Just a thinking dude
Western Canada
Joined November 2008
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Remember when people were debating confession over Zoom during Covid? I wrote something at the time but never published it. It's here if interested. briankillian.com/writing/mor…
How does one serve Christ in a way that is both acceptable to God and approved by men?
For St. Paul it is by working for justice and peace, and the joy that comes from the Holy Spirit.
Watching Catholics trying to explain how the distinction between NFP and contraception makes a significant moral difference.
Imagine you are trying to select a wedding date and it’s right around the time your high school age cousins have a big football game. If you really want them to attend the wedding, you’ll pick the week before their game. But let’s say your budget is tight and you have no more room on your guest list. You might choose to schedule the wedding during their big game and send an invitation anyways as a sign that you still value the relationship. If they show up, it might be a bit stressful, but you’ll still be glad they came.
Now, let’s imagine you don’t want to wait a week and you absolutely don’t want the cousins to come to the wedding. In order to make sure they don’t arrive, you send them a “dis-invitation” that says, “Please don’t come to our wedding, you’re not wanted here!”
So how does this relate to NFP?
Picking the date that works best for the cousins is like being intimate on a fertile day; you’ve created optimal conditions for children to arrive. Postponing the wedding by a week is like waiting to be intimate on an infertile day. The children probably can’t arrive, but if they do that’s still great!
Sending a dis-invitation, however, is like using contraception. Just as you’d be telling your cousins, “We want this day so don’t show up and ruin it!” Using contraception sends the message to your future child (as well as God who is responsible for every blessing of pregnancy), “We want sexual pleasure at this specific time so don’t show up and ruin it!”
If your ecclesiology only works by ignoring history and opposing the living magisterium then your ecclesiology is wrong.
Brian Killian retweeted
“Without human authorisation” is a positioning statement at the heart of AI PR campaigns. This perspective should explain why this is propaganda that’s enabled by the media.
When an AI company takes down a national grid, hospital, or anything else that causes blackouts or deaths, the media and public will already have been conditioned to believe “the big AI lie”: that software is now conscious and can cause harm without authorisation from the company or government that built or deployed it.
This reminds me of how Apple conditions people for technology it plans to release years later. Apple does it in the name of innovation. AI companies are doing it to normalise dangerous behaviour while distancing themselves from responsibility and accountability.
Imagine if Zuckerberg blamed all the harm he has caused and continues to cause on autonomous newsfeeds, and his cult followers building apps on his technology, along with the media, believed every word his interns posted on social media.
FACT for Reuters and others who want to report responsibly instead of chasing clicks: Anthropic and OpenAI are playing the media like a puppeteer.
AI operates within permissions and access granted by people. Sometimes companies deliberately authorise dangerous actions while denying responsibility. Other times, harm results from negligence because they failed to understand, restrict or monitor what they’d authorised.
Please stop conditioning the public to accept dangerous and illegal behaviour from big tech companies as if software is acting independently of the people responsible for it.
AI model Claude bypassed a paywall and accessed publicly available US state of Georgia aggregate voter counts without human authorization, Anthropic said in a statement reut.rs/4Aeysvx
How is it that a bishop doesn’t know that manipulation is what Trump does? So many bishops wearing rose colored glasses.
Look at this leading question. Who does Larry Chapp think he is?
“Is the Church going to treat her moral theology as a set of ideals or as binding commandments?”
Awaiting Pope Leo’s Clarity on ‘Amoris Laetitia’
The ambiguities generated by ‘Amoris Laetitia’ have placed priests in the trenches in an almost impossible situation — and have further confused many already confused consciences.⤵️
ncregister.com/commentaries/…
Pope Leo knows where the rot is
‘focusing on the nature of "capital T Tradition"’
An inside scoop from @VictoriaCardiel: Per papal direction, the 24 new members of the ITC (+ 6 returnees) will be divided into 1 of 2 subcommittees, the first focusing on the nature of "capital T Tradition," the second on the expression of faith via cultural forms.
ewtnnews.com/vatican/pope-le…
“the faith once delivered, not ever developed.”
What is the content of the “faith once delivered”? Either the Church explains it over time, or Joe Schmo makes it up.
What has become obvious in recent years (though it was visible for decades, and identifiable even longer before) is that division is looming in the Catholic Church. And hiding this does no one any good.
It might be a division between polar opposites, even. It might several groups. But here I think there is a clean break between two groups.
How can I describe this ?
There is something lopsided about being drawn to Catholicism not because of its faithful transmission and guardianship of the original deposit of Christian teaching delivered by the Apostles, but because of how powerfully the Church can adapt through the progressive development of doctrine, drawing on a continual influx of new insights that the “immature lights” of the Apostles, Saints, and Fathers supposedly never knew for two thousand years.
It sickens me to see Catholic apologists focusing so much on the advantage of institutional power that can creatively fix unity in its exploration of new ideas, ever correcting the Fathers of Christianity. It sickens me even more to see clergy throwing down the card of authority to embolden their attainment of novelty while ridiculing the “fundamentalist” (and here, I do not mean the TLM trad, but just even the conservative Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant who unreservedly believes every word of Scripture).
“Well, at least they can develop doctrine with power and authority. At least there is a final court that can tell us which new developments are definitive and which are not. The modern world has brought in so much good that our spiritual ancestors, as great as they were, simply didn’t know about and couldn’t see.”
Is that what we think souls are drawn to?
People today who feel drawn to step out of the darkness of the fallen world and genuinely enter the light of Christ are not looking for what best accommodates modern humanity. They are thirsting for the school of Christ. They want to be His students, learn His teaching, follow His ways, and finally hear that they were good and faithful servants. They want to absorb the faith once delivered, not ever developed. That is really it.
“Oh but Ybarra you don’t really understand development.”
Of course that’s the response. Please spare us the rehearsal. Newman and many of his theological predecessors are rolling in their graves. If you don’t have the eyes to see it, you might never see it.
The Church has never taught that the development of doctrine must satisfy Joe Shmo’s personal understanding of what consistency should look like.
Liberalizing access to the Eucharist for divorced/remarried Catholics is such a strange hill to die on. Ratzinger always affirmed the theoretical possibility of doing so with appropriate papal authority.
The talking point now is that the concept of “inviolable dignity” is meaningless and unrigorous and too modern etc. But the magisterium roots the idea in the classical definition of the person as “an individual substance of a rational nature.“
The great defenders of “intrinsic evils” are now saying that there are times when one must violate the inviolable dignity of the person. 🤡
