed to survive quite strong for thousands of years, while decadent civilizations never do. In the process, we have helped and inspired a great many more people than you give us credit for. Our writing and traditions will continue to influence and inspire, while principles of less merit, virtue, and discipline, all tend to get consumed. We see bad regimes fall all the time, don’t we, and they all started out with the idea that whatever popped out of the human brain—brains like yours or mine—was worthy of starting an entire culture around. You see, it is not because we are evil preachy hypocrites that we survive as a church; it is because of our goodness. Oh, you don’t buy that? Well, that would be because you don’t regard the Bible as the Word of God, or the Apostolic Tradition as being ordained by God. Well, we do. So then why are you on a Catholic Web site attempting to convince Catholics that they are wrong by referring to your own values, rather than how we violate our own values and are hypocrites? I think it is because you can’t.

And yet here you are preaching about how great your idea of “freedom” is, which you implore us to believe protects a woman’s rights. You use reductio ad absurdum to ridicule opposing viewpoints. You rave a lot and your paragraphs always come down to the same conclusion: we are in error but you are not because you are the only person in a sea of backwards stuffed shirts who is worldly enough to defend a woman’s right to choose.

You are upset that you believe we cannot see your idea of the sovereignty of the “self,” of the “individual.” Well, we do get your point. We just don’t disagree. God comes first.

But you don’t stop there. You try to call us out on our hypocrisy—our alleged attempt to hold ourselves as being better than people who preach feminism, who are “pro-choice” (when they are really pro-abortion), and the majesty of freedom of choice.

But we actually do believe in the sovereignty of the self. We differ from you, because we call it “free will.” We believe that your way of life is not free because you cannot see past yourself. Your idea of “higher power” is an illusion, we realize, because that “higher power” is only your selfishness pretending to be God (or one of your gods); I am sure that you actually believe that this almighty being to which you say you subscribe receives no praise or tribute, other than the pleasures you allow yourself (not to say that you, in order to live your philosophy or religion or whatever you call it requires tribute or any practice or tradition in order for you to follow it purely). But if there were no United States, and you were living in a state of anarchy, you would probably abandon your oath of individuality by adopting the ways, tribalisms, or ethos of a group in order to survive. Do you really think that the Tara Way would get you by in a world where there were no laws or government? Everybody has to serve somebody, I guess. We, as Catholics, realize that there is more to life than the United States—God, to be precise. That’s our point of view. Not yours. We realize that. I presume I should wipe the dust from my feet and move on. (Oops, I just quoted Matthew 10:14!)

Incidently, thank you for pointing out to me that I don’t know how the Internet works. You are certainly an expert on the Internet. I hope I one day get to be as accomplished as you are. Then I will be able to spend voluminous amounts of my time on the computer. I can hardly wait.

You have to understand that we believe that what you are supporting is disgusting. What I am coming to realize is that you spend a great deal of your time issuing these views online rather than partaking in the act of charity—which although I am not criticizing you for (because doing so would not even help)—is another reason why you are different from us, and represents what I find to be the most offensive about you. If you had a clue what selflessness and charity are like, you would not act like you do, and no, there is no chance—not even one iota—that you could ever convvince me in your current state that you are a charitable selfless person in any meaningful way. Yes, like it or not, we are going to tell you that your choice for how you live your life is offensive.

We are also free to say that Sandra Fluke behaves like a whore. That’s just too bad if it makes your blood boil. This is our site, not yours. We might also go on your site and say so. But you would welcome our doing that, and it would only encourage you to engage in further bad rhetoric.

It is also too bad for you that we want to create anti-abortion legislation and that because you oppose our wanting that, you disdain our saying that you are pro-abortion. If you were pro-choice, you would not oppose our right to create anti-abortion legislation. And as a matter of fact, it is too bad if you don’t like that we don’t agree with your idea of “free rights” for women. You say you never had an abortion. If you had one, you would realize that you just destroyed your freedom of choice—in addition to killing a human being.

As far as my getting a tax break because I am married with kids, that is also too bad. If you really think that tax breaks amount to the respect that this nation should give a family—rather than the mockery and disenfranchisement that we are increasingly experiencing, along with our being deprived from most of the levity and inclusion that we once experienced when we were “free” (like you), you are kidding yourself. The difference between us and you appears to be that you think that we think we deserve these tax breaks. Sorry, but they just are as they are, just like our dwindling sense of honor in the eyes of people who believe that we are full of baloney for our so-called preachy-ness. Sorry, but if you became a parent, you would know that you are of higher honor than people who only act on their own behalf. This isn’t preaching. These are words of the highest social value coming from a parent—yes, mostly because I just happen to be one. If you become a mother, then you will not accept somebody denigrating you as “mom” merely for voicing your opinion about how they could live their lives better as you do when you derisively call me “dad” with your reductio ad hominem rhetoric (just because I am Catholic and a father and opinionated, I surely am trying to trample on your rights). But you are getting your tubes tied. So therefore you’ll never understand what you are disagreeing with or be able to actually use our own logic to prove us wrong. Again, it’s too bad that we feel this way. You are out of your league here, Tara.

As for your holding the torch for freedom, and defending people’s rights to say whatever they like, I would not presume to think that you are Evelyn Beatrice Hall. She said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” You are far beneath her writing. If you want to be taken seriously as a woman writer, you had better learn how to write and argue effectively. Or else, you will influence nobody except for the people in your own enclave. You have convinced none of these Catholics that they are wrong. It isn’t about logic and facts, anyway. It’s about faith in our beliefs. You don’t understand that. Getting us to feel stupid and catching us in what you consider to be lies and contradictions is not going to turn us away from our beliefs and our church. It doesn’t work that way. If you really want to influence a Catholic, then become religious, a parent, a caregiver, an almsgiver. I am sorry, but they are really the only people we pay attention to. And if you became such a person, you would not be calling yourself a “slut” or behaving the way that you do (yes, I am referring to your verbal profanities and your sexual imagery). And it’s too bad. Keep ranting. We don’t care.

And insofar as Christianity stealing from other religions (eg, Christmas deriving from Saturnalia and virgin worship), you are absolutely right. We did “steal” that stuff. We admit that we have no clue when Christ was born (and neither do you). But the Catholic church does not partake in the vast festivities that you think we stole. We worship on Christmas. We venerate the Virgin Mary. We do all that because we were taught to see the world as a source of faith rather than doubt. You have now tried to make us doubt that what the world has helped bring us—feasts and veneration of a virgin (which was also paralleled in the pagan Roman vestal virgins) is a source of belief. But if you understood our history and doctrine, or read or listened to anything other than what your culture teaches you, you would grasp that we believe that Christ redeemed the meaning of all of those things you say our church stole in order to build our Church and its traditions. For that matter, December 25 is just a date that we chose. Sorry, but the Vatican already says so. Wrong again, Miss Tara.

When you get your tubes tied, and you get to have all the sex that you want without getting pregnant, and then later you find out how unkind the world is toward women when they age, you will probably want to believe that there is more to life than just your body and your intellect. But then again, that’s just our belief—in God and Jesus Christ, and our having less faith in a world that is not saved by Jesus Christ. And it’s too bad for you that we do. I am sure that when you are my age you will look deeper into religion or maybe just philosophy and will order your life with rituals or the morals you famous claim to fatuously eschew, but you will probably have too much pride to admit to yourself that you are becoming so. Oh, I guess I am insulting and “slut-shaming” you again because I am applying my own experience to you. Could it be that I am an older more mature person, who just happens to be a Catholic father and husband—who is advising you. And it’s too bad that I just advised you. If you don’t like it, stop reading. It’s just too bad.

And yes, you are shaming yourself.

Is it possible that you could find something better to do with your spare time than spend that time blogging on the Internet? It is mind-boggling how much life you have missed between the last time we communicated when I look at your Twitter page. There must be an encyclopedia’s worth of stuff that you put on there over two months. All dedicated to you and your ideas. Well, I guess that’s too bad for all of us.

You are in my prayers. And that’s too bad, too.