No actually I don’t. I hate his doctrines. David Warren is a tower of intellectual strength and and integrity. On many issues, he represents a voice of long-term sanity, though as a Holy Fool he aggravates many.
My problem with David Warren is that he is not of our species, and does not know it. Consequently on the subject of sex he preaches to some other class of being not commonly found among humans – those who feel no lust. He may share human DNA; but I can scarcely believe it from the way he talks.
In this week’s sermon, he writes:
“A woman, who is not the victim of a rape, has always had that right; and even my Catholic Church recognizes a method of contraception that is quite infallible. Gentle reader may guess what that is. And while it is only a rule of thumb, “no sex without babies, and no babies without sex” does in fact provide adequate guidance for any conceivable life issue.”
How else can you account for his advice in a major newspaper, that the best course was “no babies without sex, no sex without babies”. Wilful perversity? Possibly, but not on this issue.
This is not Roman Catholicism, David. It is just the voice of a man in whose veins no testosterone runs. I am not saying that you lack courage, for clearly you have profound moral convictions and have suffered greatly for them. I am saying that you have critical absence of the vital juices that make humans the most sexual of all species.
A man who explained his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism on the basis that the Anglican Church was getting too gay-friendly has some serious thinking to do about the nature of the priesthood of the Roman Church, the largest gay-owned and -operated institution in the world.
Warren continues:
“This moral injunction (no babies without sex, no sex without babies) is dismissed as “too simple.” Yet merely by trying to draw some alternative line, say between contraception and abortion, we have already found the means to become irretrievably lost. All moral injunctions are simple, and the sinful heart has always cried out for a little complexity.”
Warren continues in the long line of Catholics from Saint Paul and Saint Augustine forward, to find something inherently sinful about the human desire for sex, whether with oneself, or others, whether with the opposite sex, or one’s own. One of the 39 articles of the Anglican religion, written in the 1540s, expresses it thus.
IX:…..”the lust of the flesh, called in Greek, phronea sarkos, (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized; yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.
If lust be something not subject to the law of God, one asks how it is different from the production of bile or hemoglobin, or the production of neurotransmitters or snot, or any other bodily function. And if lust is subject to the will of God in the same way as other bodily functions and processes, one asks how or why it has the nature of sin.
Sex is how we got here. I mean more by sex than by how we were given birth. I mean sexual selection, how you chose your mate and how you were chosen, is the only means of evolution directed enough, intelligent enough, discriminating enough, to take us from furry-faced bipeds under the plains of Africa to listening to Mozart under northern stars, dining on food with cutlery and table cloths, in the space of 30,000 years. Read Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind for a more complete exposition of this argument. To place in sexual selection the burden of sin is a portion of traditional Christian doctrine that we have all walked away from, for many profound reasons.
All but David Warren and his lonely band of traditional Catholics. May God bless them and preserve them, for they have been made crazy. Our revenge shall be to outbreed them.