It's funny to hear two people or groups talking past each other. Take the US Postal Service and the Freedom From Religion Foundation going at it about the upcoming Mother Theresa commemorative postage stamp. Both sides get the issue partly right, partly wrong.

The FFRF complains that by issuing a Mother Theresa stamp, the USPS is violating it's regulation against honoring people who are primarily noted for religious undertakings.  I did a little digging, and found this page on the USPS.com web site.  The relevant section would appear to be:

So what was Mother Theresa known for?  Ask anyone on the street who has heard of her, and the response would probably be "working with the poor".  That's it in a nutshell.  Mother Theresa was not primarily known as a preacher, although she spoke with strong religious and moral conviction.  Although she was the foundress of a great religious order who has missions all over the world (including here in Memphis), she is not known primarily as such.  She was known primarily for going out into the streets of Calcutta and gathering up the forgotten people, showing them compassion and supporting their dignity.

It seems to me the FRFF would have more of a leg to stand on if they protested on the fact that she was not really a US Citizen, although she was given honorary citizenship by President Clinton and the US Congress in 1996.

However, they do have a valid point.  "You can't really separate her being a nun and being a Roman Catholic from everything she did," said FFRF spokeswoman Annie Laurie Gaylor to Fox News.  She's right about that.  You cannot separate Mother Theresa's humanitarian work from her Catholicism, because religion drove everything she did.  Even if the humanitarian work is what she's being honored for, that work came about because of her love of Christ.

The USPS countered by pointing out they've honored people before with religious backgrounds, such as Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Father Flanagan.  These men were honored for civil rights or humanitarian work, but they were all informed by their religion.  The USPS is splitting hairs pretty thinly when they say they are not honoring the religious work of these men.  For Dr. King and Fr. Flanagan particularly, while their work might be recognized as good on a secular level, it was religious work built on their faith in God and in Christ.  To deny that is really to deny the work as a whole.

The FFRF really goes off-axis when responding about these previous honorees.  They opposed Fr. Flanagan's stamp but not Dr. King's.  Gaylor is quoted saying that "Martin Luther King 'just happened to be a minister'".   Really?  A man who referenced the Lord time after time in his speeches, who waxed eloquently using language straight out of the Bible (anyone remember the "I have been to the mountaintop" speech--a clear reference to Moses and the Hebrews?), and who helped found the Southern Christian (there's that word) Leadership Conference, "just happened to be a minister".  It seems to me that most of what he did stemmed from his ministry.

If you think about it, it's pretty silly to say that Mother Theresa is not being honored for religious work, because all her work was religious.  At the same time, the USPS is technically still upholding its regulations because most people would recognize Mother Theresa less as a religious figure and more as a humanitarian.  While it's walking a fine line to claim that your not honoring a religious figure for her religious activity, the FFRF is really the group out on a limb with their desire to suppress honoring someone who did great humanitarian work because that work was religiously based.

As for me, I'll be getting my Mother Theresa stamps because I think she should be honored, both as a humanitarian and as a Christian.  So there.

FoxNews.com - Atheist Group Blasts Postal Service for Mother Teresa Stamp

Have you ever been driving, looking at the car in front of you, and suddenly the tail lights, license plate and bumper look like eyes, a nose and a mouth? I'll bet you have. Or have you sat in a chair doing nothing, looking at the wallpaper or the ceiling, and suddenly you can make out a face in the pattern? You've probably seen pictures of rocks in the desert that are famous for looking like a human profile when viewed from just the right place or when the light hits it just right. There's the famous Face on Mars, the sticky bun that looked like Mother Theresa, and the Faces of Jesus and Mary have been seen in everything from clouds, to frost-covered windows, to slices of toast, to candy bars.

We humans seem to be hard-wired to see human characteristics in just about anything. More than anything else, we can see a human face just about anywhere we look. Is it any wonder that ancient peoples found gods everywhere in nature? Stare at a lake or a rock or a tree long enough, and you are bound to see a face in it. It's not a human, so it must be the face of the lake itself or the face of the god that dwells therein. Over time, stories develop about this god. He or she is given a name, an origin, a personality. The god becomes more real to the humans by becoming more human itself. No religion I'm aware of ever developed around worship of an object or a mindless force. The god always had to be built up into a human-like creature before it became worthy of worship. Man created gods in his image.

Perhaps this talent to find persons wherever we look was planted in us by our Creator. We have a personal God who wants us to look for Him, so he planted in us an innate desire to seek out a person when we look around. But God knows that this instinct alone isn't enough. Left to ourselves, we can work out the existence of some sort of god, but we can only cast him into a mold of our making, ultimately ending up with a God that is only a pale reflection of ourselves.

Fortunately, God has not left us alone in our search. In His revelations to Abraham, Moses and so on, God took on a human characteristic such as a voice so that He could tell and show us more than we would figure out on our own. In Jesus Christ, God the Son went beyond assuming a human characteristic or two by becoming fully human Himself. He could teach us, show us, and lead us directly. He gave us a face that satisfies our innate longing to find a person wherever we look in the universe. And He helps us to go beyond our homemade gods and see the glorious truth that, rather than God being a person we've made in our image, we were made in His.

I sparked a little conversation on Facebook recently when I insisted on pointing out that the current decade did not end at the end of 2009, but will end at the end of 2010. Some would call it nit-picking, but I simply call it standing up for facts. There was no year 0 A.D., so the first decade A.D. was from the years 1-10, the second decade was 11-20, and so on down to our present decade of 2001-2010. The same thing happened with our transition from the 20th Century to the 21st. Most of the millennial celebrations took place at the beginning of the year 2000, when they should have occurred at the beginning of 2001.

My understanding is that we can largely thank Dionysius Exiguus and St. Bede the Venerable for the year-numbering scheme that references the Incarnation as the central event, but leaves out a zero or null year.

Now, we like to refer to our decades with names, such as "the Roaring 20s" or "the Naughty Oughties" (I saw that last one in a British publication, and I like it.) However, such a naming convention tends to make the mind thinking of, for example, all the years ending in "0n", thus grouping 2000-2009 into a decade.  This is a perfectly reasonable social convention, but it is no cause to mislabel the decades, centuries or millenia when numbering them.  The "Whiny 90s" might have covered 1990-1999, but the 200th Decade A.D. was 1991-2000.

Again, some don't see any importance to getting it right.  But facts are facts.  To deny them is to slightly loosen your grip on reality.

Today, I read a column by Walter E. Williams, where he touched on this.  I liked this paragraph particularly:

So, we'll see you at the beginning of the decade, a year from now.

Further Reading:

Wikipedia Entry: Year Zero

Walter E. Williams: The Myth About U.S. Manufacturing, on World Net Daily

I had not heard Franz Biebl's Ave Maria before, but now I'm in love with it. Here it is performed by Chanticleer:

If you prefer the sound of female voices, may I offer this performance by the Pro Musica Girl's Choir. I don't know who they are, but I like the sound, and the setting is beautiful, too.

I haven't heard a male-female choir that I thought sounded as good as a single-sex group, but this one is still good (De la Salle University Chorale in Manila).

I couldn't believe it when I first heard about this, but this company produces a skin cream whose key ingredient was harvested from an aborted child:

Now, to base medical treatments on the death of the innocent is horrible enough, but to base cosmetics on it?  That is just sick.

Here are links to two pastoral letters that I want to study soon. The first is from my own bishop, J. Terry Steib of Memphis, TN: Living our Catholicism: That Our Joy May Be Complete.

The second is from Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa: Ecclesia Semper Reformanda (The Church is Always in Need of Renewal)

I got a chance to look at a Palm Pre the other day.  There's a lot to like about it.  Given a choice, I would probably prefer it to this IPhone I'm using now, but I can't believe the things Palm got wrong.

First off is the keyboard.  I could get used to it, I suppose, but it's more like the Centro's and not like my Treo's at all. It's cramped, and it has that lip around it getting in the way of your thumbs.

The biggest problem is the basic PIM apps.  I had been sure that Palm would bring over to WebOS everything good about the Palm OS apps.  Boy was I wrong.  The Treo is a great PIM that is also a decent phone.  The Pre appears to be a better Internet device, but as crappy a PIM as the IPhone.  I use categories extensively on my Treo, and they appear to be non-existent on the Pre.  And what the heck happened to being able to sync to a local copy of Outlook? Synching via wi-fi is nice, but I want to be able to sync to my laptop rather than to a server. Then there's the fact that you can't sync Tasks or Memos to anything!  I've got years' worth of memos that I keep synched between my Treo and Outlook, and I edit them freely in both places.  And they are categorized! I prefer to do a lot of my task entry on the laptop and sync it over to the Treo, an option that does not appear to be there for the Pre.  The Pre, at least, has tasks, which are still strangely missing from the IPhone even in version 3 (why add voice memos instead of a freakin' to-do list?), so it's still better than the IPhone in that respect. 

I'm not moving off of AT&T to Sprint anyway.  Maybe by the time the Pre comes out for other carriers they'll have it ready for real work.

If President Obama and the Democrats really wanted abortion to be "rare", the way they say they do, don't you think they should propose increased taxes on abortions? After all, that's what they propose for just about any other activity they want to inhibit. I'll believe that they want to reduce the number of abortions when I see them giving the abortion industry the same kind of tax and regulation treatment that they give tobacco.

Back in college, one of my electrical engineering professors introduced a mnemonic for remembering how inductors and capacitors interact with electrical current. That mnemonic was "ELI the ICE man."

To make sense of this:

• L = symbol for induction (a property of such devices as solenoids)
• C = symbol for capacitance
• E = symbol for electromotive force (electrical voltage)
• I = symbol for electrical current

The mnemonic works as follows: ELI means that for an inductor (L), voltage (E) leads current (I). So changes to E across L leads to changes to I. Likewise, ICE means that changes to current (I) across a capacitor (C) leads to changes in voltage (E). Confused yet?

Anyway, the thought occurred to me today that the mnemonic has application to the differences between liberals and conservatives. It seems to me that with a liberal, emotional response tends to come before intellectual response. With a conservative, the opposite is true. So: ELI - Emotion in a Liberal leads Intellect; ICE - Intellect in a Conservative leads Emotion.

Nothing profound, but I needed to write it out.