``Where the
Bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be;
even as where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church'' Ignatius of
Antioch, 1st c. A.D
For Atheists, Agnostics,
Those Afflicted with Scientism,
and Other Secular-Minded People
Who Are Nasty to Religious Folk
(This page is snarky. The snark isn't intended for all
who are sent here.
If you've been sent this URL and aren't nasty to Christians,
ignore the tone and just read the arguments themselves)
Don't worry;
this isn't a page set up to convert you. Nope, not going there; I'm
guessing you're so incredibly
intelligent, especially after having been
exposed to those three greatest geniuses the world has ever known --
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher -- that my doing
so would be a
waste of time.
Instead, the purpose of
this page is to make some points about your dealings with those of us
who believe in God, because dealing with you materialist types is
getting a tad
tedious.
A
Christian can't even go to Youtube, watch an hypnotically beautiful
video of a murmuration of starlings (see above), and post a sweet,
simple comment
such as, "God is
such a Genius Artist!" without being verbally assaulted.
"Oh, boy, here
we go. Another sky-fairy believing idiot! Religion is the cause of most
of our problems!"
"I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and have more evidence for
his existence than you do for your god!"
"'God'? I think you mean 'nature,' idiot."
"You only believe in god because your parents taught you to or because
you're afraid of death and want to make yourself feel better" (Yes, the
doctrine of Hell is such a comfort!)
And
if any reference is made to creation, to the concept that the
universe was brought forth, ex nihilo,
by God, then come the standard
"You're
stupid" and "You hate science" routines, typically coupled with tons of
assumptions (e.g., "You think the earth is 6,000 years old"). You set
up strawmen, knock them down, and seem to expect Christians to be
bowled over by your fallacies.
Seriously,
pretty much everything you throw at us, so often with an
apparent attitude of extreme hubris, is something we've heard a
gorillion times before. It's not clever, interesting, or
thought-provoking. Worse than that, it's boring.
Seriously, it's tired, man.
Been done. Y'all are in need of a new schtik.
But
even worse than that, it's
mean-spirited. A Christian watches that truly
beautiful video of a starling murmuration, is filled with awe and
pleasure, publicly expresses a simple sentiment of gratitude that such
a thing exists, is harming
absolutely no one in the process -- and
here comes
The Professional Atheist, thrilled to shit all over it. This is your
attitude personified:
I mean, let's say, arguendo,
that you are
absolutely right in your atheistic conclusions. You are the genius of
all geniuses, more brilliant and correct in your beliefs than all of
your ancestors put together. You've read Aquinas and refuted each and
every one of his points with unassailable logic. If Aristotle were
sitting across from you, he'd be ashamed of himself, stuffing his mouth
with Cheetohs so he'd have an excuse not to talk and, therefore, be
thoroughly thrashed by your shocking brilliance and shown up
as the poseur he obviously was in contrast with you (I think we should
cut him some slack, though. I mean, how intellectually
dazzling could he have been
anyway without having been exposed to the great expositions of Dawkins,
Hitchens, and Maher?)
Christians, on the
other hand, are -- well, they're just not
that bright.
They don't -- likely even can't
-- comprehend that there is no God sky fairy and are
too afraid to really look at
the world and just admit
what they really, truly know deep down inside, but can't bring
themselves to say: that everything we see is inherently
meaningless, meaningful only
in terms of the meaning we, as
individuals or a collective, depending on your persuasion, assign to
it.
Christians are like children,
really, but you, the atheist, for
whatever reason, given
the chemical
processes that take place in your
individual brain, are in possession of the sort of mind electro-chemical
brain patterns that the religious -- a type that desperately clings to what amount to fairy
tales, that lives in fear of
death and needs a "security blanket" of
faith in order to get through life intact -- cannot even begin to
grasp.
The Christian is an addict, needing that "opiate of the masses"
Marx wrote about. You, though, are free! Christians believe only
because they want to believe!
Putting
aside the erroneous idea that desiring something means it doesn't exist
(seems to me that most things we desire actually do exist), even if all the above
were so, why
would you take such great pleasure
in smashing the delusions of those poor, pathetic,
not-too-slick-in-the-membrane, silly, junkie
bastards? Doesn't
that strike you as at least highly
uncool if not plain old outright nasty?
You're encountering people you see as not very intelligent and who live
in fear, a people
who at least feel the need for pretty lies to maintain their very will
to live, and your
response is to gleefully
and with great hubris smash
the beliefs that give them comfort as they endure their sad little
lives.
Y'all enjoy pulling the wings off of butterflies, too? What the Hell is
wrong with you?
How is that not different from
getting your kicks out of telling children there is no Santa Claus?
Believing
it right and good to dissuade a
kid from believing in Santa -- where "right"
and "good" are defined by whatever the atheist pulls out of his ass, of
course, no matter how many five-dollar words he uses to describe his morality ethics -- and
going about
it gently, with love and concern, is one thing;
taking pleasure and pride in
it is
quite another. And the equivalent of the latter is what so many
atheists do. They almost seem to lie in wait with the hope
that a Christian says something he considers "dumb," like "God is such
a Genius
Artist," just so they can hop
all over it and talk about that stupid-ass Flying Spaghetti Monster
(which, as an Italian, I call cultural appropriation on).
The sort of attitude shown by such behavior is more than just bizarre
and annoying; it comes
off as truly sociopathic.
I
imagine that some of you might reply with "But Christians are pro-life,
think acting on homosexual desires is
wrong, are against gay marriage,
and think sex outside of marriage
is sinful. That affects ME, so screw
them! They want to impose their morality
on to the rest of the world!"
If that's
your response, I've got two things to say. First, ever notice how so
much anti-Christian nastiness comes down to "They think it's
wrong for me to fuck anyone I want to, anywhere I want to, any time I
want to! And they don't want me to be allowed to kill the biological
conseqences of fucking
just because they see them as human
beings! Waaaah!"? That's so deep, man. (see "What's your pet
sin? Or
what did your
parents do to you?" below).
Second, get real clear on the
fact that the secular-minded want
to
dictate their "morals" onto
the world just as much as
-- nay, MORE than -- any Christian
does. A country's laws either include prohibitions against killing
babies in utero or
they
don't, there's either a thousands-of-years-old,
rooted-in-biology view of marriage that informs
the law or there isn't,
etc. The two cannot exist at the same time. Unless you're an anarchist
(and most of those who claim to be are just Commies who have to be either radically
ignorant of History or just
plain old evil bastards given what History teaches), you want your
version of "morality" to be
given the force of law at least as
much as anyone else does, you
hypocrite.
And don't think "well, a Christian can just not get an
abortion while letting a pro-choice person get one if she wants!" Would
you have said in Germany during WWII, "well, a German can just not kill
a Jew while letting a Nazi kill one if she wants!"? What is it about
the belief that "abortion is MURDER" do you not comprehend?
Has it never truly occurred
to you that if the
Christian sees human life as beginning at conception, he has no real
choice but to be against abortion? He believes that when a human
sperm
and human egg meet, a human being is formed. Do you disagree that it is
human as opposed to, say a
platypus? Do you disagree that it is a being? That it is alive? That it
has its own DNA and, though
dependent on its mother, is a separate being from its
mother? Break it down and it becomes pretty clear that thinking that an
embryo or fetus is "an individuated living human being" is in no
way
some mark of "superstition"; it's science.
It isn't some
horrific form of
anti-woman nastiness for someone to not want to see unborn living human
beings murdered in the womb, is it? I mean, doesn't the opposite
sound a little more intuitive -- i.e., doesn't it actually sound more
like anti-woman nastiness to agree with the idea that it's OK to kill
what are, in fact, living
human beings just because they're in the womb? That's what
they do in
China, man -- hold a pregnant woman down and rip a baby right out
of
her.
And if you're
down
with abortion, how far do you want to go with that line of thought? At
what point does it become human "enough" to warrant protection? Is it a woman's desires alone that
make
an unborn living human being deserving of protection? That seems to be
what the law says, isn't it? Kill a pregnant woman, and you can go down
for two murders, but if Magic Mommy kills the baby herself, it's OK.
Imagine this: Little Miss Pro-Abortion, after a life spent battling for
"choice" and wearing pink pussy hats, finally wants a baby and gets
knocked-up when she's 35, a result for which she spent thousands of
dollars in IVF
money. All of a sudden, that "clump of cells"1
gets a name and deserves
a baby shower with cake and beautiful balloons. That there is "magical
thinking" if I ever heard any.
Princeton's Peter Singer thinks parents should be able to kill their
kids after they're born, too.
I mean, hey, why not? A kid can't live without mooching off of others,
right? And if the kid is unwanted by Mommy, the magical god-creature
who can wish human beings into and
out of humanity, what do you have against it? Don't bring up
adoption as a response; pregnant girls can go that route, too, but the
pro-death crowd still insists that infanticide is the answer.
And here, a
University of Tennessee college student argues
for the murder of 2-year olds because they don't express themselves
well. Why not 3-year olds? Why not have the ability to speak in
complete sentences, with perfectly pronounced R's, as your criterion
for who should live and who should die? What I love best about this
video is his typical liberal arrogance. It rolls off him like a dark,
dense fog that he seems to see as dazzling in its luminosity.
The segue into
the matter of abortion2 was made to make
this
point: the law is a teacher. Our laws shape our culture. And culture
isn't something one can just "change the channel" on. It isn't like a
TV or radio station; it's more like the air we breathe. Someone's ideas of the True, Good,
and Beautiful WILL inform and shape the laws we have. So what makes you
think that Christians have no more of a right than secular-minded
people do to shape what those laws will be? Hell, a large percentage of
you atheists aren't even content to even just leave Christians alone. Catholic
hospitals have to offer contraception and abortion. We have to use nonsensical pronouns
in many areas of the world or get
fined ridiculous amounts of money. Christian bakers have to bake
cakes for gay weddings
(not,
mind you, "Christians have to serve homosexuals". The issue is not and has never been a matter of Christians
not wanting to serve gay people. If a gay guy wanted a birthday cake, I
doubt any Christian baker in the world would refuse him! The issue is
cooperating in bringing about a gay "marriage," which is a violation of
the consciences of many Christians). Oh, and if a Christian calls
bakeries owned
by homosexuals and wants a cake with wording supporting traditional
marriage, guess
what happens? (As an aside, the
push for gay
"marriage," an idea that's about 5 minutes old, is based on a number of
lies -- e.g., that marriage is primarily about luv, that gay "marriage"
is about "equality" even though a gay person could always marry someone
of the opposite sex just as a straight person could, and a straight
person also couldn't marry someone of his own sex just as the gay
person couldn't, thereby showing perfect
equality, etc. Further, the legitimate concerns gay couples have --
e.g., about insurance and hospital visitations -- could've been dealt
with without having to turn marriage into a joke.)
Anyway, when it comes to law and culture, the Christian has thousands
of years
of History,
thousands of years moral thinking produced by some of
our greatest minds (well, aside from Dawkins, Hitchens, and Maher),
and, it's absolutely
arguable, sound sociological and psychological
principles on his side. Also on his side is being able to assert that
his worldview is the one that built Western civilization with its
universities, hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, great cathedrals,
incredible technologies, etc. His worldview is the one that inspired
the most beautiful art the world
has ever seen and heard, from Gregorian
chant, Bach, and Mozart's Requiem Mass to the
works of Da Vinci, Bernini,
and Raphael.
The modernist secular worldview has been building for a mere 500 years,
becoming increasingly more inane, insane, and dangerous as time goes
on, as is evident in the acceptance of usury, the vile and bloody
French Revolution, the early 19th c.
revolutions in Europe, slavery in the West, the treatment of the poor
during the
Industrial Revolution, the ridiculous Victorian view of women that led
to the 1960s madness, World Wars I and II, the hundreds of millions slaughtered
for the cause of Communism, Nazism,
etc. And what does its art look like? "My Bed," rotting
sharks, and Ke$ha's inspiring, life-affirming ode to existence, "Die Young." So-called
"Enlightenment" thinking undergirds all
that rot, and is embraced by those who push
for endless sex (fornication, bestiality, homosexual acts, threesomes,
incest,
pedophilia, polyamory, etc.) and death (abortion, euthanasia). Sex
and death -- the two concerns of the lowest of beasts. If you don't
find it "problematic" that atheism results in a reduction of
civilization to nothing but the two great concerns of worms, then you
are out of
your mind.
Footnotes
for this section:
1 "Fetus" means "offspring," not "clump of
cells," by the way. "Embryo" means "fetus in utero at an early stage of
development." Don't fool yourself by thinking that using Latin words
makes killing babies OK.
If you're a woman reading this and have had an abortion, or if you're a
man who's pressured a girlfriend or wife into having an abortion,don't
despair
and don't hate yourself. There is healing from this, believe
me. Face the Truth and grieve what you've done, but know that
forgiveness is yours if you want it!
Religion
is (insert a
negative adjective here)
One of the most
exasperating things Christians encounter is the attack
on their Faith that begins with some bold assertion that includes the
hidden premise that all religions are the same. "Jesus is nothing but a
myth! He never even lived!1 Religion is just so stupid! If
it were to
disappear tomorrow, the world
would be better off!" is one very typical example of the many types of
this sort of attack. In response, I say:
1)
Religions are not all the same, and one would have to be
mentally-challenged to not see that most obvious of facts. I
mean, seriously, if you can't
tell the
difference between Islam and Christianity, or between Buddhism and
Hinduism, you're blind.
Throwing out such a vague line about the evils of "religion" is akin to
saying something like, "Food is
stupid! People choke to death! And think about liver
and onions! It's a disgusting dish! If food were to disappear
tomorrow, the world would be better off!" Before you start in with "but
food is necessary to life, and religion isn't," see point 2:
2)
Has it never occurred to you that the religious impulse is
culturally universal and that that
fact must have some cause and
function? It's a fact
that
all over the world and all throughout time, man has turned to religious
thought
to explain why he sees what he sees and in order to find meaning and
purpose. Maybe
your
trashing "religion," with no qualifications, and mocking the religious
impulse isn't scientific at
all in that it ignores reality (human nature) -- and
maybe it's highly dangerous. What do you propose in its place? And as
you answer, know that science cannot
ascertain
meaning and purpose; that's not its goal, and no tool
of science is capable of
doing such. Further, it cannot -- it is definitionally unable -- to
ascertain what is Good or Beautiful.
Maybe you're not
bothered by the idea of those you love (whatever that means) being
nothing but "glorified
monkey meat," in essence, beings who'll die and turn into dust to be
seen no more, but most people aren't built that way. Almost no one is.
Given those facts, is it really wise to, mindlessly and with no
selectivity, quash what you see as "fairy
tales," those mere "stories" the religious tell themselves in
order to
find a reason to get up in the morning? Why would you want to position
yourself as the Shiva of religious thought, the Great Destroyer who
ruthlessly and with great pleasure tries to take from people the
source of their peace of mind rather than act as a benevolent person
who thinks
he's more educated and aware than those poor suckers who need their
fairy stories, but understands their "silly" need and wishes them no
harm? Seriously, what the Hell is wrong
with you?
And maybe you're the high IQ, introverted type, someone who's not
dealing with psychological "issues" such as a great sense of underlying
rage or a propensity to fall into deep depression, not given to
addictions or "acting out" in anti-social or self-harming ways. Well,
good for you! But not everyone is like that; in fact, I'd guess that
most people aren't. Take away from them
a sense of purpose and a moral code that keeps those passions in
check, and you're asking for big heap trouble. Maybe you are chugging along doing
OK-fine with your books and your computer at hand, and are content in
picturing the universe and humankind as inherently meaningless. But
what about that 16-year old boy who's been bullied half to death,
doesn't fit in, has shitty parents, and no one to turn to? What about
that girl in her early 20s who's dealing with having been sexually
abused by her grandfather, the results of her behaving promiscuously
because of that abuse, an unwanted pregnancy that stems from that
promiscuity, and, odds are, a lifetime of ensuing poverty? What about
that 40-year old guy who's just gotten dumped by his wife, has had his
children, home, and half of his income taken from him for the next 20
years? Now imagine all of these people believing that life is
inherently meaningless, and seeing human beings as of no more intrinsic
value than rats. Have a clue yet? Do the terms "going postal" or
"school shootings" ring a bell?
You might be thinking, "Well, doing such a thing would be awful." But
you don't have a single, solitary philosophical leg to stand on in
saying that as an atheist. Why shouldn't that 16-year old bullied kid
go ahead and take revenge by shooting up the school? Some possible
reasons:
Because
you don't like
the idea? So what? The kid who goes through with such a plan obviously
liked the idea just fine. What makes your likes and dislikes more
compelling than
his? Do you think the Columbine shooters did what they did because they
didn't want to do it?
Because
he'll "grow out of" his despair someday? So what? He
"grows out of" his teenaged angst and --- then what? Finds an economic
niche for himself in the world, earns enough to attract the attention
of a nice bit of evolved monkey-meat of the opposite sex, and has a 1.6
evolved monkey-meat kids who'll be gone in 18 years if they're lucky
enough to find jobs? What meaning
is there in all that? What are the odds of that happening? How do the
odds of that remote and tenuous reward pay off relative to the
immediate reward of sweet, sweet revenge and the ability to make a
grand statement that tells the world, "I exist! I made an impact!"?
Because
you wouldn't want such a thing to be done to you?
Well,
He's not doing it to you; he's doing it to his classmates.
Even if he were doing it to you, your desires don't
make for a compelling moral argument at all. Stalin wanted a lot of
things, too, and millions of dead people (Christians, which is why we
don't hear about them) were the result.
Even if he were to
do it to you, it wouldn't mean
anything morally anyway, would it? It might mean something to you, subjectively, on
an emotional level, or maybe it'd mean something to your glorified
monkey-meat family after you were extinguished, but why would it mean
anything to him? More
importantly, why should it
mean anything to him?
Anyway,
by
your thinking, his life has no objective meaning, and neither do the
lives of his classmates. So who the Hell cares? Why should he care? Why would you care? Should you care? If so, why? Because you don't like
suffering and think it's "bad"? Well, as so many of your kind are fond
of telling Christians, your dislike of something -- say, the idea of
your loved ones disappearing forever after death -- is just a
fear-based response that is philosophically worthless.
3)
In my experience, vicious attacks against religion qua religion by the Professional
Atheist
types usually come down to one of two things: a) their belief that if
something isn't mathematically quantifiable, it is stupid to accept it
as true (tell that to Gödel), and/or b)
becoming religious and consistent would require their having to change
(or at least try to change) behaviors they
don't want to change. The former is covered in the section, "Scientism,
Materialism, and Other Ways of Knowing," and the latter is covered
in
the section, "What's your pet sin? Or what
did your
parents do to you?"
Check them out...
Footnotes for this section:
1 What's sadly hilarious is that a good
percentage of the atheist types say Jesus never existed at all -- while
another percentage says He did, but was gay.
And another percentage says He did, but was
transgendered. And another percentage says He did, but was
married to St. Mary Magdalene. This sort of crap goes on and on and
amounts to one thing: Jesus either didn't exist at all (in spite of the
Historical evidence, such as textual evidence from Tacitus, Josephus,
Lucian, Pliny the Younger, the Talmud, etc., the actions of the early
Christians, the actions of the early post-Temple Jews, the Shroud of Turin, etc.), but even if He did, He was anything but what the people who
actually knew Him said He is.
Peter, Matthew, Mark, Luke -- the people of the early Church -- walked
with Him, ate with Him, followed Him, but somehow didn't pick up on the
"facts" that He was a gay, transgendered radical feminist Who didn't
exist, but was married to St. Mary Magdelen.
Christ set up the Catholic Church Himself, on the rock of St. Peter,
the first Pope (his bones are buried at the Vatican), who was
followed by Pope Linus, who was followed by Pope Anacletus, who was
followed by Pope Clement, etc., and onward, to the awful Pope Francis
(to see the
list of Popes going back to St. Peter, see this
page). There is a lineage there, and every Catholic priest has been
ordained by a Bishop who was ordained by a Bishop who was ordained by a
Bishop who, going back 2,000 years, ultimately was ordained by one of
the 12 apostles, who were ordained by Christ Himself.
Anyway, in addition to all the aforementioned theories about Who Jesus
is, there's also the "Christianity
is just a big 'shroom trip, man" idea. Seems as if any ridiculous idea will do -- but
Christianity, with its Historically traceable direct lineage going back
to the men who knew Christ personally, won't do at all.
Collectively, Christ-haters and Church-bashers are a joke.
The Atheist
View of the World
Christian
=/=
Protestant
If I had a
nickel for every time I had some version of the following
thrown at me:
You believe that
homosexuality is sinful! Well, why don't you read your OWN Bible and
stop
eating shellfish?
First of all, the Catholic Church doesn't teach that
"homosexuality is sinful" so you're off to a bad start. The Church
sees homosexuality
as a disorder, no more "sinful" than clinical depression is (I grant
that many Christians use very sloppy, unfortunate language when talking
about this topic, and many of us are upset at what's being taught to
our children, how Christian businesses and schools are legally forced
to conform to anti-Christian thinking and practices in order to exist,
and, so, can get a
little mouthy and ticked about it. Because of all that, someone's
wrongly thinking that the Church teaches something different than what
She actually teaches is
understandable to a point. On
the other hand, the Church does have a
number of catechisms, and one'd think it'd be obvious that if someone
wants to find out what the Church teaches, he'd turn to catechisms and
magisterial documents, not to Lurlene down to the Pick-n-Save.).
That
aside, you might be
able to pull such a routine on Protestants, who believe in the concept
of
"sola scriptura," or the "Bible alone"
as the rule of faith. When
you're talking to a Catholic (or an Orthodox), however -- you know,
the type of
Christian who belongs to the Church that's been around for 2,000
years and whose roots go back thousands of years more
to the ancient Israelites -- instead of a member of the 8-year old
Bob's Church O' Jaysus on the
corner -- you're making a fool
out of yourself. Cherry-pick a Bible verse, and I'll ask you if you've
consulted Aquinas's "Catena Aurea" to see what the earliest Christians
had to say about it. Chances are you haven't and don't know what you're
talking about.
Catholics
don't see the Bible alone as the rule of faith. There
are three pillars of
the Catholic Church -- i.e., three things by which we can know what to
believe when it comes to religious Truth: Sacred Scripture, Sacred
Tradition, and
the Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church). All three of
these must be
consistent with one another, and be consistent throughout time (e.g.,
what
was taught as dogma a thousand years ago is just as true today).
Catholics
know that
the Old Covenant
has been fulfilled with the New Covenant. The positive divine law
manifest in the old Mosaic laws are not the same as eternal divine law
and natural law, and
those Mosaic positive laws have no moral force whatsoever now, having
been fulfilled
and perfected by the laws governing the New Covenant. And Catholics
know that Christ set up a Church and gave to that Church the authority
to teach and interpret Scripture (the Church is the very source of Scripture, not the other
way around). So, just stop
with the old Leviticus and single Bible verse-based arguments; you're
showing your ignorance.
Also,
as an aside, not all Protestants are fundamentalist evangelicals,
the type you see on TV screwing people out of money by preying on their
ignorance and desperation. Not all Protestants are brainwashed
Israel-worshiping people who are perfectly happy to send their sons to
die for wars Netanyahu, AIPAC, and the Washington neo-cons of both
parties want. But as disgustingly misled (and as politically dangerous
when it comes to foreign policy) as
that latter type of
Protestant is, most of them, in my experience, are basically kind and
giving people, "good ole boy" and "nice gal" types who deserve a
helluva lot more than your Christian-bashing nastiness.
The overall point is this: "Christianity" isn't synonymous with
"Protestantism." Catholics aren't Protestants and don't believe as
Protestants do. We don't
believe in "the Rapture"; doing things to bring on the end of the world
so we can go up to Heaven while everyone else suffers on earth;
worshiping Israel; that all you have to
do is say the "Sinner's Prayer" and you're saved forever; that people
get sick because they deserve it (necessarily, anyway); that people are
poor because they deserve it (necessarily, anyway); that smoking,
drinking, and
gambling are sins in themselves; that the United States is chosen by
God to
push democracy all over the earth; that the G.O.P. is some sacred
entity; that people choose to be gay; that
"rugged individualism" is the way (we see the family as the key
structure of civilization -- preferably the extended family -- not
the "rugged individual" as in pure libertarianism, or the "collective"
as in
socialism); etc., etc.
Bottom line: if you're American, and what you think you know about
"Christianity" is what you've gleaned from Protestantism,
televangelists, or Hollywood movies, then you don't have a clue about what classical, traditional Christianity teaches.
Galileo
(15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) wasn't
censured because of his
cosmology1; he was censured for not proving his cosmology
while
presenting it as fact and, most of all, for going beyond making
scientific assertions and crossing over into theology.
Copernicus (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543), who also held to a
heliocentric universe, dedicated his book on heliocentrism to Pope Paul
III, who greeted the work with great interest and gratitude. Galileo,
who came after Copernicus,
was a jerk and insisted on delving into the realm of theology, which he
had no authority or expertise to do.
So the
"common knowledge" that Galileo presented a brilliant and proven idea
to the Church, but was treated like dirt (by being confined to a palace) because his assertion
"contradicted Sacred
Scripture" (a collection of Books that the Church reads very
differently than Protestants do) and threatened the Church's
psychological hold on the people is a big, fat
lie.
So,
Galileo
aside, whence comes this idea that the Church hates science? It's a
ridiculous notion given that it's the Church,
along with a handful of ancient Greeks, that invented science. It was a
Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, who came up with the modern scientific
method
itself! Check out this long list of Catholic priest scientists:
-- and keep in mind that those are just the priest and religious
(monks, brothers, friars, nuns, sisters) scientists and doesn't include
lay-Catholic scientists, like Pasteur, Cassini, Pascal, etc.
History isn't the
source of this wrong idea, so what could be? My guess it that it
comes down to three things aside from Galileo: 1) anti-Christian
prejudice rooted in materialism, 2) anti-Christianism rooted in a
strawman view of Christianity born of Protestant televangelists and
Hollywood propaganda, and 3) evolution, the idea that all life
forms we see are the
products of "slime" X time rather than of any design.
3), I assure you
than no educated Catholic (or
any sort of educated Christian in general) denies the
mechanisms of evolution (natural selection, sexual selection, genetic
mutation, genetic drift, genetic draft, gene flow). The question of origins, though, is another matter,
and here's the deal (and if you think it isn't, prove otherwise!):
those who see evolutionary mechanisms as the sole cause of man's very
existence can't prove their assertion using the
tools of science any more than a Christian can use the tools of science
to prove that God made man.
That man derived from some primoridal slime is neither a
testable hypothesis nor something that can be observed. Ergo, it
is not something that can be subject to the tools of science.
The
evolution question is a helluva lot more complicated
than people on both sides
want it to be. In order to talk about
evolution in any way that goes beyond a screeching match, the term has
to be defined: by "evolution," is it meant just the above-listed
mechanisms which no reasonably-educated person denies? Does it refer to
the idea that all life on
this planet arose from just one randomly-caused "primordial organism"
or from a very few such
randomly-arising life forms? (please note that any idea of Earth having
been "seeded" by aliens from other planets just pushes the question
back and to another place)
If that sort of clarification isn't made,
people on both sides
of the discussion will be misunderstood and come off as ridiculous to
the other side, and the discussion will be
fruitless at best.
When
talking about evolution to Christians, ask yourself if it is truly unreasonable and
stupid to posit that there is a God Who brought about
all of this order and complexity -- and whether that line of
thought is more unreasonable and stupid
than the secular version of things taught today as if it is all
scientific fact rather than theory.
For ex., if Ockham's Razor (William of Ockham was Franciscan
friar, by the way) means anything to
you, compare these two stories:
Story One
God
created the universe and all in it, ex
nihilo. He made this universe with physical laws that govern how
things operate, and we can use the scientific method to determine how
they do so. Natural selection, sexual selection, mutations,
genetic draft, genetic drift, and gene flow affect man and the other
animal kinds He created, and we can study to learn how these
creatures have changed over time. Though not
the only tool in the human toolbox, science is a remarkable one that
has allowed us to understand God's physical laws and to invent
technologies that alleviate suffering and make life longer, healthier,
and safer.
Story Two
OK,
class, here's how it goes: There
was nothing, not even time itself, and then, somehow, there was something.2
Then
this something exploded somehow,
for some reason, and the universe was formed.
In
one area of this universe is our solar system, and on one planet of
this system, conditions were somehow
such that, somehow,
nucleotides and amino
acids formed. These nucleotides, somehow,
formed into RNA which somehow
carries information which
came from nowhere.
Then,
somehow,
through the mechanisms of evolution, these
primitive organisms changed over time. Some of them, somehow, became more complex and
included DNA as a conveyor of their genetic information which came from
nowhere -- this DNA essentially acting as code without a Coder,
something seen
nowhere on earth ever outside of assertions of fact involving the
origins of life.
Though
random mutations are almost always harmful to organisms and are
relatively rarely evolutionarily successful (i.e., they are not
adaptive, not naturally selected for, and not sexually selected for),
new
genetic information, acquired from nothing, coming from nowhere, somehow resulted in ever-increasing
complexity, eventually even resulting in organisms that became, somehow, sexually dimorphic. In
sexually dimorphic organisms, at the same time female parts were
randomly developing and somehow,
for no apparent reason, being naturally and sexually selected for, male
parts were simultaneously developing
in other organisms of the same kind and, somehow, for no apparent reason,
also being naturally and sexually selected for. In the human female,
for ex., though the female gamete is useless without the male gamete,
ovaries developed to produce and store these gametes. Simultaneously,
Fallopian tubes randomly developed to transport the ova. The uterus,
again through random mutations, developed to provide a destination for
a fertilized ovum to implant itself and grow. The vagina also developed
to provide the means for the male gametes (which may or may not have
already been developed at this point) to enter into the female body.
Neither the gametes, nor the ovaries, nor the Fallopian tubes, nor the
uterus, nor the vagina were beneficial and should have been selected
for without all of the other parts being in existence, and without the
presence of a complementary male organism of the same species with his
own functioning reproductive
system, but all of these parts came about nonetheless.
Once two organisms of one kind became
sexually dimporphic with strangely coincidentally complementary sexual
parts, the organism with
the female parts that somehow
got selected for, and the organism of the male parts that somehow got selected for were somehow also able to find each other and to successfully
reproduce! Or, to put it another way, "And lo, their
randomly-caused, independently-developed reproductive systems magically
came together and worked to make more of their kind!"
That the fossil record isn't littered with the millions and millions --
or even tens and tens, or even one -- of
those in-between fully male and in-between fully female organisms of
all -- or even any -- of the sexually
dimorphic
species, shouldn't
bother you; nor should you have any concerns about the dearth
of evidence of organisms with the then
newly-forming sexual changes
that weren't successful in
evolutionary terms, and, so, died out. This is a sacred
idea, a matter of dogma, and
no questions or doubts will be tolerated. If you question any of this is any
way, you will no longer be considered a scientist, you will not get
your
degree, and you most definitely will not get tenure. In addition, you
will
be ruthlessly mocked as stupid, and be given no mercy whatsoever. So,
repeat the
mantra "this happened over millions of years" as if
it's a prayer so that the "Time is Magic" idea is ingrained into your
mind and explains away any doubts or questions. "Time is Magic!
Time is Magic! Give a monkey a typewriter, and, if you wait long enough, he will produce the plays of
Shakespeare! In the case of sexual dimorphism give two monkeys
typewriters and they will both
produce the plays of Shakespeare, with one writing in English, and the
other in French, and then
they will get together and collaborate to write all of Dickens's works
as well."
This process of sexual dimorphism was repeated millions of times, somehow. Either that, or there was
one original sexually dimorphic species that came about as just
decribed, and that species then later evolved into the millions of
other sexually dimorphic species we see today, with enough of their
intra-species random mutations --
said mutations almost always having a negative effect on an organism's
ability to survive and reproduce -- being successful, and with
those mutations involving the reproductive systems happening in a
complementary way in both the
males and females of those species at the
same time. Somehow.
Aside
from sexual dimorphism which involved at least two different organisms
independently and randomly mutating such that they acquired complex
systems containing individual parts that shouldn't have been sexually
or naturally selected for at each stage, and those two organisms
finding
each other, resulting in the remarkable coincidence that those
complex systems were complementary and successful together, such
complex systems developed in other
ways, as well, giving rise, in the end, to systems that
allowed for such things as sight, hearing, etc. E.g., there's no need
for an optic nerve without the complete visual system, but optic nerves
evolved and were somehow selected for anyway.
There's no need for cones and rods without the complete visual system,
but cones and rods evolved and
were somehow selected for
anyway. Same goes for the iris, the retina, the cornea, the occipital
lobe of the brain, etc. None of these parts was valuable on its own,
but, somehow,
they all came together and made for something spectacular. This
phenomenon happened over and
over again, within a given species (e.g., the development of the organs
of hearing, sight, touch, etc. in one type of organism) and across
species (giraffes, alligators, and binturongs all have these sorts of
systems, and these systems are different in each of these species in
many ways).
At least some of these organisms also developed, somehow, consciousness,
self-awareness, the
ability to engage in abstract thought, use tools, and to feel emotions.
And one of these organisms, man, developed as well, somehow, the need to know of and
feel a sense of purpose, of meaning, to understand why he exists at
all, what he should be doing
while alive,
and what, if anything, happens after death. A universal religious
impulse evolved -- an impulse that we now
know is silly and redundant given the
chronological
superiority we have by having been born in the 20th century rather
than, say, the 13th. This religious impulse must have once served
an evolutionary purpose, but no longer does -- at least not for the
Good Scientists -- i.e., scientists who engage in scientism rather than science, who see science as the
only tool worth having. As to the religious, say as personified by a
Protestant good ole gal, like our "Lurlene down to the Pick-n-Save,"
perhaps she and those like her are just not as evolved as the Good
Scientists. The fact that the Lurlenes of the world will generally have
many more children than the Good Scientists shouldn't be seen as
evidence that goes against the idea that the evolutionary purpose of
religion is no longer needed and that maybe scientism is maladaptive!
We have degrees from Ivy League Schools
and the Lurlenes don't. We have social prestige, and Lurlene works a
cash register! While we attend wine and cheese soirees, Lurlene plays
Monopoly with her family! Just remember that and our evolutionary
superiority becomes evident!
And while I'm on the topic of evolution, I don't want to hear anyone in
this class bring up the concept of general racial differences. We all
know that race is nothing but
a social construct. The fact that a population that evolved under
circumstances X, Y, and Z will, over time, come to have different
characteristics than a
population that evolved under the very different circumstances of A, B,
and C applies only to non-human animals. Somehow. If you think you see a
difference between a native Ugandan and a native Swede, you are not
only not being a Good Scientist, you are a ruthless hater who needs to
be shut up and made to disappear from academia.
The same goes with regard to any talk about differences between men and
women. In spite of all that sexual dimorphism stuff mentioned earlier,
men and women are exactly the same, with the same general aptitudes and
interests. Not even things like menstruation and pregnancy reveal a
thing about sexual differences given that a woman can believe she is a
man and therefore, in fact, BE a man, yet still menstruate and become
pregnant. A person's sex
gender is precisely
and only whatever he
they feels it is at any given moment, totally divorced from biology and
the needs of an ordered society. The only
scientific difference between men and women is that men are evil
oppressors, and women are
good victims, where "evil" and
"good" are defined by whatever Good Scientists and SJWs pull out of
their collective ass.
Further, though there is no real, ontological difference between human
animals and non-human animals, there is
all the difference in the world when it comes to how we must think and
talk about them. This will be evident not only with regard to the topic
of
race, but also when it comes to
things like carbon footprints, overpopulation, global coolingglobal warming climate
change, how we perceive ant
hills vs. cities, etc. Though a
rat is a pig is a dog is a boy, humans
are bad, and non-humans are good. Somehow.
Saving sea turtle eggs is good, but thinking it important to save
unborn babies is bad. The more elephants the better, but humans
should die off by the billions. All of the Good Scientists agree
with these assertions to some degree, from Bill Nye to Neil deGrasse
Tyson, whom you can recognize as Good Scientists because they're on TV.
For realz now, which one sounds more "magical" and improbable? Which one makes more
sense? Which one fits Ockham's idea the best? Which is more beautiful
and more psychologically fulfilling? Which is more intellectually
limiting? In what possible way does Story One impede advances
in science, as we're so often warned is the case? Why is one treated as
the idea
of idiots, of those who "hate science" and are illogical? What sort of bigotry is this?
There was
nothing, and then, after the Magical Ingredient of Time, there was this.
Check here
to see learn about the over a thousand scientists who "either hold
a Ph.D. in a scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics,
engineering, computer science, or one of the other natural sciences" or
who are medical doctors that serve as professors of medicine, and who
agree with the following
statement: 'We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random
mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.
Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be
encouraged.'” Go explore Dr.
James Tour's Youtube channel and shake your brain up:
Now, some reading
this might be thinking, "But putting God into all this
makes it unscientific!
Teaching Story One even as a possibility
can't be done in the classroom! Haven't you seen 'Inherit
the Wind'?
Pretty soon, we'll have toothless banjo players teaching science!
Haven't you seen 'Deliverance,' either? Idiot!" But that's not true on
either count.
There is order in the world,
there are such things as
irreducibly complex systems, evolution as it pertains to origins is not a scientificaly testable
assertion, etc. Those are scientific facts,
and relating scientific facts is obviously not unscientific. Letting a
class know that there is evidence of design says not one thing at all
about the Designer (other than that He -- or She or It, if you prefer
-- exists and designed, obviously). Going beyond
such an assertion of fact, of a probability, is where science ends and
theology begins.
But before that point? Well, truly, if you can't see the difference
between these statements, you're
hopelessly lost and/or radically dishonest:
Statement A:
"There are problems concerning evidence (such as the fossil record),
the inability to observe, and
testability with regard to
the theory that all life sprang from a common, randomly occurring
source. And there is
evidence for design in the universe, such as irreducible complexity,
sexual
dimorphism, the incredible order we see, etc. But going beyond statements that posit the
possibility of design is beyond the scope of science and, therefore,
this class; at this point,
science ends and philosophy and
religion begin."
Statement
B:
"Get out your Bibles, kids, and turn to
Genesis!"
Dr.
David
Berlinski, formerly a researcher in molecular biology at Columbia
University, a research fellow at the International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Études
Scientifiques in France; author of works on systems analysis, the
history of differential topology, analytic philosophy, and the
philosophy of mathematics; and senior fellow of the Discovery
Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Listen to more
Berlinski at Youtube.
And
don't go thinking that scientific achievements will dry up if people go
around believing in God. History shows otherwise, and the exact
opposite seems to be the case. Listen to this man talk about new
discoveries that've come about precisely because scientists
approached their fields with design in mind.
At
this point, some reading this might be asking the standard, "But
where did GOD
come from, hmmmm?" as if you're scoring some grand point even though
the question is more akin to snarkily asking, "But why can't a triangle
have four sides?" God, by
definition, is eternal and beyond the ability of science to
quantify Him. God, as the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause, doesn't
"come" from anywhere; He
is Being Itself; that's why He's God (in the Old Testament, He profoundly refers
to Himself
as "I AM.") It is the physical world that is bound by physics. It is
physical bodies that must obey the laws described by Newton. God,
though, is Spirit.
And while I'm at it, understand this:
PREMISE: God
exists and is, by definition, omnipotent, able to do anything that
doesn't contradict His Divine Nature, His own goodness, and Logic.
PREMISE:
IF God exists, THEN He can work outside of the laws of physics of which
He is the Author (i.e., He
can perform miracles).
ERGO,
talking about the miraculous as impossible, and treating assertions of
miraculous happenings as "proving" that the idea of God's existence is
stupid, is a
tautology, a fallacy.
A
sample of such an argument: "Virgin births don't happen.
Nowhere on
earth do they happen! Can you even point to ONE and back it up with
SCIENTIFIC PROOF? No, you can't! Therefore, your god is just a
character in a ridiculous fairy tale! I'll stick with the Flying
Spaghetti Monster, moron!" This is an irrational argument that uses its
conclusion as part of the argument itself. Just stop.
Then there's this: What
you consider a mere "lack of belief" can be attributed to any insensate
thing -- for ex., a booger. Your worldview amounts to being able to
say, "I just believe what boogers believe!" What
a genius you are. You argue as if asserting
there's no God is not
positively asserting anything, that the burden of proof is on the
religious at all times, that the atheist has nothing to prove. But that
isn't so. Your asserting that there is no God (rather than your saying
you simply
don't know if there is a God or not) is positively asserting that the
universe and life came about as a result of chance, that there is no
final arbiter of what is True, Good, or Beautiful, etc., all
empirically unprovable notions. You are
asserting that there is no ultimate cause, no "Actualized Actualizer,"
behind existence and change ("movement" -- not just in space and time,
such as the rolling of a ball across a floor or the begetting of
generations through time, but in terms of the characteristics of
things, like the existence and ripening of a melon). God
in this philosophical sense must be grappled with and not be conflated
with belief in any religion's particular understanding of God or "the
gods."
Finally, in addition to all that, Dr. Jordan Peterson makes an
argument, based on totally Darwinist premises, that religious belief
makes sense:
Footnotes for this section:
1 Re. Cosmology: As an aside, cosmology is being
turned upside-down
once again. A preferred direction is being detected in space -- and
that direction seems to have us at the center. So maybe Tycho Brahe was
right and Galileo and Copernicus were wrong. Besides, using the theory
of
relativity as a premise, we can use the earth, the Sun, or even poor
demoted Pluto as "the center" mathematically and it all works out. Do
searches on "'axis of evil' AND 'cosmology'" or "'preferred direction'
AND CMB'". Some papers about this topic.:
Rong-Gen Cai and
Zhong-Liang Tuo at the Key Laboratory of Frontiers in Theoretical
Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have re-examined
the data from 557 supernovas throughout the Universe and recrunched the
numbers.
Today,
they confirm that the preferred axis is real. According to their
calculations, the direction of greatest acceleration is in the
constellation of Vulpecula in the Northern hemisphere. That’s
consistent with other analyses and also with other evidence such as
other data showing a preferred axis in the cosmic microwave background.
That
will force cosmologists to an uncomfortable conclusion: the
cosmological principle must be wrong.
According to the
cosmological principle, there is no special place or direction in the
universe when viewed on the cosmic scale. The assumption enabled
Copernicus to propose that Earth was not the center of the universe and
modern scientists to assume that the laws of physics are the same
everywhere. Due to the cosmological principle, scientists also assume
that the universe is “homogeneous” - having a uniform structure
throughout - and “isotropic” - having uniform properties throughout.
But
a few recent studies have found the possible existence of cosmological
anisotropy: specifically, that the universe’s expansion is accelerating
at a faster rate in one direction than another. In the most recent
study, scientists have analyzed data from 557 Type 1a supernovae and
found, in agreement with some previous studies, that the universe’s
expansion seems to be accelerating faster in the direction of a small
part of the northern galactic hemisphere...
...But
as Cai and Tuo note in their study, the case is far from closed. In
contrast with the current results, some previous analyses of Type 1a
supernovae data have not found any statistically significant evidence
for anisotropies. And many other data - such as that for the cosmic
microwave background radiation, galaxy statistics, and dark matter
haloes - strongly support the assumption of homogeneity and isotropy on
the cosmic scale.
Yet
considering that the cosmological principle is one of the pillars of
modern cosmology whose fundamental importance is difficult to
exaggerate, threats to its credibility won’t be taken lightly. If the
cosmological principle turns out to be wrong, it would dramatically
change the way we look at the world.
Over the
centuries, astronomers have provided increasing evidence that Earth,
the Solar System, and the Milky Way don't occupy a special position in
the cosmos. Not only are we not at the center of existence—much less
the corrupt sinkhole surrounded by the pure crystal heavens, as in
early geocentric Christian theology—the Universe has no center and no
edge.
In
cosmology, that's elevated to a principle. The Universe is isotropic,
meaning it's (roughly) the same in every direction. The cosmic
microwave background (CMB) is the strongest evidence for the isotropic
principle: the spectrum of the light reaching Earth from every
direction indicates that it was emitted by matter at almost exactly the
same temperature...
...We
observe the relics of recombination in the form of the CMB. The
temperature of the Universe today is about 2.73 degrees above absolute
zero in every part of the sky. The lack of variation makes the cosmos
nearly as close to a perfect thermal body as possible. However,
measurements show anisotropies—tiny fluctuations in temperature,
roughly 10 millionths of a degree or less. These irregularities later
gave rise to areas where mass gathered. A perfectly featureless,
isotropic cosmos would have no stars, galaxies, or planets full of
humans.
To
measure the physical size of these anisotropies, researchers turn the
whole-sky map of temperature fluctuations into something called a power
spectrum. That's akin to the process of taking light from a galaxy and
finding the component wavelengths (colors) that make it up. The power
spectrum encompasses fluctuations over the whole sky down to very small
variations in temperature. (For those with some higher mathematics
knowledge, this process involves decomposing the temperature
fluctuations in spherical harmonics.)
Smaller
details in the fluctuations tell cosmologists the relative amounts of
ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy. However, some of the
largest fluctuations—covering one-fourth, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth
of the sky—are bigger than any structure in the Universe, therefore
representing temperature variations across the whole sky.
Those
large-scale fluctuations in the power spectrum are where something
weird happens. The temperature variations are both larger than expected
and aligned with each other to a high degree. That's at odds with
theoretical expectations: the CMB anisotropies should be randomly
oriented, not aligned. In fact, the smaller-scale variations are
random, which makes the deviation at larger scales that much stranger.
Kate
Land and Joao Magueijo jokingly dubbed the strange alignment “the axis
of evil” in a 2005 paper (freely available on the ArXiv), riffing on an
infamous statement by then-US President George W. Bush. Their findings
were based on data from an earlier observatory, the Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), but the follow-up Planck mission found similar
results. There's no question that the “axis of evil” is there;
cosmologists just have to figure out what to think about it.
The foundation
of modern cosmology relies on the so-called cosmological principle
which states an homogeneous and isotropic distribution of matter in the
universe on large scales. However, recent
observations, such as the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic
microwave background (CMB) radiation, the motion of galaxies in the
universe, the polarization of quasars and the acceleration of the
cosmic expansion, indicate preferred directions in the sky. If
these directions have a cosmological origin, the cosmological principle
would be violated, and modern cosmology should be reconsidered.
And ends with
these words:
The standard
ΛCDM model has a great success in explaining the observations of the
CMB temperature anisotropies, as well as the galaxies distribution and
motion. The standard model of cosmology is based on the
assumptions: the validity of Einstein’s general relativity, and the
cosmological principle. This model can explain most large-scale
observations with unprecedented accuracy. However, several directional
anomalies have been reported in various observations: the polarization
distribution of
the quasars, the velocity flow, the handedness of the spiral galaxies,
the anisotropy of the cosmic acceleration, the anisotropic evolution of
fine-structure constant, including anomalies in the CMB low multipoles,
such as the CMB parity asymmetry. Although the confidence level
for each individual anomaly is not too high, the directional alignment
of all these anomalies is quite significant, which strongly suggests a
common origin of these anomalies.
If
these anomalies are due to cosmological effects , e.g. the
alternative theory of gravity or geometry, the non-trivial topology of
the universe, the anisotropic dark energy or the particular large-scale
fluctuation modes, they indicate the violation of the cosmological
principle. So, one should consider to build a new
cosmological model to explain the large-scale data.
And then there's
the fact that astronomers are finding an order to the Heavens that has
a less than .1% probability of occuring by chance. From "Alignments of
radio galaxies in deep radio imaging of ELAIS N1" by A. R. Taylor P.
Jagannathan, found in
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume
459, Issue 1, 11 June 2016 (online here):
Abstract: We
present a study of the distribution of radio jet position angles of
radio galaxies over an area of 1 square degree in the ELAIS N1 field.
ELAIS N1 was observed with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope at 612
MHz to an rms noise level of 10 ľJy and angular resolution of 6?arcsec
× 5 arcsec. The image contains 65 resolved radio galaxy jets. The
spatial distribution reveals a prominent alignment of jet position
angles along a ‘filament’ of about 1°. We examine the possibility that
the apparent alignment arises from an underlying random distribution
and find that the probability of chance alignment is less than 0.1 per
cent. An angular covariance analysis of the data indicates the presence
of spatially coherence in position angles on scales >0$
$_{.}^{\circ}$$5. This angular scales translates to a comoving scale of
>20 Mpc at a redshift of 1. The implied alignment of the spin axes
of massive black holes that give rise to the radio jets suggest the
presence of large-scale spatial coherence in angular momentum. Our
results reinforce prior evidence for large-scale spatial alignments of
quasar optical polarization position angles.
2 Don't even think about throwing at us Lawrence
Krauss with his "A Universe from Nothing " nonsense book about
invisible, expanding space bubbles. He thinks he posits a universe from
nothing, but then changes
the definition of "nothing" to "an approximation of nothing" which
he characterizes as "a physical quantity."
Scientism,
Materialism, and Other Ways of Knowing
The scientific
method is just one tool among many in humanity's toolbox (one of the
greatest tools, in my opinion as a lover of science). That some people
seem not to know this is pretty incredible, but it's a fact that some
don't -- or at least talk as if they don't. If something can't be
quantified, stuck under a microscope, viewed through a telescope, etc.,
then it's deemed as non-existent or, at least, unimportant by some
people. This view of the world is called "materialism" or "scientism,"
and people afflicted with it tend to think of themselves as
ultra-geniuses, as superior to their supposed intellectual lessers who accept
as true things that aren't scientifically quantifiable.
But quantum physics tells us that the material isn't at "the bottom" of
things; consciousness is required. Listen to this mp3
about that.
The biggest problem with scientism, though, is that science can't
answer questions about meaning and purpose. It might, for ex., be able
to measure
the things we deem to be "beautiful" and predict what sorts of things
we'll put into the category of "beautiful," but it can't tell us why we
deem anything as beautiful at all, or explain the meaning of "beauty."
Science
can't tell us what is good or bad, either. Making moral judgments is
simply
not the purpose or within the purview of science. But that doesn't mean
that beauty or right and wrong aren't important and don't exist.
In
traditional Christian thought, while reason alone can lead us to accept
the
existence of God as, say, the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause, etc.,
reason alone cannot lead
us to accept that God is Triune, that Jesus is His Son, that His mother
was immaculately conceived, etc. These are matters of divine
revelation, not natural knowledge. But given that
God, by definition, can do the
miraculous, none of the above things are illogical or unreasonable;
they're simply
beyond the ability of science to deal with.
Given this, you might be thinking, then how the Hell are we
expected to believe in such things as the resurrection of Jesus Christ?
The Shroud of Turin, the evidence of
History, the early Church, the Gospels, a
phenomenological approach (reasoning back to God given the nature of
man), etc., aside, the answer
is this: it is God Himself Who, directly or indirectly, gives us this
knowledge through divine illumination, and once you
know something and experience
something, whether by divine illumination or from some other cause, you
then
know it is true. Obviously, our senses can be tricked, and we can be in
error about things we think we know. But there are also things we know
we know, and logical, thoughtful people are usually able to
differentiate between, for ex., something they may have dreamed and
something they most definitely experienced in the real world. Different
types of experiences also make different sorts of impressions that
affect how clearly we know them, too. For ex., you might not be able to
remember what you were doing on August 9, 2001, but the odds are good
that you know what you were doing on September 11 of that year. And one
can know, with no hestitation and yet with no proof whatsoever, that
one loves one's children, for ex. and that sort of knowledge, and the
certainty of it, is different from the sort of knowing demonstrated
when answering a question like, "Are you sure that Albany is the
capital of New York?" Well, if you are divinely illuminated by God
Himself, you know things in ways that are intense, clear, and
sometimes ineffable (for the less intellectually gifted, such knowing
might be even more difficult to articulate and convince others of).
Those who haven't experienced such illumination simply do not know
because they haven't experienced it. And the problem with some atheists
is that they don't understand this basic fact about the Christian
experience. Worse, they treat religion purely as an
intellectual exercise, as something that is either amenable to the
tools
of science or which should be treated as ridiculous (albeit, some
Christians are sloppy in their thinking and talking about all this sort
of thing, too. Undoubtedly, most Christians, like most people in
general, have IQs
of ~100.).
Some Christians are mere "cultural Christians" -- self-proclaimed
Christians because they were raised
that way -- just as how, today, most Millennial-aged people blindly
accept liberalism and materialism because that's what they've been
taught to believe.
But many who were raised Christian have gone through long
periods of doubt and then come back to the faith after study and only
received divine illumination later in life, and
others are Christians
because, as former agnostics, they believed that the religious impulse
is important and
meaningful and it affecteded them personally, have seen the effects of
disbelief on people and societies, have studied, and then have been divinely illlumined
by
God.
When it comes to the latter two types of Christian, you're not going to
argue out of his faith someone who is divinely illumined, who has experienced God
and is made to know things he can't prove to be true according to the
scientific method, I assure you.
That person's having experienced God, and his soul having been infused
with the gift of faith, obviously doesn't make what he knows a good
argument for you
to believe what he believes. But it does make a good argument for him
to believe what he believes, and no amount of your calling him an idiot
makes what he knows something he no longer knows. If I hit you across
the face with no
cameras
around, leaving no marks, etc., you'd know damned well that I hit you
across the face even though you can't prove it. No amount of someone's
telling you, "but you can't PROVE you were hit across the face, so
you're just talking shit!" is going to change your mind about what you
damned well know to be true. This is the way it is for the mindful
Christian, and if you sincerely
want to
know what the Christian knows, then just sincerely ask the
"If-You-Are-There-God" to lead you to all Truth and see what happens.
Your sincerity will show in the humility and perseverence with which
you
ask.
Until and unless you do so, don't go around doing the equivalent of
telling a person who's been slapped across the face and knows he's been
slapped across the face, that he hasn't been slapped across the face
just because he can't prove it using petri dishes and test tubes.
That's sorta dumb and really arrogant, isn't it?
And don't pretend that anything worth knowing is something that is
necessarily scientifically quantifiable, or that we can't know anything unless it's
scientifically quantifiable. Everyday experience should show you
otherwise:
Know, too, that,
at its core, acceptance of Christian doctrine is a matter of faith.
It's not blind faith. It's not unreasonable faith. It's not any sort of
faith that contradicts logic. It's an acceptance of the authority of
the Church built by Christ, an acceptance of truths revealed by the
Church and which we can know through the study of history, an
examination of psychology, sociology, human nature, such phenomena as
the Shroud of Turin, etc.
At this point,
some of you might be thinking something like, "OK, but
Muslims are religious, too, and they believe what they believe, too,
and Mormons talk about that 'burning in the bosom' and such, so
what about that?" What about that is this: the religious impulse -- the
need for meaning, the desire to bind (religare)
oneself to the transcendent -- is a part of human nature, an aspect of
man that we
Christians believe is built into him by God. Those who haven't been
made aware of Christian Truth still have that need for meaning; they
still have a religious impulse. Manifestations of that impulse will be
shaped by their environment such that the average guy growing up in
Saudi
Arabia will turn to Islam, and the average guy raised in India will
turn to Hinduism, etc. -- the same way that we all suffer from hunger,
but folks in China might eat rice while those in Mexico eat tortillas.
But this doesn't mean that all religions are of
equal value any more than all foods are of equal value. And it doesn't
mean that all are equally true or nonsensical, or that none is true;
it's
just human nature acting out in the world as it is.
But here's the thing: in traditional Christian
thinking, reason is of paramount importance, and reason and the Faith can never, ever contradict
each other. The religious impulse
is natural and good, but that
doesn't mean that all religions
are good. The desire to eat is good; eating poison is not good. That
some people eat things that are bad for them doesn't mean that hunger
doesn't serve a purpose. And a defense of the religious
impulse or of "religion" qua
religion isn't a defense of the
irrational; quite the opposite, and as was said earlier about
(traditional) Christianity, the Faith and reason do not and can not contradict each other.
Now, some aspects of the Christian Faith
are beyond reason alone, but
they won't contradict it. For
ex., Christ's having turned water into wine is a miracle, beyond the
scope of science, an act that goes beyond the normal laws of physics.
But God, being God, can do the miraculous. Therefore, there's no conflict with reason (see the "Christianity is
anti-science" section above).
Islam, on the other hand, posits all sorts of unreasonable things, even
a god who is capricious, who can contradict his own nature.
The Muslim god can do evil, for ex., while the Christian God
cannot because He is Good and can't not
be Good. The Christian God cannot contradict Logic. In fact, in
Christian theology, He is Logic -- the Logos, the Divine Order.
(John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Logos [the Word], and the Logos was
with God, and the Logos was God.")
Then there are the person of Muhammad, and the Person of Jesus. The
former
is a pedophile who'd froth at the mouth, roll around on the ground as
if demon-possessed, and have "visions" that resulted in the
terror-ridden religion we all know. Jesus, on the other hand, is
admired even by those who aren't Christian at all. He taught a message
of love, taught against hypocrisy, used beautiful parables that showed
the importance of the will, etc.
There are the psychological and sociological effects of a
given religion. Islam is brutal on women, is spread
by the sword and has been since its inception, and one who leaves
Islam is to be beheaded. Post-Temple Judaism
(which is a totally different religion than the
religion of the Old
Testament) is a profoundly racist religion, one that sees ethnic
Jews
as a different species than the "goyim" who exist to serve Jews. It
sees Jews as having a
"divine spark" while "Gentiles" have the souls of brute beasts. It
pushes a brutal circumcision rite on
male babies, etc. Christianity, on the other hand, while pushing a few
things that are wrongly seen as "awful"
today (as in since
about 5 minutes ago) -- e.g., being
against gay "marriage" and abortion, etc. -- is the religion that built
Western civilization, the most effective, beautiful, advanced
civilization ever. Unlike Islam (and early post-Temple Judaism, by the
way), in
Christianity, forced conversions are totally
against Church teaching (which isn't to say that forced "conversions"
weren't attempted on blessedly very rare occasions -- and not on the
part of clerics. Charlemagne, for ex., went through the motions of
forcibly "converting" a few thousand Saxons. But his doing so was
against Church teaching. Charlemagne wasn't the Pope and wasn't "the
Church." This basic sort of idea should be remembered when studying
History. It's beyond ridiculous that the Church is so often blamed for
what some individual Christian -- or "Christian," as the case may be --
did. Unlike Islam or post-Temple Judaism, traditional Christianity has
a central authority, a place where "the buck stops." What must be
accepted to be Christian -- at least traditionally -- is easily
determined through magisterial texts).
While Muslim women in many areas are forced to walk around wearing the
equivalent of tents and can be
divorced at their husband's whims, Christianity raised the
dignity of women from pagan Rome's views to one in which women could
own property, engage in business, couldn't be forced into marriage,
didn't have to worry about being thrown
out and divorced at a man's whim, weren't pressured into leaving their
babies to die from exposure on rocks, enjoyed the benefits of chivalry,
etc. Catholic women ran
monasteries and hospitals, have churches named for them, taught mathematics
at
universities, led
men in battle, are honored in
art, etc. Mary, the Mother of God, is seen as the very greatest of all of God's creatures.
Though Muslims preserved Greek texts found
in Christian areas they conquered (which texts were later re-introduced
into Western Europe; they
still existed in Eastern Europe without Islam), Islam is
incompatible with science, as can be seen by looking at the veritably
stone-age Muslim civilizations that exist in the world today. The
Catholic Church, though, not only pretty much invented modern science,
it values science highly
(particularly astronomy).
It
isn't
afraid at all of reason, logic, and the findings of (sound) science.
In Christianity, the two great commandments -- the commandments that
encapsulate all
moral thought -- are "love God, and love your neighbor." God is seen as
Love itself, not as a petty tyrant as in Islam, or as an
entity who can be tricked as in post-Temple Judaism.
Politically, traditional Christianity honors the
right to self defense, the concept of a Just War, and the principle of
subsidiarity, a very
sound and human approach to human power. As shown by even the ancient
writings of St. Augustine, it sees the Church and State -- the "City of
God" and the "City of Man" -- as separate realms, with the former,
ideally, informing but not equating to the latter, making theocracy
impossible. While
recognizing the virtue of piety and the reality of man's nature, which
includes his
desire to live among people who are like himself, the Faith itself is
for everyone, no matter his race. Contra what Pope Francis -- a very bad Pope who has more in
common with George Soros than Pope St. Gregory the Great -- says, the
Church
traditionally has a sound view of immigration, a view described by the
Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on "Migration" like this, "[r]estrictive
measures [on immigration] are also justified on grounds of health and
morals, and on the general ground that a national family has a right to
say who shall join it," and She does so while also teaching against the
idea that any race is more or less beloved by God or due more or less
charity than another race.
Economically, the Church honors private property, free markets for wage
and price-setting, encourages voluntary labor unions who organize to
protect their interests, and teaches against usury -- the
mechanism
which, along with such tricks as fiat currencies, fractional reserve
banking, and the
Federal Reserve -- has allowed so much wealth and power to accumulate
into the hands of so few, and ultimately allowed them to buy or have
inordinate influence over the channels of our culture (the media,
acedemia, politicians, etc.)
To wit, ideas have consequences, and traditional Christian thought
leads to a
sane and happy social order. It makes sense.
The same can't be said for brutal Islam, post-Temple Judaism and its
racist
exploitation of non-Jews, Hinduism with its caste system, etc. Look at
the
condition of nations where non-traditional Christian religions or
political ideologies
predominate! Want to live
in Iran? How about India with its Ganges
corpses and lack of
toilets? Maybe you prefer pagan Nazism or, worse, atheistic Communism which
killed many, many more millions of people (Christians) than Nazism even
dreamed of? Note how so
quickly down hill the West is falling in terms of social order the
further away we get from traditional Christian thinking!
In other words, you have to look at
the different religions and their
effects as a whole -- i.e., in terms
of:
their
assertions of religious Truths and the evidence for and
effects of those assertions;
their
psychological effects -- e.g., does a given religion
tend to make for suicide bombers or people who run soup kitchens? Does
it lead people to feel more contentment and peace or does it cause them
to become warlike (Islam) or to veritably worship their own group while
exploiting out-groups (post-Temple Judaism)? Does it lead to
self-examination or to seeking
enemies?, etc.;
their
sociological and political effects: If everyone in a
given area practiced a given religion, what would the place be like?
Would the arts and sciences flourish? Is liberty valued? How are
women and children treated? How are the weakest among them treated?
What makes for a just reason to go to war (in Islam, it's to convert by
force, subjugate and tax those who don't convert, and behead those who
don't go along with either. In modern Judaism -- well, they typically
get others, especially the United States, to do their fighting for
them, and mostly for the cause of hegemony over lands owned by other
people. In traditional
Christianity, wars must be purely defensive, winnable, etc.);
their
relationships with reason
and science;
the
types of people honored in the various religions -- e.g.,
compare Muslim
"heroes" (invaders and conquerors), the Jews' lying Simon
Wiesenthal, and Christianity's Mother Cabrini,
St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc.;
the
histories of the various religions. When doing so, be
careful to sift out propaganda, of which there is much against Catholicism, and avoid
making the incessantly-seen
error of mistaking "King So-and-So" or "Spain" or "France" with "the
Church" or "the Pope." If you read about something dastardly a
Christian did, check to see how the Pope at the time responded to it.
Also know something about the doctrine of
papal infallibility -- what it means and does not mean;
how
the different religions treat unbelievers. In Islam, they
are to be subjugated, and beheaded if they refuse; in post-Temple
Judaism, they are,
ultimately, to practice the Noahide laws (and beheaded if they break
one of those laws) and become servants of the Jews, and in the
meanwhile, it is
kosher to cheat and pray curses against them, etc.; in traditional
Christianity, they are to be
loved and taught the Truth even as Christian societies protect the
common good and defend themselves against any potential pernicious
influences, such as usury (for ex., read about the
Spanish Inquisition)
their
treatment of human weakness: In Islam, homosexuals are
thrown off of rooftops, thieves have their hands chopped off, victims
of rape (not the rapists!) are murdered, a daughter who has sex outside
of marriage can be killed to preserve the family's honor, etc. In
post-Temple Judaism, in practice,
the only real sin is harming or betraying other Jews (e.g., turning
them in to the police if they do wrong), and non-Jews are there to be
exploited, to obey "the Noahide laws," and to be killed if they fail to
uphold those laws. In Christianity, sincere
contrition always -- always
-- leads to forgiveness even as society acts to defend itself against
human evil (e.g., a thief who is truly contrite can be forgiven by God
and others and be treated with human dignity and love, but he will
still be locked up to pay his debt to and defend society).
When
you look at the world's religions as a whole, it's
pretty obvious that (traditional!)1
Christianity stands
alone as the religion that is not at
all like the others.
Footnotes for this section:
1 The word "traditional" must be emphasized when talking
about "Christianity" these days. Not only has Protestantism changed the
popular view of "Christianity," but even the human element of the
Catholic
Church has undergone a revolution, having been infiltrated by enemies
of the Church. Vatican II -- or at least "the spirit of Vatican II" --
has wreaked utter havoc on
the Church. Read about all
that here.
But -- neurology!
What a dearth of
imagination it takes to smugly thrust brain scans at someone and go on
about correlations between scans and behaviors, the presence of tumors
and changes in personalities, and other such things, treating it all as
proof that the mind is
nothing but neurons connected by
neurotransmitters and such. Never minding the question of which comes
first (scan results or the behavior/characteristic in question), to be
consistent, such a person would have to see a motherboard as all there
is and all that matters if a busted CPU disallowed the running of a
program or made the running of a program wonky. Stop and think about it
for a minute.
Whoah, you
can't judge me.
Read your Bible, idiot!
Here's what the Catholic
Church teaches about judging others. Clue: it doesn't at all
involve
refraining from making moral judgments about human actions.
Cherry-picking Bible verses (a Protestant game. See the "Christian" =/=
"Protestant" section above)
and
using
them radically out of context to attack Christianity is a deceptive
practice. Stop doing it.
Hypocrite!!!!
A hypocrite is someone who pretends to be what he isn't, or pretends to
believe what he doesn't; it isn't someone who has moral standards
and
fails to live up to them sometimes due to weakness. Catholicism teaches
that we're all sinners, and has done so for 2,000 years now. This isn't
new. Further, any Christian who knows the Faith knows that his being
divinely illumined and on the path of salvation is in no way a matter
of his own achievement; it is a gift
of grace -- a gift offered to
everyone.
Spiritual arrogance has no place whatsoever in a Christian's life. This
isn't to say that some self-proclaimed Christians aren't arrogant. But
those who are so are exhibiting behaviors that aren't virtuous in the
least.
Unlike Muslims who think they impress their god by blowing themselves
up and taking as many people with them as possible, and unlike
post-Temple Judaism whose practitioners see themselves as, in essence,
possessing "sacred DNA" that makes them better than the "goyim,"
Christians approach God with humility
and gratitude.
No educated, virtuous Christian thinks he's perfect or better than a
Muslim or a Jew (even though he knows his religion is true and Islam
and post-Temple Judaism are not); quite the opposite. Traditional
Christianity teaches Christians to "face their shadows," to examine
their consciences, to recognize when they've screwed up, and to make
amends -- including making amends to God by going to Confession (which,
by the way, requires sincerity and the resolution to try to sin no more
in order to be valid -- in order to "work." IOW, the old trope out
there about how Catholics think they can do anything they want
and then just tell a priest about it, get away with it, and keep on
doing it is yet another big fat lie told about Catholicism).
For ex., catching a Christian looking at porn for illicit purposes
doesn't mean
you've found a
hypocrite (unless he denies ever doing it or presents himself as
superior to other, fellow
sinners); it means you found a being who is human, who's weak, who
screwed up, needs to
repent, and should try not to do that again.
If you want to see some real
hypocrites, talk to people who push the "life sprang randomly from a
primordial soup" idea -- and, at
the same time, deny that general racial
or sexual differences exist. Or see what the "Antifa" people are up to
-- a group
that claims to be fighting "fascism" while throwing bricks and M-80s at
people's heads, burning down buildings, trying to prevent the free
exchange of ideas on college campuses, and totally ignore the
definitionally fascistic merging of the government and the corporate
world. Or cast your eyes toward those
feminists who
demand equality when it comes to CEO positions, but aren't clamoring to
get an equal number of female trash collectors or ditch diggers, who
don't want to sign up for Selective Service, don't want to pay their
own way on dates, etc. Then there are the
dual citizen Israeli-Westerner folks who vote for laws in Israel that
uphold Israel's Jewish character, holidays, ethnicity, etc., and fight against
immigration there all while
voting for policies that disallow
Christian nations from preserving their
character, culture, and
peoples, and voting to have Western
lands flooded with Muslims. Or talk to a limousine
liberal type who's all for unlimited immigration -- but not in his backyard and who doesn't have
to live with the effects of such as "the little people" do (e.g.,
lowered wages, job scarcity, higher taxes to cover the increased
education and health costs, low-trust heterogeneous neighborhoods,
higher crime rates, etc. See, for ex., how
Mark Zuckerberg, who's constantly pushing for immigration importing
cheap labor
for the corporate types, is suddenly all
about building walls when it comes to his precious property in Hawaii).
As for me, I much prefer to be around human beings with moral standards
and human weaknesses rather than human beings with no moral
standards and human weakness.
Religion is the
cause of all (or most) wars! It's killed more people than anything
else!
Really? Which
religion caused WWI? WWII? The Korean War? The war in
Vietnam? It was atheistic
Communism that has killed
more people in the
20th century alone than were killed during all wars throughout all
of
History put together. Most people won't hear anything about the
millions more
Christians slaughtered by those possesssed of Communism (led
by Jewish Bolsheviks) than Jews were killed by paganism-loving
socialist Nazis, of
course. I'll leave it to your imagination as to why this is so, but
whatever the case, the ridiculous idea that "religion" (again, with no
qualification, as if all religions are the same) is the cause of all or
even most wars is Historically obtuse.
Most Westerners
who
go on about how "religion causes all wars" seem to have the Crusades
in mind. But it wasn't "religion" that started
those wars; it was a
religion. It was Islam; the
Crusades were purely defensive
on the part of Christians.
Read about it here: http://www.fisheaters.com/crusades.html
What's
your
pet sin? Or what did your parents do to you?
A thought
experiment: Imagine Christianity, but then take away its
teachings about how sex belongs inside, and not outside, of marriage.
Would you still
be attacking Christianity if its stance on sexual morality weren't an
issue? The other moral laws -- e.g., against stealing, murder,
lying, etc. -- likely make sense to you, right? And, if you're like
most and are aware of History, you
respect that traditional Christianity invented universities,
hospitals, etc., that it cares for the poor, sick, and orphaned. You
likely find the "stuff" of traditional Christianity beautiful -- the
cathedrals, stained glass, statues, Gregorian chant, polyphony, sacred
paintings and icons, etc. If you know anything about History, you're
probably glad about how the Church raised the status of women in a huge
way, too. You likely dig the Church's teachings against slavery and
racism,1 and probably even find the Person of Jesus Christ
to be a
sympathetic character.
My sense is that most people who constantly attack Christianity would
find another hobby if all the "sex stuff" weren't an issue.
But what if traditional Christianity's teachings about sexual morality
are right? I challenge all
here
to read this
short but powerful online book, "The
Garbage Generation." Seriously, read it and think about it long and
hard. And watch the video on the introduction page as well. Isn't it clear that Pope Paul VI's warning
about artificial contraception, made in the encyclical Humane Vitae was absolutely true?:
[A] man who
grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the
reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional
equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction
of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he
should surround with care and affection.
Look around! See how the pressure on women these days isn't to look
nice, or even beautiful, but to look "hot." Notice how her sexiness -- which to most men, is
gone by the the time a woman reaches the age of around 30 to 35 -- is
treated as the sine qua non
of a woman's value.
See how pressured women are to look and be as slutty as possible.
Look at the effects of our "hook-up culture" -- STDs, broken
hearts, shame, incredible
loneliness, millions and millions of children raised
with no fathers, abortion. Hook-up culture coupled with outrageously
unfair divorce and custody laws have given us a
generation of men who are saying HELL NO to marriage because
they know that, for them, there's likely
nothing to be gained and
everything
to lose by getting married now. For a man, marriage now means handing
over
his balls to a woman and just hoping
she doesn't use our unjust laws to crush them by taking his kids,
house, car, and half of his paycheck for the next 20 years, thereby
making sure he has to make all of the sacrifices of marriage while
getting none of the benefits of marriage after he's been dumped --
all while the exact opposite
is
the case for women: after dumping a guy, women still get the
benefits of marriage (material support from the man, the house, car,
kids, etc.), while having to make none
of the sacrifices of marriage. And, besides, women are "giving out the
milk for free" thanks to the "sexual revolution," so why should a man
make the gamble of marrying at all?
And if a pregnant woman doesn't
want to name an individual man as the biological father
walking wallet, the welfare state steps in and acts as "Daddy."
Those of the
feminist persuasion might be thinking that men don't care
about marriage and children anyway, but if that's what you're thinking,
you
don't know men at ALL. Most men want what most women want: to have a
trustworthy, sane spouse to love and grow old with, and to have
children and grand-children. Even from a purely
evolutionary perspective, having children is pretty much our biological
purpose. The MGTOW (Men Going
Their Own Way) guys aren't going that route for kicks, but for survival given the reality of our
divorce and custody laws, and modern female fickleness and selfishness
-- a
selfishness that is taught to
Western women as the ideal.
I highly encourage you to
read a book written by Nora Vincent, a lesbian who went
"undercover" as a man to learn what she could about what men are
actually like. The book is called "Self-Made
Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man", and it's not only
fascinating, it's heartbreaking. So many women, led by the man-hating
feminists
who dominate our cultural institutions, really have no idea at all about what men are
like, how truly noble most of
them are, how generous
most are, how much
they suffer, how they value loyalty in ways that most women can't even
imagine,
what sorts of intense
pressures they have on them because they are men and how hard it is for
them to deal with those pressures, just how nasty and bitchy so many
women are when dealing with men, etc. At the end of the interview
below, when asked if she thinks women understand men, Nora replied
with, "Not at all. No clue." And when asked if she likes being a woman,
she said she likes it even more after
her experiment because being a
woman
brings more privilege.
Between the
freely available sex and the insane divorce/custody/support
laws mixed with the welfare state, men are being shoved out of family
life altogether. Single women are having kids with no men around, a
phenomenon that, as the above linked-to book, The Garbage Generation,
will tell you, is the root cause of so many of our social problems. If
that
isn't the height of selfishness -- to consciously choose to get pregnant with babies
who'll have no father -- then what is?
Who won
the sexual revolution? Not kids. Not women. Not men. No one did. The
Church was right. And we now have a few generations of people who think
of sex as having nothing to do with procreation, which is, in reality,
its very biological purpose!
Sex, to them,
has nothing to do with children and raising families; it's a hobby,
pretty much nothing but a dance with a happy ending (at least
for the men involved; most
women don't have orgasms from casual hook-ups).
Lust
is a pretty all-consuming passion, and when it's fueled by an
endless supply of porn and a culture that has tossed aside traditional
Christian morality, it's a problem that snowballs. If a man's life
is such that he's spending hours a day searching for porn, if he
is
effectively impotent because he's so desensitized from it all that a
real woman doesn't measure up and can't get him excited, if his mind is
so "pornified" that no woman would want to marry him and have to
sexually compete with the thousands of digital women in his head, then
that man
has effectively removed himself from the gene pool and has made himself
genetically worthless and ineffective in terms of
duties and obligations. That's
exactly what the enemies of Western
civilization
want: a bunch of politically and culturally useless eunuchs who
are so
busy downloading airbrushed images of digital women that they can't be
bothered to build
families, work for the common Good, and defend their people. The
enemies of Western civilization
produce porn and package it as a
harmless expression of "freedom," pushing sexual libertinism, but in
reality, it is mental slavery, one large piece of the puzzle that
results in the death of the family, and, therefore, ultimately, the
destruction of Western civilization. Watch this video and think about
it:
The Church was
and is right about sex and its rightful place in
marriage. Period, the end (and, by the way, doing it the right way by
keeping it in marriage makes for the best sex. According to studies, Catholics
have the best sex of all).
Aside from not wanting to give up rutting like bonobos -- which for
some strange reason, are always being thrown in our face as creatures
exemplifying how humans ought to live in spite of the fact that they
eat shit and cannibalize
each other -- even their own babies -- the other
phenomenon
that has some people railing against the Church is Daddy
issues. God is Father, Pat hates his/her earthly Dad (or never had
one to begin with), and, so, Pat hates God. Or maybe you, as an
atheist, just haven't reconciled
your Oedipal issues and want to "kill Daddy" so you can be the boss. Maybe, instead
of the Christian's embrace of religion being a matter of mere
wish-fulfilment, it's the atheist's refusal to believe that is a result
of psychological projection and desire.
Donna Steichen, in
her book "Ungodly
Rage," talks about radical
feminsts who are self-proclaimed Catholics -- i.e., people who claim to
be Catholic, but who don't agree with what the Church teaches and want
to change pretty much everything about Her2 instead of their
moving on down the street to the Episcopalian joint that has everything
they want. She discovered one big commonality: most had miserable
childhoods, often marked by fatherlessness and/or sex abuse.3
Instead of dealing with it, they direct their rage at another target.
Want to have some "fun"? Read what
the feminist Kate Millet's sister has to say about what drove her
sibling. It's typical for feminists. As a group, they're miserable
people who want to spread their misery around.
To paraphrase Rick James, displacement's a helluva drug. So is
projection. My
challenge to you, if you're a
Church-hater, is this: check yourself. Figure out what's really bugging
you, face it, and deal with it. Don't blame God for your disappointment
with Dad.
Finally, remember the atheist accusation that started this page -- that
Christians only believe because they want
to? Maybe atheists don't
believe because they don't want to. Maybe they just want to be
"free" to fuck anyone at any time and anywhere, indulge in hedonism,
and act out their rage against Daddy (Antifa anyone?).
2 Catholics refer to the Church as "She" because
the Church is seen as "the Bride of Christ." The Church is a Platonic
Idea, one with an earthly manifestation. "The Church" Herself is one,
holy, Catholic, and apostolic" (the "four marks of the Church"). She is
unblemished, without error. Her human element, on the other hand, is
imperfect, filled with people -- including priests, Bishops, Cardinals,
and, throughout History, Popes -- who can do some pretty wretched
things. The miracle about it all is this: throughout the Church's
2,000 year History, no Pope has ever presented something as a teaching
that must be held by all Catholics everywhere anything that contradicts
other such teaching. Even a Pope like Pope Francis, a liberal,
politically ignorant man who's causing a lot of damage to the human
element of the Church, has not presented as dogma anything that mars
the Church's record of pure teaching. If you want to know what the
Church teaches, don't turn to the New York Times, habit-less religious
sisters who march for feminism, priests who push for incessant change,
etc.; look to the Catechisms and Encyclicals, and learn how to recognize teaching that is presented as
dogma or as teaching that must be held by all Catholics. Contrary
to what liberal-minded types want the world to believe -- including
liberal types who are self-proclaimed Catholics -- some mindless
uttering of Pope Francis, made during an interview on an airplane, does
not "Church teaching" make. If a Pope says he prefers Frosted Flakes to
Wheat Chex, no Catholic is bound to prefer to eat Frosted Flakes.
Further, Popes can sin. All of them have, in fact; they're human. The
first Pope, Pope St. Peter -- the Simon Peter of the Gospels -- even
denied Christ three times. And some Popes sinned a lot, were simply not
good Christians. See, for example, Pope Alexander VI. But even the most
sinful Popes have not presented error as dogma. Christ protects His
Church, even in spite of some seriously bad, weak, not-too-bright,
and/or outrageously sinful Popes (and know that, along with some bad
Popes, we've been blessed with truly wonderful ones -- many more great
or good Popes than bad ones). That Christian doctrine has been
preserved by the Church for two
millennia in spite of all that is indicative of something
wonderful.
The
2010 US Fourth National Incidence
Study of Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4)
found that compared to
peers in two biological parent married families, children who lived
with a single parent with no
cohabiting partner were five times more likely to be sexually abused;
children who lived in a
step-family (with married biological and non-biological parents) were
eight to nine times more likely to be sexually abused; and
children who lived with a single parent with a partner in the home were
20 times more likely to be sexually abused.
Step-
and single-parent families accounted for
only one-third (33%) of all
children in the United States
but accounted for more than two-thirds (66.8%) of all children who were
sexually abused. The over-representation of
'broken' families implies that if all children in the United States
lived with both married biological parents, the rate of child sexual
abuse could be halved at least.
But
there's evil in the world!
People who say
that because there's evil in the world, God either doesn't exist or
else He's a tyrant clearly haven't thought things through. Read here about the Christian view of theodicy,
the "problem of evil."
Christianity
is nonsense
because Spanish Inquisition
If you're
typical, almost everything
you think you know about the
Spanish Inquisition is wrong, wrong, wrong. See this page -- and read
it with some sense of History and respect for the intelligence and
integrity of those who were born long ago. If you read about History
thinking that anything less than accepting abortion, thinking gay
"marriage" is good, asserting that there are 59 "genders," pushing the
idea that
there's no biological basis for traditional sex roles, etc. is stupid
-- well, just forget reading about History altogether and cut to the
chase by telling yourself, "Everyone born before I entered into the
world was an evil 'fascist'" and be done with it:
Christianity
is nonsense
because priests are pedophiles
Did you
know that pedophilia is not
typically the problem when it came to clerical
sex abuse? Wouldn't know it after hearing the late-night talk show
hosts
and stand-up comedians with their pedophile priest jokes, would you,
though? That said, there is most definitely a problem of clerical
sexual abuse in the Church, but it's not a problem of pedophilia; it's
a problem of homosexual ephebophila and hebephilia, that is, the sexual
abuse of physically sexually mature teenaged boys. And it's caused by
precisely those same men who try to change Church teaching, condone
what the Church doesn't condone (acting on homosexual desires, divorce,
contraception, etc.). In other words, the problem exists in direct
contradiction to Catholic teaching, unlike the Muslim rape problem,
which is directly condoned by the Quran. Read about it all here:
I was once
watching the remake of the totally creepy movie "Coma." In this movie
-- actually a little mini-series -- is a hugely evil institution that
keeps human beings alive and in comas so their
organs can be harvested and medical experiments can be done on them. In
one scene, the directress of this
institution -- an institution that stands
against everything the Catholic Church teaches -- was shown
praying the Rosary. Truly surreal. What they did was the cinematic
equivalent of making a movie about the life of Mr. Rogers -- you know,
the PBS show guy -- and randomly
throwing in a scene of him rolling around in bed with 5 hookers after
shooting up some cocaine and booty-dancing to Cardi B. Most people
would be wondering, "where'd that
come from?! WTF?" But that
scene in the Coma remake is typical for Hollywood fare.
That is how the
powers that be, the enemies of Western civilization, do it. They use
film, TV, music, and other forms of art to portray the Church in ways
that are not only just innacurate, but so hideously innacurate
and over the top that it's almost shocking. They'll do it in very insidious ways -- e.g., having a
villain wear a Crucifix for no understandable reason whatsoever, or
mentioning, as a totally irrelevant aside, that the serial killer in
the movie used to be an altar boy.
The Bad Guy in
"Mystic River" holds his hand in a very unnatural position just so you
can see his ring with the Cross on it. You'll see in a later scene that
he has a necklace to match. Look for this sort of thing; you'll see it
all the time.
Christians are depicted as
being stupid, hypocritical, puritanical, tight-assed, superficial,
judgmental, boring,
uncreative, uncool, cheesy morons with no aesthetic sense. Many are
portrayed
as
completely insane (the mothers in "Carrie" or "Psycho") or as
sociopaths (the serial killer in "Se7en"). Priests are invariably shown
to be alcoholics, womanizers, or pedophiles. And every year at
Christmas and Easter come the documentaries on the History, National
Geographic, or PBS channels that attempt to show how
"ridiculous" Christianity's religious claims are (watch for it! You will see it!)
This sort of thing is incessant. It's a given. Every minimally alert
Christian knows that if he's
watching a movie
or TV show made after the mid-1960s and a Christian character shows up,
that character will
almost undoubtedly be
completely unlikeable and deserving of any bad
thing that happens to him. The only exception is the rare, kindly "nun"
(actually a religious sister, but Hollywood doesn't know the
difference) -- the type who doesn't believe what the Church teaches,
preferring to attend feminist rallies instead (she, of course, wears a
habit even though she's the exact type of religious sister who
wouldn't dream of it in real life). Gone are the days of
"The Bells of St. Mary's," "Angels with Dirty Faces" or "Meet John
Doe," that's for sure.
Meanwhile, of course, people of other religions, especially Jews, are
portrayed as awesome,
brilliant, kind, exotic, cool, etc. The Jewish family is invariably
shown either around a table engaging in intellectual conversation
coupled with Italian-esque emotionalism and liveliness -- or being
rounded up for Dachau -- by some Nazi wearing a Crucifix, of course.
Hey, by the way, want to know who voted for Hitler in Germany? Here are
two maps. The first shows where the Catholics lived in Germany; the
second shows who voted for Hitler:
Catholic
areas shown in black
Hitler
voters shown in black
Wouldn't have guessed that if you bought what the ADL is selling, would
you?
Anyway, back to the story about how the media constantly attack the
Church: Ever wonder why
Hollywood
does this? Ever wonder to what degree your perceptions of Christianity
are flavored by how the media mangle its image?
I absolutely grant that a relatively small percentage of ephebophile
(not pedophile) priests have damaged Christianity's reputation (way out
of proportion to the actual numbers. See "Christianity is nonsense
because priests are pedophiles" above), as have Bishops who did not
deal wisely at all with the problem (which most certainly did exist
and, sadly, thanks to Pope Francis's undoing of Pope Benedict XVI's
work, still exists).
And there are some Christians who are not that bright. Of that there is
no doubt; I know a number of them (along with many Christians who are
truly -- literally -- geniuses. And I also know a lot of atheists who
accept the politicaly-enforced modern dogmas and who are idiots. And I
know many liberal professional types who push those dogmas for a living
and are idiots. In all this, it's smart to not mistake raw intelligence
for wisdom, sanity, common sense, or level-headedness. At all.).
And then there's the problem that certain Protestant sects do a ton of
damage
in the U.S. with their bad theology and absurd televangelists.
But
Protestantism
isn't a synonym for Christianity (see "Christian" =/= "Protestant" ). Protestant sects
have
been around for 500 years, with many of them being not much older than
your
toothbrush; Christianity has been around for 2,000
years, and is rooted in the Old Testament, which is thousands of years
older yet. But for many Americans, when they hear the word "Christian,"
the
likes of this stuff come to
mind:
Why? Because that sort of madness and
Hollywood's lying bullshit are typically all they "know" about
"Christianity." And for those who were raised Protestant and left it
behind,
finding it wanting, all they
typically know about "Christianity" is whatever their preacher-man said
about it, a man whose theology isn't any older than 500 years at most and, in the U.S., likely
included dispensationalist nonsense,
the inhumane "Prosperity Gospel"
heresy which is the Beatitudes turned inside-out, etc., etc.
Both types need to learn some History and expand their awareness. (If
you're Protestant, see this page for some
rebuttals to some basic Protestant assertions)
The Catholic League issues yearly reports about how anti-Catholicism is
manifest. Check them out. And as you read, ask yourself why Judaism isn't treated in
this way. Why do the powers
that be go way out of their
way to deny the obvious by
calling Islam a "religion of peace" constantly bash Catholicism?:
