Dave Armstrong's 150 Reasons I'm Catholic

I'm publishing a book; "Dave Armstrong's 150 REASON'S I'M CATHOLIC." We're months away from sending it to the printer. But I advanced the cover design because we need to print new "catalogs" (actually just a 3 fold brochure), and I wanted Dave's book in it. Rather than write a long post about this, which I would not have done until the book was out, Dave did it for me. So, H E R E' S DAVE.

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2010/07/150-reasons-im-catholic-book-covers-and.html

If you think the cover at right is strange, wait until you see the Protestant version... Dave has an image at the bottom of his blog.

FAMILY TIES Meets CARIAD in Lake St. Clair

We've been sailing in the Great Lakes out of Detroit for about 10 years aboard our 41-ft ketch FAMILY TIES. Our good friends Garrett and Lauren Meyers have their 41-ft sloop CARIAD nearby. And although we've been out in each others' boats, we've never had the boats out together. On Saturday Pam and I were flying out into the lake when my cell phone rang and Garrett announced he was sailing toward us on our starboard quarter. After a while we started taking pictures of each other with our iPhones.  We missed the shot of Pam fending off his boom when we got sort of close to each other.  Click on any of the images for a larger shot.

Canadian Navigator

Took some time Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon to do some sailing. We frequently dodge Great Lake freighters, one of the treats of sailing the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair.  As I entered the Lake yesterday, this is what greeted me. We've seen this ship often as she hauls cargo from the upper Great Lakes to ports in Lake Erie. This day she was headed for Toledo. Double click on image for larger shot of whole vessel. Click HERE for the ship's page at MarineTraffic.com and click on the Long./Lat. to see where the ship is currently located.

What Catholics Really Believe BOOK SURVEY

Would you help us by taking a survey about a book we are ready to print? We've been working on in off-and-on for 3 years. It's finally ready to go to the printer, but which printer and how many copies should we print? The responses to this survey will help us a great deal. Thanks. Click on the following link for the survey, and you'll also see samples of the inside of the book.

TAKE THE SURVEY

Gomez Bodes Well For Los Angeles

This short blog has a deep arc, reiterating some recent sad events in my professional life, and ending in some hope, evidenced by the article accessible by the link in this blog's title.

Mentally, I came into the Catholic Church whooping and crying for joy in the fall of 1997, and formally and physically at the Easter Vigil 1998. The Honeymoon lasted until the late summer of 2009 when I was scandalized by the work of three bishops and their curia in an attempt by over 100 individuals under my leadership to produce a dramatic short movie for Christian television on a pro-life matter. The Honeymoon ended.

The experience heavily reinforced a conclusion arrived at in 2000 that it was the American Catholic bishops that were most responsible for the presence of abortion in the U.S.. There is a natural moral law at work that without correction and strategies biased in action the vacuum will be filled by the opposition. Had the bishops been characterized by backbone they would have long ago avoided what Cardinal Ratzinger and the Early Church Fathers describe as "mute dogs" who, to avoid conflict, let poison spread. It is a characteristic of shepherds that Ratzinger finds "repulsive". (SALT OF THE EARTH, Ignatius, page 82). I like Benedict XVI.

So, I have been more critical of American bishops and I am not their ardent supporter. I have stopped giving money to any diocesans based effort because I've seen up close the power hungry greed of their middle bureaucratizes, and I have a few letters from more than one bishop that speaks directly to or implicates the calumny that runs a muck in the offices of American bishops.

The most recent evidence of this is how the USCCB lately has FINALLY spoken out against the Obama Health Care efforts because of how it funds abortion. WAY too little, WAY to late. About 70 years too late. And we're suppose to think the bishops are moral leaders? I wish it were true.

So, I confessed my grave misgivings to one particular curia leader (whom I know to be conservative and pro life and working herself to a pulp for good causes) who works for Archbishop Gomez in San Antonio. She felt sad for my conclusions and then endorsed her boss as not fitting that unfortunate model.

Now, a couple months later Gomez is appointed to take over for Mahoney in L.A. ... and many of my conservative friends would love to see Mahoney disappear into the woodwork because of his lackadaisical action with respect to orthodox, pro-life, Catholic conservatism.

The linked article (click on the title to this blog) suggests entirely that may happen. Let's pray.

J.W. Westcott II Launch

For years, at the Gregory Boat Basin on the Detroit River, our sailboat (FAMILY TIES) spends the winter on shore, under wraps just a few feet from the J.W. Westcott II and its sister ship and back up the Joseph Hogan. I think these are the only U.S. Mail Boats in history. A Westcott boat has been delivering mail-by-the-pail (on the end of a line) to commercial freighters and other vessels as they pass through the Detroit River or 115 years. So, it's been fun getting to know the owners and operators of these vessels. This year I happened to be down at the yard numerous times shooting a documentary for the owner of Gregory (Scott Gregory) of the ship-wrights as they change out the engines on Scott's 52-foot Hatteras. One day I walked over over to look at my boat to see how the covering was fairing in a recent snow storm. It wasn't doing very well, there were holes in the covering and I was down there next week with Pam to put a new cover on it. But the snow was pretty enough that I took some video of the river, empty slips covered with snow and ice, and the Westcott sitting next to us. Just last week I was down there again to record the techs as they lowered two, 1,800 pound engines into Scott's refurbished engine rooms. When we got done, Dan Miller (the yard manager) ran off to help launch the Westcott. I grabbed my camera and tagged along. The snow as gone and the sun was out. The next day Scott wrote and asked if he could be a clip of the Westcott launch on the Gregory Boat Company's Facebook page. I said yes, but didn't realize it would take me hours of editing. We'll it's done, and here's something to remember Detroit, the River, and a little history of a unique aspect of the U.S. Mail and the 115 year old J.W. Westcott Company, located at the foot of the Ambassador Bridge to Canada.

Terrorists Need to be Liberated From a Hellbound God

 They Need to Be Liberated From Their God

Times ONLine Article about Mosab Hassan Yousef 

SON OF HAMAS Book at Amazon.com


The Wall Street Journal -- Weekend Interview
Mosab Hassan Yousef with Matthew Kaminski 

The 'Son of Hamas' author on his conversion to Christianity, spying for Israel, and shaming his family

March 6, 2010

'I absolutely know that in anybody's eyes I was a traitor," says Mosab Hassan Yousef. "To my family, to my nation, to my God. I crossed all the red lines in my society. I didn't leave one that I didn't cross."
Now 32, Mosab is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Throughout the last decade, from the second Intifada to the current stalemate, he worked alongside his father in the West Bank. During that time the younger Mr. Yousef also secretly embraced Christianity. And as he reveals in his book "Son of Hamas," out this week, he became one of the top spies for Israel's internal security arm, the Shin Bet.

The news of this double conversion has sent ripples through the Middle East. One of Mr. Yousef's handlers at the Shin Bet confirmed his account to the Israeli daily Haaretz. Hamas—already reeling from the assassination of a senior military chief in Dubai in January—calls his claims Zionist propaganda. From the Israeli prison he has occupied since 2005, Sheikh Yousef on Monday issued a statement that he and his family "have completely disowned the man who was our oldest son and who is called Mosab."

For the past two years, Mosab Yousef has lived near San Diego, where he's kept a low profile out of concern for his security. The U.S. is currently weighing his application for political asylum, and until his confession to espionage and the publicity blitz that accompanied it this week, only knew him as the son of a terrorist who sometimes attends evangelical churches in California. The book is intended to launch a new life in America.

Mr. Yousef, whose large, engaging eyes sit prominently on an oval face, says he was confused for many years himself, and realizes many people will be as well. His family has been shamed and old friends refuse to believe him. The book, a Le Carréesque thriller wrapped in a spiritual coming-of-age story, is an attempt to answer what he says "is impossible to imagine"—"how I ended up working for my enemies who hurt me, who hurt my dad, who hurt my people."

"There is a logical explanation," he continues in fairly fluent English. "Simply my enemies of yesterday became my friends. And the friends of yesterday became really my enemies."
The first half of his memoir describes a childhood in Ramallah marked by close familial ties and the Israeli occupation. He describes a kind and unusual Muslim father who cooks dinner, treats his mother well, and cares for his neighbors. An imam trained in Jordan, Sheikh Hassan Yousef rises to prominence in their hometown, and in 1986—along with six other men including the wheelchair-bound cleric from Gaza, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—forms Hamas at a secret meeting in Hebron. The first Palestinian Intifada—or uprising—breaks out the following year. Mosab did his part, throwing stones at Israeli settlers and army vehicles.

"Most people heard about Hamas after Hamas started carrying out terrorist attacks," he says now, speaking near his agent's home here in Nashville. "Hamas started out as an idea. Let's say a noble idea—resisting occupation." Those early clashes with the Israelis begat worse violence, and the cemetery near his house began to fill up with cadavers. Palestinians also turned on each other. A corrupt and authoritarian Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) sparred with the rising Hamas and other groups. All of them used accusations of "collaboration" as an excuse to torture and kill rivals or the weak.

Mr. Yousef traces his awakening to his first sustained exposure to Hamas cruelty. In 1996, he was arrested by the Israelis for buying weapons. He says he was beaten and tortured badly in custody. It was then that the Shin Bet approached him. He says he thought about becoming a double agent. "I wanted revenge on Israel," he writes. But when he was sent to serve his term at the Megiddo prison in northern Israel, he says he was more shocked by the way the maj'd, Hamas's security wing, dealt with other prisoners.

"Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people!" he writes. The Muslims he met in jail "bore no resemblance to my father" and "were mean and petty . . . bigots and hypocrites."

By agreeing to work with the Shin Bet, he got out of prison early. He says he was curious about the Israelis and fast abandoned his idea to become a double agent. Though he took money from Shin Bet and stayed on their payroll for a decade, his handlers in the early years didn't ask much of him. They encouraged him to study and be a model son. His code name was the Green Prince: green as in the color of the Islamist Hamas flag, and prince as the offspring to Hamas royalty.

During those quiet years he met a British cabbie in Jerusalem who gave him an English-Arabic copy of the New Testament and invited him to attend a bible study session at their hotel. "I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about," he says in "Son of Hamas."
As a spy, Mr. Yousef wasn't fully activated until the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. A few months before at Camp David, the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat had turned down the Israeli offer of statehood on 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital. According to Mr. Yousef, Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention. So he sought out Hamas's support through Sheikh Yousef, writes his son, who accompanied him to Arafat's compound. Those meetings took place before the Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the second Intifada. It came when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Mr. Yousef's account helps to set straight the historical record that the uprising was premeditated by Arafat.

Mr. Yousef tells me that he was horrified by the pointless violence unleashed by politicians willing to climb "on the shoulders of poor, religious people." He says Palestinians who heeded the call "were going like a cow to the slaughterhouse, and they thought they were going to heaven." So, as he writes in the book, "At the age of twenty-two, I became the Shin Bet's only Hamas insider who could infiltrate Hamas's military and political wings, as well as other Palestinian factions."

Mr. Yousef claims some significant intelligence coups for himself, and he says he isn't telling the world everything. Early on, he was first to discover that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group born during the second Intifada, was made up of Arafat's guards, who were directly funded by international donors. He says he found the most lethal Palestinian bomb maker and foiled assassination plots against President Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, as well as a prominent rabbi. He says he broke up cells of suicide bombers about to attack Israel. And he helped convince his father to be the first prominent Hamas leader to offer a truce with Israel.

His handler—a "Captain Loai," now retired from the Shin Bet—corroborated many of these stories to Haaretz. The paper said the Shin Bet considered Mr. Yousef "the most reliable and most senior agent."
Mr. Yousef strains to justify himself, but ultimately "the question is whether I was a traitor or a hero in my own eyes."

So we're back to why?

The motivation, he says, was to save lives.

"I'd seen enough killing. I was a witness to lots of death . . . Saving a human life was something really, really beautiful . . . no matter who they are. Not only Israeli people owe me their lives. I guarantee many terrorists, many Palestinian leaders, owe me their lives—or in other words they owe my Lord their lives."

He says he used his influence at Shin Bet to get the Israelis to try to arrest Hamas and other Palestinian figures rather than blow them up with missile strikes. He says he saved his father from the fate of Sheikh Yassin and other Hamas leaders whom the Israelis killed by secretly arranging to have him arrested. "I know for sure that my father is alive today, he still breathes, because I was involved in this thing," he says.

Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion. He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.

"I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn't leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it's a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.

"I'm not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can't deny they came from Christianity as well."

Mr. Yousef says he felt burned out and decided to stop working for the Shin Bet in 2006, against their wishes. He made his way to friends in southern California whom he'd met through bible study.
As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Do you consider your father a fanatic? "He's not a fanatic," says Mr. Yousef. "He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.

"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."
These are all dangerous words. Of the threats issued to his life by Islamists, he says, "That's not the worst thing that can happen to you. I'm OK with it, I'm not afraid. . . . Palestinians have reason to kill me. Some Israelis may want to kill me. My goal is not to defeat my enemy. It is to win over my enemy."

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

Pitney Bowes MailStation 2 Ink Cartridge & 2 x 4 Mailing Labels

Anyone need some 1/2 price, but brand new (in shrink wrap) 3M 2x4 inch mailing labels (1,000) and a Mailstation 2 Ink Cartridge? They're yours for 50% off.

We're constantly attempting to improve service and reduce cost. That has resulted in a few extra office supplies that Office Max won't take back because I purchased them more than 30 days ago. Never mind that I was going to buy even more stuff. Such attention to customer irritating rules lost them some business. But now you have a chance at a couple items that are not $40 but $20, and not $20, but $10... and I'll pay the shipping.

Send me an email at "sdw AT stanwilliams.com".

Haiti Destruction, VooDoo and Catholic Leaders as Mute Dogs

At the risk of sounding judgmental (and I am doing that because of the warnings in Ezekiel 33) here are a couple of lines in a story about the devastation in Haiti from the AP:

The destruction of every major Catholic church in the capital, including the 81-year-old cathedral, also was a sign, he said: "When there is all this corruption going on, whose role is it in society to speak out? Isn't the Church supposed to say something?"

Most Haitians are Christian — largely Catholic with a small but growing number of Protestants. But most also practice Voodoo, which along with Catholicism is an official state religion.

As I work on a screenplay for a story based in the U.S. that quote tells of yet another example of what Cardinal Ratzinger recalls in SALT OF THE EARTH (page 82, the Ignatius 1997 paperback edition):

The words of the Bible and of the Church Fathers rang in my ears, those sharp condemnations of shepherds who are like mute dogs; in order to avoid conflicts, they let the poison spread. Peace is not the first civic duty, and a bishop whose only concern is not to have any problems and to gloss over as many conflicts as possible is an image I find repulsive.

 Catholicism and Voodoo both State religions, and both practiced by the people. Are you kidding me? And what did the Haitian archbishop (before he was killed in the wreckage) and other prelates say of this commingling of Voodoo and Catholicism? Did he turn his head afraid of incurring the wrath of the state? Or did he, as the story suggests, not speak up much at all?

And what are the U.S. bishops doing and saying with respect to the commingling of some government approved practices like contraception and abortion? Are they just writing letters, taking votes, and speaking out? Are they being like Obama... "Time for another speech." Or are they leading the culture more dynamically with their lives. Are they afraid of the conflict and the negative press?

Well, take another look at the Notre Dame Cathedral of Port Au Prince above. Maybe the Earthquake was not a sign from God, but it sure comes off as a strong metaphor that something is going on here in addition to a really bad construction code. Or maybe that's no code.  Ah, a code of life. You cannot buck Natural Law. Gravity, like moral truth, is not just a good idea, it's the law. You mess with it, destruction is sure to result.

God's judgment comes, then, comes simply as the natural result from ignoring Natural Law, that is by ignoring the marriage of Faith and Reason.  To the devout Christian there is a certain and healthy paranoia that comes out of the humility of realizing how small, insignificant, and stupid we are compared to God. At the same time there is a confidence in how responsible, significant, and rational we need to be in order to advance human progress. Devout attention to the things of God will motivate individuals to PAY ATTENTION ... to BE WISE .. to ATTAIN KNOWLEDGE, and constantly be on alert for the devil who prowls around trying to screw everything up. The devout Christian cultivates the opposite mindset of the deconstructionists, the cynics, and the skeptics. Those negative mindsets are the result of sin and a willing separation from God and the universe's wisdom.  When we sin we distress, loose hope, stop thinking as rationally, and are blinded toward the progress that can both save our soul and body.

So, here we have this horrible, pathetic destruction in Haiti.  (Yes, give money to trusted relief organizations, as I have done... but go beyond the money. Don't trust in it.) Was it God's judgment as Pat Robertson suggested? Was Pat Robertson's comment as "stupid" as President Obama claimed. While the Rev. Robertson can sound radical and out of touch at times, I suggest that Robertson might have a sense of what God is about more than President Obama who has demonstrated a deeper trust in government to redeem us than in God.

I think God's judgment in Haiti can easily been seen in the rejection of common sense building codes that have been around the English speaking world for over 100 years. Such a rejection of readily available knowledge and wisdom suggests the similar rejection of a devout Christian mindset that marries faith and REASON, and pursues wisdom and knowledge.  God doesn't need to reach out his hand in some "act" of judgment, man simply brings God's judgment himself by ignoring what God has made available and directed mankind to pursue.

It is unfortunate -- no it is utterly tragic -- that skeptics are so ready to reject the things of God, when all progress is based on the gifts of faith and reason that God has given to man. 

FOXNews.com - Czech President Klaus: Global Warming Not Science, but a 'New Religion'

FOXNews.com - Czech President Klaus: Global Warming Not Science, but a 'New Religion'

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