IN PURSUIT OF PILATE’S QUESTION
INTRODUCTION: Like a string of pearls, though some may be diamonds some stone,
these forty relatively short essays hopefully hang together on one common thread,
Pilate’s question to Christ recorded in Chapter 19 of St. John’s Gospel, “What is truth?”
Perhaps a pearl a day is just what the doctor ordered. Enjoy!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I.
TOLERATION MISUNDERSTOOD
PART II.
THE SLIDE TOWARD SECULARISM AND RELATIVISM
PART III.
RELATIVISM AND THE DALAI LAMA
PART IV
THE EUCHARIST AND INCLUSIVENESS
PART V
THE MEDIA, RELATIVISM, FAITH AND THEODICY
PART VI
MY NAME IS “I AM”
PART VII
A SHORT LOVE STORY
PART VIII
THE WAY AND OTHER WAYS
PART IX
A GIFT HORSE AND THE PROPER USE OF CHOICE
PART X
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY LOOK IN THE GIFT
HORSE’S MOUTH
PART XI
THE BIRTHDAY PROBLEM AND METAPHYSICS
PART XII
A METAPHYSICAL BIRTHDAY PRESENT
PART XIII
REASON LEADS THE WAY TO REVELATION
PART XIV
THE GREAT GIFT HORSE: AUTHENTIC LOVE AND
LIFE IN ABUNDANCE
PART XV
HE”S ALWAYS ON THE PORCH
PART XVI
PRODIGAL SON LITE
PART XVII
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
PART XVIII
THE COSMOS VS. MONISM, AMAZING GRACE VS.
AMAZING DEBAUCH
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PART XIX
THE STORY OF PELAGIUS-MR. OPTOMISM
PART XX
LOVE, FREEDOM AND THE HIDDENESS OF GOD
PART XXI
THE CLEARING EFFECT OF REVELATION ON
RELIGION AND SUFFERING
PART XXII
JESUS, THE RESURRECTION AND LIFE
PART XXIII
REVELATION AND NON-REVEALED RELIGION
PART XXIV
BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM
PART XXV
COMPASSION AND THE GOOD SAMARITAN
PART XXVI
PLURALISM AND DIALOGUE
PART XXVII NEW AGE ENDS AND DUST IN THE WIND
PART XXVIII WHY? A REVIEW
PART XXIX
THE CHURCH, THE NEW AGE AND NEW MORALITY
PART XXX
MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS
PART XXXI
THE HARD ART OF LOCKHEART TO THE RESCUE
PART XXXII
OF MARRIAGE, PAIRRAGE AND POPULATION
PART XXXIII FREIDAN’S COMFORTABLE CONSENTRATION
CAMP
PART XXXIV IMAGINE, RELIGION VS SECULARISM, CENSORSHIP
PART XXXV
GUILT, EVOLUTION, REASON, THE WRONG
ROOTS AND RIGHT ROOTS OF OUR RIGHTS
PART XXXVI A CASE IN POINT: ROE AND DRED SCOTT
PART XXXVII FORGETTING THE ROOTS OF SAFTY AND
FREEDOM
PART XXXVIII I’D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA-1925
PART XXXIX THE NEW CHURCH AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH
PART XXXX
THE 40TH PEARL
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I. TOLERATION MISUNDERSTOOD
Most, though not all people, are finally coming to realize after centuries of strife that
ethnic, political, philosophical and religious diversity is part and parcel of the human
condition and mutual toleration of these differences is obviously essential for survival.
Hopefully we have learned that much by now but a question arises, where does truth fit
in? Must the serious pursuit of truth be shelved in the name of toleration, peace and the
avoidance of conflict? Must it be buried with the hatchet? Must all views be placed on an
equal footing in order to avoid strife and the whiff of inequality and intolerance? This is
not an easy thing because as much a part of us as our diversity is our very human striving
after truth in everything from science to philosophy and religion. It is difficult for many
to dismiss the very concept and desire for truth with Pilate’s sneering retort to Christ and
its implication that there is no such thing or that its attainment is beyond our grasp. But
must the noble striving cease lest it be our undoing? If truth is one and its pursuit
essential to what we are, what are we to do about diversity and the multiplicity of beliefs?
Can the achievement and attainment of truth coexist in peace with equality and diversity
or must one suffer at the hands of the other? Can truth and diversity live together for
long? As we work and move in the direction of a better understanding of the truth
especially in the areas of science, philosophy and religion, must not diversity along with
equality in these areas diminish? How do we placate those who take offense?
We know toleration must be preserved and respected. Our survival depends upon it.
We know we must not return to a time when it was thought that error or dissent in the
realm of politics, philosophy and theology had no rights because we now know from
principles originating long before they were formularized in our Declaration, Constitution
and Bill of Rights that people holding to error or to dissenting opinions and beliefs
certainly do have rights. Yet, if we take that most fundamental of philosophical-political
questions and ask the origin of these human rights, rights such as life or liberty, we are
seeking the truth, a truth, however, about which there is great disagreement. Must the
search for the truth in this and many other sensitive areas cease in fear of upset or out of
respect for diversity? It is simply no good, indeed dishonest and mentally suffocating, to
dodge the issue and back off controversy by holding that all views and opinions are of
equal validity or that truth and error whether in important or unimportant matters are
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subjective and dismissible concepts with no basis in reality. That currently popular
dodge, often marching under the name of inclusiveness or diversity, submerges thought
into a sea of relativism that endangers any progress in these matters. Obviously we
cannot shelve debate on the truth or error of important questions in the name of tolerance
and peace and remain human. It is not in our nature as thinking beings to do so. And there
is real danger of losing what has been gained by the generations before us over long
periods of time and through great mental effort. To cite just one illustrative example,
upon the correct location of the roots and origin of the human right to life and liberty
could rest their continued viability. Whether these rights originate with governments or
beyond governments is a vital question. In what way are these rights inalienable? These
matters demand answers. We must proceed toward them with reason, faith, hope and
belief that through bitter experience humanity has of late become mature enough (this is a
big gamble admittedly as a brief look at popular TV and media entertainment amply
illustrates) to assimilate the answers without jeopardizing the need for toleration. As truth
be known, it comes down to this: all opinions may not be equal but those individuals
holding them are. And here’s another must. The search for truth must be done with
toleration protecting all views even the most erroneous short of public endangerment.
This is quite a challenge and a test of our faith in history, experience, education and time
doing their work. The search for truth may inevitably impinge somewhat upon diversity
but it cannot be allowed to impinge upon toleration if we are to survive.
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II
THE SLIDE TOWARD SECULARISM AND RELATIVISM
The necessity of toleration and the fear of upsetting it cannot be allowed to
dampen the search for the answers we all so fervently wish to find in a great many fields.
Some of the answers to the important questions that were very firmly placed in our
founding documents have recently been challenged. For example, the Founding Fathers
of the American Republic, for all their experimentation, held that there were eternal
truths revealed incrementally in history but not dependent on history or government for
that matter. The source of these truths, the unalienable right to life and liberty, for
example, were derived from or as they put it were endowed by the Creator. That’s a plain
answer much jeopardized today by the rise of a radical secularism and in some quarters
an aggressive atheism. Recently President Obama addressed the Congressional Hispanic
Caucus Institute’s 33rd Annual Awards gathering. In his remarks he made reference to the
Declaration of Independence. When he got to the line, “endowed by the Creator with
certain unalienable rights,” he omitted “Creator.” He repeated the exclusion on a couple
of other occasions before public questioning induced him to cease the censorship. The
president’s motivation is still unexplained as he maintains a Christian faith but his
surgery effectively cuts loose from very secure mooring very important and basic rights
with consequences that could well be outright dangerous. If not the Creator, who?
Government? And if endowed by government, still “unalienable,” that is, impossible to
take away without due process? Who holds the hammer? The secularist especially of an
atheistic bent is almost forced to say “government” or the people themselves. Either
answer presents serious problems for inalienable rights. The danger lies in the proposition
that what gives can take.
Though the threat from advancing secularism cannot be ignored perhaps an even
more pernicious and related trend is the ease with which some people slip into a default
mode, older than Pilate’s question and declare there is no such thing as truth. They hold,
in spite of what the Founders believed, that there are no real answers to the important life
questions we all ask for everything is relative. You say tomato, I say tomahto. Such
relativism as that is tolerable in the inessentials but it can become downright dangerous in
important matters. It can ultimately be as destructive to human rights, happiness and
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fulfillment as the rejection of toleration. Of course, the effect on our ancient pursuit of
truth is disastrous.
Truth and toleration must coexist and relativism must be avoided simply because
truth and toleration are essential to human happiness and survival. Whatever kind of
world it would be, where there is no truth but rather everything in the name of toleration
is equally true, it would not be human. Truth exists independently of what we think or
believe and it cannot be contrary to truth. And, it is discoverable. You might call that a
basic and essential act of faith upon which all our knowledge rests. Take it away and we
are doomed, no more Homo Sapiens but quite the contrary. Science can find it with
difficulty in the laboratory, philosophy and theology, perhaps with even more struggle, in
the laboratory of reason, logic and perhaps, as will be examined later, revelation. That
last item will need much examination but in fact all these areas of endeavor are often
helped by intuitive aid as Einstein and many others freely attested. Is there really much
difference between a strong intuition and a self-evident truth? Here, for example, is a
self-evident truth, not a mere opinion, in the realm of religion: all religions may be false
but they cannot all be true. Certainly, this holds as fact if truth in one and the principal of
contradiction upon which our sanity and science rests is valid for, as everyone knows, the
world’s religions contradict each other in vital areas and in these areas of contradiction
they cannot all be right. Going further, it is hopefully self-evident that there cannot be no
gods, one god and many gods, that God cannot be the same as the material universe and
different from it, that the universe cannot be eternal and created in time, that God became
a human being or never did. In these, as in so many areas, as truth advances diversity of
necessity must decline. This is generally true but it sometimes has happened that as truth
is attained it sometimes reveals new areas for thought and differing opinions. For
example most physicists accept the “Big Bang” as true but many new questions arise as
to what existed before it since it is not possible for something to arise from nothing. The
arena of diversity and its debilitating cousin relativism in at least some areas of belief
must shrink with the establishment of truth. Though this is to be expected the best and
most well-intentioned people often resist it out of fear of a return or even a growth of
intolerance. It appears that our all-important and recently acquired appreciation for the
vital importance of the toleration of diversity in thought and opinion along with
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inclusiveness can in some cases have unhealthy side effects. In some cases it can lead
good people to work at preserving differences instead of letting the advance of truth do
its unitary work and such an attitude can rather easily slip into the dangerous relativity
mode. Such a mode of thought makes a shambles of the very concept of truth, even of
self-evident ones. But we have reason to hope that the protection of toleration and
diversity and the avoidance of relativism can be achieved without downplaying the
importance of the truth. It’s a balancing act but a vital one.
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III. RELATIVISM AND THE DALAI LAMA
Unfortunately that hope was not advanced by comments made not long ago in a
speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the Dalai Lama maintained that “no one
(religious) tradition is superior to another.” This raises the point mentioned before. Is it
really possible for such varied religious traditions to be all equally valid? After all, they
come up with very different answers to the basic questions mentioned earlier concerning
the nature and existence of God and even the purpose of life. Though the possible
answers are not that numerous they are varied and they all cannot possibly be right. It is
only if they were all completely off the mark that the Dalai Lama’s remarks could have
any validity and that of course was far from his intended meaning. That would mean no
god, no future life, no purpose, no plan, all mindless accident and chance and although
some strands of Buddhism are close to that position it does not reflect the thinking of the
average non-philosophical practitioner including the Dalai Lama’s. Neither he nor most
people believe that, to use the musical equivalent, the “Hokey Pokey is what it’s all
about.” For those hoping or believing that science has backed up this nihilistic position,
they will be disappointed for in fact science is increasingly going in the opposite direction
being compelled to do so by the complexity and mathematical beauty of the laws
governing nature. It is a direction that most of the world’s ordinary clear thinking people
have long gone. The mass of humanity, though understanding that God cannot be proven
by laboratory experiment, has long understood that disbelief in God is unsustainable
indeed irrational in the face of a rational universe with rational laws. Yet, concerning
God, the religious traditions that the Dalai Lama had in mind do indeed have very
differing views on such basics as the nature of God and an after life. Such differences
should not be swept under the rug in the name of toleration, pluralism, peace,
understanding, diversity, equality and inclusiveness. The search for the truth in these
important matters must advance even while mutual respect is maintained and cherished.
The Dalai Lama’s honest, well-intended though not well thought out relativism is not
conducive to a better understanding of the human situation and may even damage the
cause of toleration in the long run. Can we not manage to balance and sustain both
values? The Church, as we shall see, answers “yes.”
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The dangerous and growing relativism epitomized, unintentionally without a doubt,
by the Dalai Lama is, unfortunately, by no means confined to the religious sphere. When
Drew Faust became President of Harvard University she announced, “truth is an
aspiration not a possession.” Actually it has to be both or why would anyone or any
University aspire to something un-possessable or unattainable? Who would want to pay
huge sums, going into great educational expense and often debt, to pursue what there is
no chance of attaining or possessing? It is a gage of the seriousness of the growing
relativism problem that respected leaders in religion and academia have been affected by
it. Indeed the infection has filtered down into religions other than the Dalai Lama’s.
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IV. THE EUCHARIST AND INCLUSIVNESS
It is not uncommon for some Christian churches, especially those that believe the
notion that all of Jesus’ teachings and actions are handily summed up in the single word
inclusiveness, to advertise that they are “diverse and inclusive communities,” with
“communion tables open to all the baptized.” Whether or not the communicant believes
in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, for example, is not a factor with these
churches though it was when Christ first broke the news about the truth of the Eucharist
to His Disciples and listeners, as described in Cha. 6, of John’s Gospel. “Unless you eat
the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood…” Everybody was shocked and many
walked away but here’s the problem for these churches, he did not equivocate in the
name of inclusiveness or fellowship or retreat into symbolism, allegory or metaphor to
bring them back. He let them go. Evidently there was something being announced here
more important to Him than inclusiveness, fellowship and diversity if achieved at the
expense of that something. And that something was in ancient times and is now a central
truth of Catholic theology namely the dogma of the real presence of Christ in the
Eucharist under the appearance of bread and wine. St. Paul summed it up this way,
“…whoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty
of the body and blood of the Lord.” But in the warm and welcoming fellowship
congregations of the type being described here the teaching is now relegated to an
unimportant incidental in the drive for inclusiveness. Whether the communicant believes
this ancient and till the Reformation almost universally held truth of the Real Presence of
Christ in the Eucharist or not is of little import. The new non-teaching takes precedence,
a table open to all baptized. It is hard to see how one can receive communion worthily if
you don’t know what it is and if a church doesn’t either. A once vital truth thus gets
shelved, shoved under the rug, to achieve a contrived togetherness and fellowship. This is
relativism in ascendance. The irony is that in practice an open communion table does not
achieve the real unity that communion aims at, certainly not the unity envisioned by
Christ when he prayed in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel, “that they all may be
one…” Far from it, for the dumbing down of the dogma avoids the facing of the hard
questions on the real nature of the Eucharist that require the honest and cogent answers
upon which any true unity must be based. In fact, a restricted communion facilitates
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those questions, forcing one to think about them especially when kindly asked not to
receive. Here one is forced to confront the reality and demand the answers from which a
real unity can flow; a unity based upon history and scripture that does not jeopardize the
importance of the truth. When the truth becomes trivial, in this case whether the
sacrament does or does not become the body and blood of Christ, strange things have
occurred. Not long ago one such minister, in one instance at least, gave “communion” to
a dog. When truth becomes relative it becomes unimportant, sometimes worse.
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V. THE MEDIA, RELATIVISM, FAITH AND THEODICY
Relativism has become a default position for many and predictably has invaded
popular television with a vengeance. The Classical and Christian confidence that mind
can resolve difficulties and attain truth has been greatly weakened. Now we often hear
that it’s the pursuit of the goal, truth included, the aspiration, the journey itself that’s the
thing with the goal receding in importance. It sometimes seems the modern mind has
given up. Famous interviewer Barbara Walters, almost sounding like the Dalai Lama,
summed up the trend beautifully when she remarked, “There are so many ways of
looking at life and death, you just cannot say this belief is right and that is wrong.” The
thought here seems to be that multiple opinions can never be successfully reduced or
resolved. In other words, because there is such overwhelming diversity of opinion, one
opinion, one philosophy, one religion is as good as the other. One of them cannot be
closer to the truth, to the real than another. At any rate it isn’t worth the time or effort to
find out. This is inclusiveness, the elevation of diversity if you will, actually hindering
the search for truth. And it shouldn’t be that way because in fact there really aren’t that
many ways to look at, to approach life and death. The field is actually smaller than many
like Ms. Walters envision and made even smaller by the one human in history who, like it
or not, identified himself as the way, truth and life when it came to these things and by so
doing reduced options considerably. If attitudes like Ms. Walters’ became widespread,
what stagnation of thought would result! It would likely lead to a deadening indifference,
a harbinger of relativism, and a defeat for humanity because in reality there is, as
mentioned and will be demonstrated, not really as many scenarios as Ms. Walters thinks.
To repeat, the self-evident truth or what should be one that “it is possible that all
religions (opinions, philosophies) may be wrong but they certainly cannot all be right”
should be a partial antidote to the Walter’s attitude and spur inquiry rather than
indifference. Anything that dampens the search for the truth of the things we all want to
know about is as much an enemy of humanity as intolerance. It is sad to think of the
pessimism of commentators like Ms. Walters. What they really mean is that amid
conflicting views in philosophy and religion, attaining truth is outside our capabilities,
that no progress is possible and that a healthy certainty in these matters is beyond us. But
the fact of life is, as most realize, we can at least move to a strong and logical conviction
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through reason, perhaps not of mathematical certitude, but of a logical certitude equal to
the capabilities and conditions of our human state and the subject matter at hand. It’s a
kind of certainty we can live with and act upon, one that can handle doubts with reason
and remain certain enough to move ahead and live a life of faith hope and love. Such a
certainty is by no means beyond us. Its been said that the religious mind works by
negation, that is by trying one hypothesis after another until nothing is left standing
except faith. With that attained faith the things of this world make much more sense
echoing the prayer of medieval philosopher-theologian Duns Scotus, “This I believe but
if it be in anywise possible, this I would also know.” St. Augustine put it this way, “I
believe that I may understand.” But then Augustine went over the line and made the
unpardonable error when asked for proof of the existence of God of inviting the
questioner first to believe and all will become clearer. It was an error not repeated by St.
Thomas Aquinas who along with the Church maintained that knowledge of the existence
of God was within reach of human reasoning without the help of revelation.
We are talking here of a judicious reason-based faith that is not impervious to natural
doubts but can handle them. Doubt is part of the human condition and by no means
confined to the religious sphere but so is our reasoning out of it. The result, echoing that
ancient Church conviction that man’s unaided reason is indeed capable of arriving at the
existence of God, is a faith that is the normal response of most reasonable people. It is by
no means a mere security blanket or the grabbing at pie in the sky and those who think of
it as a panacea or a form of escapism do not know religion very well. Indeed, it throws
one right into the face of reality, a reality complete with obligations, strictures, and moral
commands, some of them inconvenient to say the least. Here belief can be more
uncomfortable than comforting. But with faith, life, death and suffering are more
understandable than they are without it though not completely so.
There is the vexing “Job” problem, the problem of evil striking the innocent that the
person of faith has always to confront. In the Old Testament Book of Job, Job is the good
and innocent person, pious and upright who loses everything including that nightmare of
all parents, his children, and confronts God about it. He does not complain against God
but when friends and neighbors believe he must have done something terrible to deserve
all this and Job knows he didn’t he calls for a response from God. The lesson that the
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book’s author brings out by this story is, in the words of the New American Bible’s
introduction to the book, “that man’s finite mind cannot grasp the depths of the divine
omniscience that governs the world.” The problem, the problem of evil, yields only
slowly to human understanding and as we shall see not completely though Christ’s later
suffering and death puts it in a new and different light. On the other hand, those without
faith, the atheist for example, has the immense task of trying to explain the existence of
everything else that is, the why and how of it. The usual way out is to fall back on luck,
chance or accident. This is the faith of the deniers of faith who prefer god chance to the
God of reason. It is an explanation, as will be pointed out, highly doubtful. An
explanation that logically, philosophically and even scientifically is less and less tenable
and persuasive. Mark Thomas writes half humorously, “It is ironic but true. The nonbeliever is the greatest believer in miracles. He believes that intelligence emerged from
non-intelligence by chance. He has tremendous faith in time. He believes that given
enough of it something is bound to happen.” But, of course, something already did
happen, time. Later we will hear from Ronald Knox with his steamer trunks. His point,
time explains nothing, not even itself.
The theist for his or her part wrestles with the mysterious goodness of God who
allows terrible sufferings among us as we struggle to perfect our souls in this “Vail of
Tears.” If a Christian he will be aided by a revelation, to be examined later and contained
in the New Testament, of a God who loves us all the more for our struggle even to the
point of sharing in it and in a real sense becoming a co-sufferer. The astounding
immensity of that thought, previously unheard in history, is the part of revelation called
“the Good News” or Gospel, telling of the Creator becoming one of us, part of his
creation, to heal it, point the way to truth and life in abundance. When Catholicism was
preached in the new world where human sacrifice was so much a part of the religion, the
people were astounded to hear that God suffered and died for them instead of requiring
them to suffer and die for God. It became clear that any suffering we do here is not for or
by God nor was it brought on by human nature created good but by misuse of the only
part of it that could be misused, free will. What price freedom? And, is it worth it? Here
are questions the answers of which stretch into the very intention behind creation and will
bear examination later but in the meantime, a look at the Creator.
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VI. MY NAME IS “I AM”
What all this comes down to is precisely this; most men and women have rejected
Pilate’s cynical, “what is truth” as if truth was completely beyond our abilities and
instead have worked through the few alternate worldviews that exist to come to
conclusions. With apologies to Barbara Walters, there aren’t really that many options.
Most people do this by a process of elimination arriving often with prayer for help and
sincere thought at the one that best fits the world, as they know it. By that process of
elimination they make an informed choice. No doubt, for many people helping in that
choice is the perennially persuasive good news of revelation found in the Gospels. The
news that God so loved us as to become one of us and though he did not abolish our
suffering and death here for reasons to be explored later, he shared in them fully and to
the hilt and in the process revealed God’s love for us and the eternal life that awaits those
who learn to love. This good news spread through the classical Greco-Roman world
almost like wildfire and stands on its own to be accepted or rejected, but with sincere
thought. It has had a revolutionary effect on billions through two millennia and still does.
It cuts down the options considerably.
Revelation takes up where powerful but imperfect reason falters and because of
its limitations could not penetrate all the way to ultimate truth. In the words of Etienne
Gilson, “A man seeks the truth by the unaided effort of reason and is disappointed; it is
offered to him by faith and he accepts, he finds it satisfies his reason.” Put another way,
disordered reason is reduced to order by revelation. St. Anselm echoing Augustine and
Isaiah talked of faith seeking understanding or as expressed by others “unless I believe I
don’t understand.” Reason alone can accomplish great things but tended after a while to
wander and get lost. After notable advances Greek philosophy had stalled by the forth
century before Christ. Reason needed help and revelation supplied it. Our intellects are
equipped to know truth but even the best of them are clouded. They need assistance from
Truth in order to recognize truth in areas where laboratory science is not equipped to go.
Revelation greatly aided both the work of reason and the advance of philosophy.
The revelation being discussed is found in the scriptures of the Jews and Christians,
the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Right in the beginning, in Genesis, a vital
question was answered. Is the universe eternal or did it have a beginning? Today with the
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Big Bang we have the answer recently supplied by science but long before that, relying
on unaided reason, the schools of Classical Greek philosophy had settled on its eternality.
But Genesis was quite clear for the opposite. “In the beginning God created the heavens
and the Earth,” By thus giving unaided reason the break it needed, philosophy began its
advance again with marvelous results to be looked at later. Thus revelation profoundly
modified the conditions under which reason worked. As magnificent as was the Greek
accomplishment in philosophy, pure reason was prone to err. St Anselm believed that
God helped because the best pure reason seemed to be able to arrive at was an
inexplicable eternal, uncreated, uncaused universe, one here by chance with no beginning
or end with a polytheism in the form of myriads of gods who are part of it and
philosophies often with strong pantheistic leanings. Reason responding to revelation
understood the world as presented in Genesis quite differently, its start was the gift of
being from Being, the gift of existence from He who exists and is Himself pure existence.
The universe and our world in it were created, had a Creator, had a purpose and were not
inexplicably always just there by chance for no apparent discoverable reason.
The story of revelation moved ahead with the Jews. This small tribe of people was
chosen to carry revelation forward when their patriarch, Abraham, said a yes to God’s
invitation to become his representative people on Earth four thousand odd years ago. It
required a great act of faith. How many other people if any received the invitation before
Abraham and refused it we have no way of knowing but from this particular and rather
minor tribe of people the pinnacle of revelation, Christ Himself, would come. Ronald
Knox made a friendly jest about the whole business when he wrote, “How odd of God to
choose the Jews.” About three thousand years ago they were slaves escaping from Egypt
and their leader Moses wanted to bolster the faltering faith of the fleeing people. In the
book of Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament, he confronts “the God of their
father Abraham” in the burning bush episode and would like to know God’s name for
two reasons. In this era of polytheism every tribe had its own god and they all had names.
The Jews were still heavily influenced by the polytheism of everyone around them and
wanted to be like everyone else. Moses knew this and didn’t want to disappoint them. He
didn’t want to go back to his people in the desert empty handed. He had to get the name
of God. More importantly for future developments, a person’s name gave insight into the
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nature of that person, who that person was. It should be mentioned here before
proceeding that the term “his” for God is used throughout these “pearls” for convenience
sake. It has no reference to sex or gender and as Jesus made clear later on, God is nonmaterial. God our Father is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth was his
explanation to the Samaritan women at the well in the forth chapter of John’s Gospel.
Moses got his answer and it reverberates to this day. It was a name unreal and
unlike any of the others and with its aid reason and philosophy was enabled to achieve
great insights and make the advance that had eluded earlier efforts. The name given by
God to Moses was “I AM WHO AM.” As the third chapter of Exodus puts it “God
replied, “I am who am. Then he added, “This is what you shall tell the Israelites (Israel
aka Jacob, Abraham’s grandson): I AM sent me to you.” Religion and philosophy were
greatly changed over the centuries as the revealed name was reflected upon. The idea of
some that this answer amounts to a refusal of God to reveal his name, if effect, mind your
own business, is untenable in light of the whole text. The text makes it very difficult to
deny that God really wishes to reveal his name and in so doing his essence. “Am”
denotes existence, pure being pure and simple. The present tense has that sense, infinite
eternal existence and is commonly explained as referring to God as the absolute and
necessary being, the source and sustainer of all created beings. This is the great
metaphysical breakthrough of Exodus. Creation is revealed now not only as a one time
gift coming from the will of God the giver but as a constantly continuing gift sustained in
its very existence by that will, essentially the continual gift of being from pure eternal
Being. God is not anything like all the other “gods’ is the message and so beyond, so
other, as to be captured as nearly as our reason can capture God, as the necessary Eternal
Being, He who IS. “AM.” This is what reason working with revelation adduced. God
Creator and sustainer without whom there would be nothing that is. Moses and the people
got more than they bargained for as the fled into the desert and headed for Sinai and
eventually the Promised Land. They didn’t forget, not completely.
Classical philosophy was a great beneficiary of revelation. Under Aristotle it had
arrived at notions of God as uncaused cause whose nature was pure thought. This in itself
was a world above the tribal and mythological gods peopling the heavens at the time. The
passage from Exodus, this great gift horse if you will, provided the impetus, the key for
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further advance by Christian philosophy beyond the respectable achievement of classical
thought about what God is. The name “Am” itself was considered so sacred by the Jews
that out of reverence for it the term “Adonai” meaning “my Lord,” was used as a
substitute. “I AM” is the source of the word “Yahweh.”
God was thus declaring his essence, which is to be, being pure and simple, with
eternal existence necessarily implied, The unique Being. This revelation of the nature of
God as Being, existence itself, has implications. The undermining of pantheism, to be
examined in more detail later, was one for God’s essence was not ours or the universe’s.
He was totally other, different, separate, by no means identical with or equated to the
world, nature or anything else that is. But Genesis was not finished. It clearly refers to
God and not “the gods. Later in the prophets it was stated again “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord
thy God is one.” Still later it resonated in the Catholic Creed, “Credo in unum Deum.”
Polytheism along with pantheism was put into long continuing retreat.
These revealed religious-philosophical truths did not go down easily, appearing to
many as utterly new, revolutionary and counter cultural. They were revealed to us,
according to Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Lessing, so that with thought and
reflection, by the use of mind on them, they might become rational and understood. For
one thing, as Etienne Gilson puts it, “as soon as God is identified with Being it becomes
clear that in this God alone is and is alone, otherwise all things are God.” Such would be
pantheism, precisely what the inheritors of revelation, the Jew, the Christian, and in his
way the Muslim can never hold for if all things are God then there is no God because all
things are contingent, imperfect, impermanent and of a limited scope and being. The
essence of everything we know by our senses is not to exist forever, in other words
temporary, else they would not decay, decline, decompose or die. This is not God. God is
not temporary, God purely and simply is whereas everything else is not at onetime or
another. With this in mind, some philosophers of antiquity saw things differently and as a
result of revelation they, like Augustine, became Christians. In sum then what, after all, is
the story of revelation but a love story. The story of the overflowing and generous love of
the Creator, perfect eternal Being and the ground and sustainer of everything that exists,
that led to creation. That is the essential message of Genesis and the Exodus encounter of
Moses with AM.
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VII A SHORT LOVE STORY
This tremendous love story carried risk for the one creature that we know of made
in God’s image because that image involves not only being but also reason and free will.
God’s essence is existence, being, and closely related to it is love. Because being and
love are connected for the one would not exist without the other, God who generously
endows us with being also endows us with love. But to love it is necessary to be able not
to love, to love or not. Love is impossible without freedom for what is forced love is no
love at all. Inevitably such a story is not free of suffering, misunderstanding, failure and
unhappiness. In our weakened human condition all great love combines happiness and
unhappiness, frustration and satisfaction. For an earthly example we only have to look at
the powerful vows of Christian marriage: “Forsaking all others, in sickness and health,
for richer or poorer, in good times and bad, till death do us part,” to get the message. This
all-giving love, as shall be shown, is our great purpose for being. It is our great challenge
for it is a reflection of God’s love for us and part of the reason for our being. Marriage is
love’s great learning arena. Most of us learn the meaning and challenge of authentic love
in marriage and family. There is for most of us no classroom and teacher that compares.
Sadly, many of those imbued with today’s popular mini-morality often embodied in a
“New Age” mentality complete with a mini love that often substitutes co-habitation for
marriage, the pathetic “significant other” or “companion” for husband or wife and
surrounds marriage, if it happens at all, with no fault divorce laws and pre-nuptial
agreements, may miss the whole point and much of the learning experience. Sometimes
people who may disdain Christianity write their own wedding vows full of flowers, the
beauties of nature, sweetness and light and even a love of sorts but seldom with the
ringing magnificence and total giving, loving commitment found in the ancient Christian
words. That we increasingly fail to live up to this genuine love even as some priests have
failed in their vows is testimony to a failure of faith and the decrepitude of the age we
live in. But we have to have the freedom to try. There is no genuine love otherwise.
It seems odd that in an era when choice is cherished to the point of becoming a
death-dealing calamity for millions it is suspended by people of the Barbara Walters
mentality in the vital realms of God, life and death because “there are so many ways of
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looking at it.” But are there? Are things really as multiple and confusing as all that or are
there ways to cut to the chase, split through all the foliage and thus avoid a life of
suspended thought and deferred decision making about these most vital and important
issues? There are and revelation points the way but can we trust it? Basically that’s the
gist of Pilate’s question and the point of these essays. We already know that reason
thrived on what revelation provided. That’s a good sign but we need more. We need
confirmation of the truth of what was revealed in addition to the benefits to philosophy.
Can revelation be further authenticated and found trustworthy? Later in essay XXII we
will see that the life, death and more precisely the cogent reasoning in support of the
genuineness of Christ’s resurrection from the dead provided the confirmation we seek. It
comes down to the three “Rs.” As important as “reading, riting and rithmatic” are for
human progress and happiness these three “Rs,” are even more so, “reason, revelation
and resurrection.” The three cut through Ms. Walters maze. Reason thrived on what
revelation provided and the resurrection confirmed both. This is the pearl of great price
that we seek and hopefully shall find.
There are obstacles along the way, often ourselves. Who said, “we have met the
enemy and he is us?”
This is what poet David Middleton was getting at when he wrote:
“I Am That I Am” God said to
Moses;
But nowadays all anyone knows is
“I gotta be me,” as Me proposes.
That’s a danger.
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VIII. THE WAY AND OTHER WAYS
Before we look more closely at natural revelation based on reason at work on the
world around us and given revelation based on the Scriptures, it should be noted that Ms.
Walters opined further that “I think one of the major problems today is people saying
only my religion is right and if you don’t agree with me you are not going to heaven.”
Although this does seem to be the dismissive view in general of Islam toward the
“infidel” and some evangelical Christian churches that hold one must formally and
explicitly accept Jesus as Lord and Savior to be saved, it is possible to hold a religion as
right and true without condemning the rest as worse than useless. The issue is not as
closed and shut as these hard line groups imagine. In fact the Catholic Church, the
original, oldest and largest of all the Christian churches maintains that truth and toleration
can abide together devoid of blanket condemnations of alternate faiths and that lives lived
through beliefs different from our own are nonetheless meaningful and can be worthy of
the promises of Christ. The Church holds that all people can be saved though not all paths
lead equally to God. While some of the defenders of Catholicism early on including
Augustine (d. 430 A.D.) wrote that people outside the pale of Christianity were simply
lost (“massa damnata” he called them), the remark was directed in the heat of debate
against the Donatists who rejected the leniency of the Church toward penitent apostates
who had made sacrifice to the pagan Roman gods during imperial persecutions and the
Pelagians who held that the help and grace of God violates our freedom. We’ll see them
again later. In a calmer frame of mind even Augustine in other writings saw salvation as
possible to all. Christ died for all and the Catholic teaching is that God denies no one the
grace and help necessary for salvation. The Church holds that even those who have never
heard of Christ can be saved and if they are it is because of the redemption affected by
Christ. To all human beings is held out the possibility of being made partakers even
unknowingly in Christ who alone is the way to the Father and eternal life. They are said
to be of the soul of the Church but how is this achieved? The teaching comes from Christ
who came to gather sinners and that is, of course, all of us. But He also said, “No one
goes to the Father except by the Son.” The reconciliation of even those unacquainted
with the Gospel has been referred to by Catholics from Aquinas in the 13th Century to
the Council of Trent in the 16th and Vatican II in the 20th as Baptism of Desire.
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Essentially it is achieved by a sincere desire to find God and do his will by following
ones conscience as reflected in that encapsulation of the natural law popularly known as
the Golden Rule. As we better understand the Church as a vast hospital ship for a
damaged but not irredeemable humanity we better understand the meaning of Pope
Boniface VIII’s teaching that there is no salvation outside it. The “it” can be bigger than
he knew or we thought and so indeed is the ship, known from ancient times as the bark of
Peter. Christ’s redemptive grace is at work in a very broad field across time and space
and multitudes, young and old, of all races and nations and various religious traditions are
spiritually of the Church even if in a rudimentary fashion. The Second Vatican Council
recalled St Paul’s words to the Athenians in front of their statue to the unknown god, He
told them “God himself is not far from those who seek the unknown God in darkness and
shadows… whom as Savior desires all men to be saved.” Paul elaborated on these
thoughts in his epistles. In polite disagreement with all attitudes similar to the Dalai
Lama’s, the Church did not and does not teach that other religions are revealed religions
in the sense that Judaism and Christianity are or that they are in and of themselves paths
or ways to salvation and life. It should be mentioned here that even before the Church
became known as Catholic a little prior to 100AD it was referred to as “the Way,” and
there was only one. The use of “Catholic” spread in an effort to distinguish the universal
character of the Church from the esoteric, elitist and syncretic Gnostic amalgams that
were appealing to some segments of the population and were definitely not the way.
Though other faiths both then and now are not in themselves authentic paths nevertheless
even as the Church proclaimed the good news of the life awaiting us and God’s loving
saving power, His amazing grace was and is at work in the hearts of non-Christian
brothers and sisters across the globe. This is the Church’s position. It rejects nothing that
is true in these other traditions always maintaining however that the fullness of truth is in
it by its establishment by Christ. The grace of new life was won by Christ, who is the
way, the truth, the life, thus answering Pilate’s question. That hard won grace is there to
help all those who show they desire it by the way they live the life of love taught by the
natural law’s Golden Rule as engraved on the hearts of all people and with more
heightened detail by Christ Himself and still proclaimed by the Church.
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As was mentioned, the Catholic Church was first called that about 100AD because it
was reaching out with the newly revealed good news to everybody and trying to include
everybody on every continent and nation, both male, female, free and slave, rich and
poor, Jew and Gentile, educated and ignorant. There were no chosen people; all peoples
whether Jew or gentile were now the chosen people and in faith children of Abraham.
As Chesterton wrote “Revelation was the most curiously democratic act in the history of
mankind…” Indeed it was. It made God and the promise of new and eternal life available
to all. Not only the Jews or the philosophers or the ascetic holy men but to us, to those
who had been called the common herd. For many of the herd through the ages the Church
was and is the Bark of Peter, the great hospital ship launched by Christ. He told Peter and
the Apostles as they left their nets to follow him that from now on they would be fishers
of men, and into the catch would go sinners down and about out but who wanted to
change, go the despairing who wanted hope, go all the damaged of life asking for help,
go life’s wounded veterans who sadly had wounded others but strive for sincere sorrow,
sinners all including with some exceptions the captain and crew but none of them
despairing. In this way the Church represents to this day the real and essential
inclusiveness. For those seeking the help of God, in and out of the boat, it is blind to
gender, nation, race, education, wealth, fame, everything except need, debates over the
tradition of a male priesthood notwithstanding. In this way it is possible for it to practice
love and toleration and at the same time hold to that powerful reality of Christ’s utter
uniqueness. This understanding enables us to escape the exclusionary strictures of Islam
and some forms of Christianity and at the same time the mind sapping, truth demeaning,
inquiry benumbing relativism of good and compassionate people like the Dalai Lama and
Barbara Walters. Mind sapping because such relativism drains out the drive to know, it
aids in avoiding the thinking questions that lead to answers and often ends in an
indifference to truth expressed in the idea that all religions, opinions, philosophies are of
equal worth and that truth is everywhere even in contradiction. The attitude is sometimes
summed up with “you have your truth I have mine.” But we really know it can’t be so
and if we buy into it we live a lie, the very opposite of truth.
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IX THE GIFT HORSE AND THE PROPER USE OF CHOICE
Fortunately, in spite of an apparent multiplicity of world religions, there are in reality
no more than two basic groupings. We have religions claiming to be responses to God’s
action in human history called the revealed religions with Judaism the earliest and Islam
the latest, seven hundred years after Christ. Their teachings and beliefs have this in
common, they derive from authors and prophets or in Islam’s case one prophet,
Mohammed. Both hold God the ultimate inspirer though Mohammed’s revelation found
in the Qumran is very derivative relying heavily on the scriptures of the Jews and
Christians with native Arab beliefs and customs added in. Christianity is the unique one;
the ultimate revealed religion in that Christians hold that its inspirer was no prophet or
author but God, AM, becoming man and actually entering history as a human being. This,
the dogma of dogmas, the Incarnation, goes far beyond the other revealed religions with
tremendous implications. These then are the three religions claiming basis in God
revealing himself to humanity through prophets and inspired authors with Christianity
going beyond that to God actually becoming man.
For the rest be it native religions worldwide sometimes of a very pantheistic bent
or the Eastern traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, they make no claim of divine
revelation but represent more the mind of man in search of meaning. They are man’s
noble groping after God or some rationale for existence, for being. They have strong
external polytheistic leanings and sometimes drift into various forms of pantheism too;
more about them later.
The traditions relying on revelation are quite different. They are all monotheistic but
as we will see, not monistic. First, coming from the inspired Jewish writers of Genesis the
first book of Scripture, comes the Adam and Eve in the garden story with creation, fall
and the promise of help, redemption, a Messiah as the main motif. Then through the
founder of the Jewish people, Abraham, and their great lawgiver Moses in the book of
Exodus we move to troubles and captures and fallings away and the prophets often as
God’s goads moving toward realization of the hope of the coming of the Messiah who
had been promised in Genesis. The final chapter in the story, accepted by Christians but
not most of the Jews is that the promised Messiah came. Christ coming about 2,000
years after Abraham, perhaps twelve hundred after Moses fulfilled the promise and then
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some, more than a Messiah, the Incarnation. Leaving the Muslim addition of a final
prophet, Mohammed, for now, the Incarnation greatly simplifies Walters’ quest or choice
in all this for its absolute uniqueness. God did or didn’t become man and if he did, ball
game over, search done. Everything is truly BC and AD!
There is only one man in history that believably claimed to be God. “The Father
sent me.” “I and the Father are one,” said Jesus. “He who sees me sees the Father.” “I am
the Way, the Truth, The Life, he who believes in me though he be dead yet shall he live
and he who believes in me and lives shall never die. “ I have come that you may have life
in abundance.” Astounding words and promises never heard before or since. The
approximately forty times that the New Testament makes the point of Christ’s
identification with God the Father and his divinity, emphasizing that he was not simply a
way or a truth but the way, the truth, the life, rather simplifies things. He and his message
are there for all ages and people upon examination to reject or accept. It is not as if there
are a dozen people who said what Christ said. All that his remarkable and unique words
and his life itself call for is open, thoughtful and serious consideration and not by any
means unexamined dismissal. This is the proper use of choice and an essential reason
why we are free beings rather than the highly programmed automatons that make up the
rest of known living creation. Faith, hope, love and life are offered. “I have come that you
may have life in abundance.” All that we are required to do, called on to examine, are
these remarkable claims and decide, choose. It is no good to try to sluff Christ off as
simply a great teacher as many non-acceptors and people of the “spiritual but not
religious” mentality often try to do. Far from a great teacher, he and his followers were
great charlatans or worse, delusional, habitual liars, demented deceivers or cynical con
men if these claims are false. Buddha, by contrast, was by all indications a very good and
caring man and an inspirational teacher but this is the very thing that may never be said
of Christ and his early followers. If he was, like Buddha, only a man, he was at best a
very bad one, more adept at leading simpletons astray than anyone in history. He is the
world’s greatest deceiver or at least a very sick person, maybe a bit of both.
Christ by his own words and deeds and the fact that no one in history that we
know of ever said anything like the things he said and was taken in dead seriousness by
multitudes, simplifies our decision making for us. We basically have a multiple choice
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with only two choices, yes or no. For the rest, there were indeed many good and
religious men but Moses knew better than to claim he was the flame in the unconsumed
bush and it would never have entered his mind to do so. He knew he was not “I AM” and
didn’t pretend to be. Mohammed for his part did not misunderstand Mohammed and
suppose he was Allah. He only claimed to be a prophet. Buddha never said he was
Brahma. Indeed Buddha was an agnostic who sometimes sounded like an atheist. He
refused to even discuss eternity, immortality or God. No! There is no one out there who
ever said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except
through me.” “I and the Father are One.” “Before Abraham came to be I am.” “I have
come that you may have life in abundance.” It really can’t be blunter. No reticence, no
relativism, but in an era rife with it, it is easy to understand how Christ jangles the
pluralism and equality nerves of many as he must have the Dalai Lama’s. In one sense it
is probably more pleasant to just ignore the claims Christ made but for a thinking person
and that’s all of us at one time or another, how long can that go on? If confronted,
considered and then dismissed the reasons for the dismissal should be rather well
thought-out and solid, the more honest, the more straightforward the better. Trouble is,
for many, rejection comes after abandonment of the morality Christ taught, very weak
grounds indeed. Consider rather this, are Christ utterances the words of an egomaniac or
a self-deluded dupe, perhaps a hoaxer, a liar, a con man, the front man for a conspiracy?
You name it. For those who confront and reject his claim that he is God, the eternal
Being, giver of life become man, they seem to be the only alternative choices. For those
who prefer to dodge the claims and the confrontation, much easier on the nerves are the
bromides and sedatives: ‘all paths lead to God.” “Christ was a wonderful teacher of
goodness.” “No one (religious) path is superior.” “There are so many paths we can never
know” It seems a shame to wake these sleepers up but waking the sleepers and helping
the seekers is precisely what the great gift horse of revelation was intended to do and has
been doing since the Old Testament Days of the Jewish Bible.
Here we have the proper non-lethal arena for the exercise of our freedom and
choice. No need to live a life in mental suspension, in a relativism that usually descends
into indifferentism. There the pursuit of truth is often put on a shelf, up and out of the
way, sometimes being replaced by the gratification of pleasure pursuits, immersion in the
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arts or sports or other more or less worthy time filling involvements and distractions. Up
on the shelf it is also less likely to interfere with the mindless din and hair-raising tramp
of tripe offered up day and night by TV and much popular Hollywood type
entertainment. These things are superficially life fulfilling for many of the less
demanding. God? Give us Gaga. Under the pervasive sway of the pop media, the culture
sags dragging down many floaters beneath its deadening weight. To make matters worse
the media actually misleads many by so mixing up fact and fiction that it sometimes takes
the historically savvy to sort the mess out. Thus a channel purporting to present history
can offer a fact based presentation on the Civil War such as the film “Glory,” and follow
it up with a mish mash of fact and fiction about religion like “The DaVinci Code” as if
both were of equal value. Those whose sense of reality be it in history or religion is
heavily media influenced put themselves at an added disadvantage in the pursuit of
Pilate’s question.
Artist Siegfried Reinhardt made the point well in his 1959 painting, “Light,” in
which Christ, holding his crown of thorns high as if a tambourine, tries to break into a
distracted, confused and indifferent age to arouse it and wake it up. The subtitle taken
from the New Testament, Luke, 18:8 is appropriate, “When the Son of Man comes again
will he find any faith on the Earth?” Distraction and escapism can take many forms. For
many back then as the painting clearly shows and probably many more now it was
saturation with popular music that provided some of the distraction. Now the fog is
thickened by the added blur of an established drug culture with heavy doses of sexual
promiscuity with a rate of porn use and co-habitation unheard of prior to the 1960s. The
resounding result of this cave in to self-satisfaction with a capital “S” on self according to
Michael Franzen in his new book, “Freedom,” is not a new and unprecedented burst of
happiness, fulfillment and contentment and only the fool would have expected it would
be. Indeed resort to drugs and suicide has never been higher than in our era nor has the
creation and spread of new sexually transmitted diseases. Far from it, statistically the
happiness gage has never been lower and the loneliness barometer never higher. The
discontent gets worse the harder we drive for fulfillment and happiness because we have
a basic problem and it flows from the troubled depths of a human nature that is damaged
and misdirected. But the gift horse is still there, rejected by some, yes, but it will never be
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withdrawn. As Christ said at the end of Matthew’s gospel, “Behold I am with you all
days even to the end of the world.”
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X
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY LOOK THE GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH
For most of us the important life questions demand answers. We think about them,
not always but at times, especially as we grow older. Most of us don’t dismiss them as
unanswerable. Our answers vary. Many see the answer in revelation. For an atheist such
as physicist Stephen Hawking the key question of how or why we are here or anything is
here is answered thusly, “spontaneous creation is the reason why…the universe exists,
why we exist…why there is something rather than nothing.” He goes on to say “because
there is a law of gravity the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.” To create is
to bring into being something from nothing. Problem number one is something including
gravity can’t bring itself, create itself, from nothing because it would have to exist first.
The obvious problem with this theory is that gravity is something not nothing and law
implies a lawgiver. From whence them? But Hawking is warming up to a vital point. If
there were ever nothing, even for a microsecond, there would always and forever be
nothing. Something always had to be, something always had to exist for there to be
something now. What is it, gravity? But, from whence this thing gravity? To repeat, in
order to create anything it is necessary for someone, something, anything to first be there,
to exist, to do the creating, and to bring it about. Something has to already exist.
Something cannot come from nothing on its own because to begin with there isn’t any
own. There must first be an “own” an agent, something or else we are faced with the
logical absurdity of something coming from nothing spontaneously on its own when own
doesn’t even exist yet. Hawking’s gravity theory is practically a definition of impossible.
The way out is to say that gravity just always existed. “Because there is a law of
gravity,” says Hawking. God-gravity may not exactly be the God of revelation but when
the metaphysics of Exodus is rejected this type of thing is often what we get. For most, it
just doesn’t cut it. Some scientists like Hawking may be able to believe the impossible
but not most believers. Gravity requires pre-conditions, mass for example. What
generated the gravity or the mass that produced it? Or is there an eternal mass, and so on
and on. No doubt, something has to be eternal. Even Hawking agrees and posits gravity.
There is indeed such a law as gravity but what or who legislated it or did it simply
legislate itself from nothing? Do we come down to unknowing gravity or an unthinking
29
mass that generated it and that always existed and had in it something called the law
gravity to explain existence? One of the many problems with this scenario is science
knows of nothing of mass that is not impermanent. We need something eternal. Or is it
more likely that the necessary, essential and eternal something we seek and from which
all being comes is something thinking and eternal. But now we are inching back toward
the metaphysics of Exodus, a drift Hawking would not like. So, why is there any law at
all rather than no law and no thing, nothing at all? Why something?
There are indeed laws and these laws and the fundamental particles they govern
dictate the cosmic regularity that makes our existence possible and they are by no means
explained by the Hawkins theory; a theory that could almost be called a weak dodge to
avoid what so many scientists are increasingly concluding. Scientists such as Hermann
Weyl, for example, who objects that mathematical physics reveals a “flawless harmony
that is in conformity with sublime reason.” Hawking’s divine law of gravity is only a
part of this flawless harmony not its cause. Physicist Stephen M. Barr adds, “At the root
of the physical world…one does not find mere inchoate slime or dust (in the wind) but
instead a richness and perfection of form based on profound, subtle, and beautiful
mathematical ideas.” For these scientists the answer lies not in the chance of an
unexplained gravity that no one can account for and which requires pre-conditions or an
eternal mass that is in itself a contradiction but rather in intricate planning. For the atheist
like Hawking we emerged spontaneously from nothing or from gravity that is simply
inexplicably there and whose existence is left unexplained and unaccounted for.
Scientific explanations having at this point reached their logical limit and having thus
dead-ended, we are forced to say either the orderliness of the universe has no real
explanation outside the most completely odds defying chance or it has. University of St.
Andrews philosopher John Haldane writes in his book, “Reasonable Faith,” that it indeed
has an explanation, an “extra-natural one…an agent.” And so we move back to Exodus’
“AM.”
Increasingly, scientists see remarkable design, sublime reason, and beautiful
mathematical laws pointing to something far beyond chance. This debate about the big
questions is good, necessary and helpful and hopefully should stimulate searching
thought. Again, the great subject under discussion here is a prime reason for and worthy
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object of mind. It is the most obvious reason, justification if you will, for our wonderful
and unique abilities as thinking beings. That we arose from “nothing,” is an impossibility
of course for something must come from something. Nothing can come from nothing. An
instant of nothing is the death knell of everything.
Here the metaphysical question kicks in, a question beyond the realm of chemistry,
physics or any of the laboratory sciences. What something? What something must of
necessity always exist to make the alternative, nothing, impossible? The resounding
answer from revelation in the Book of Exodus as we saw was “I AM.” Our being, all
being, everything is the gift of the eternal Being.
In conclusion, only nothing can come from nothing. Something cannot emerge
into being from nothing by Hawkings’ kind of “spontaneous creation,” or any other way.
And more pertinent to this discussion, can perfection of form based on beautiful
mathematical ideas arise spontaneously from dumb unthinking gravity or for that matter
from nothing at all? Can Hawking’s inexplicable unthinking gravity simply exist without
cause or explanation? Such a faith most people cannot swallow. We have a choice again.
Is what Hawking proposes a better, more logical and convincing answer for our existence
and the existence of everything else than Being, “AM?” Is the existence of intelligent
beings from an inexplicable eternal unknowing gravity by sheer chance more logical or
would the gift of being from Being be more likely? Truth is not relative. Where does it
lie?
To summarize, it seems that we have come up against another self-evident truth. It
is obvious that something cannot come from nothing. If there were ever nothing, even a
split microsecond of it in all eternity there would always be nothing. Put another way,
something always had to exist for anything to exist now. In a rather lame substitute for
what most of humanity deem God the desperate atheist of the Hawkins school posits
gravity. Truth to tell, it doesn’t work well. Wilbur Mills might have said it best. “You
will never see proof that God exists only all the evidence.” We will see later that
overwhelming proof would make faith impossible and squeeze out to the vanishing point
the free will necessary for authentic love of God and neighbor, creation’s purpose.
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XI THE BIRTHDAY PROBLEM AND METAPHYSICS
We of course know that something always existed for the simple reason that something
exists now. We exist, you and most certainly me. For sure, I exist. You might be more
problematical. “Cogito ergo sum,” as Descartes wrote. “I think therefore I am,” It was
nice of him to say so but I already knew it. I knew I existed. It was another one of those
self-evident truths that we have to have faith in, the most basic faith of all. I am real and
not a delusion, a dream in another’s mind or imaginings, the figment of someone’s
imagination. Now, whether you the reader exist or anything else exists outside me is
another question. However, I believe you do exist. I must have faith in my five senses
and that what they bring to my mind is real and not their own conjuring. They tell me you
and much else beside you and me exist, much else is out there. This is a very basic act of
faith. We must believe in our senses even though they fool us sometimes. Mind can
usually detect when the senses are acting up. We take on faith that things are not
constructs designed by some master jokester to trick and mislead us. I know that my
memory like my senses is also unreliable at times and I know that Scrooge believed that
his senses deceived him, that Marley was just a piece of undercooked beef, or was it
potato? Damn memory! But all in all we must believe in our senses when they tell our
intellect that outside reality is really real. That it is not just the product of our senses
themselves with no connect to anything outside. Some thinkers called philosophical
idealists once held this remarkable belief. For them all “reality” was unreal and merely
the construct of the senses themselves. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the supreme realist, and
realists like to depend on hard evidence, when confronted with their ideas by his friend
Boswell refuted them thusly by kicking a large stone and saying ouch!
The Church has always revered realism and hard evidence. Even belief in the
resurrection as we shall see depends on it. But on the other hand, without the demand for
hard evidence any fiction is possible and truth can be anything you want it to be, your
truth as good as anyone’s. Imaginative worlds and powers can be out there; utopias
conjured up, fictional realms and principalities, space visitors, ghosts in attics and
vampires in crypts. You name it! All are possible to the undemanding mind willing to
believe without good evidence based on provable or at least reasonable and convincing
fact yet some people choose to believe these kinds of things, sometimes the very people
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who reject the historical evidence for Christ. Without evidence there can be a Cheshire
cat in every tree. With it there can’t. Such imaginings captured in fiction can be fun to
read but what Johnson is saying is that we must primarily deal with reality not detached
mind constructs if we are to attain truth. To do that we must rely on, evaluate carefully
then put faith in the evidence of our senses and the conclusions of sound fact based
reasoning
So, here we are, we have minds far beyond anything else or any other beings that we
know of. The fascinating and vital inquiry into truth, Pilate’s question, is precisely what
the human mind is uniquely equipped to do and it does make good sense in this area of
origins, the big questions of how and why we are here, to look closely at the only person
we know of who said not “ I found the truth, uncovered the truth, discovered the truth”
but “I am the truth.” Mind and Reason, working with the gift horse of revelation and if
finding it cogent can find in revelation a mighty help in the shedding of light on the great
metaphysical questions before us. The questions deserve a closer look.
Some philosophers, Will Durant for one, reject this approach claiming that theology
compromises and invalidates pure philosophy, that we must think and reason without any
consideration of a possible revelation. Revelation has to be dismissed. In a sense he was a
Pelagian. We can and must do it ourselves. Those who have lived through the calamities
of the 20th Century brought about by philosophies like Social Darwinism, Nazism and
Communism all of which denied revelation, can’t help but doubt that. And medieval man
along with many others did too. Their motto was essentially, we can use all the help we
can get or as they put it “credo ut intelligentium,” I believe in order to better understand.
Or again, Duns Scotus in the 12th century, “This I believe, but if it be in anywise possible,
this I would also know.” Belief, it went without saying, had to work with and not hinder
the exercise of that first of all divine gifts, even preceding revelation, reason. Even
without Exodus and the rest of revelation, the Church always insisted that the ordinary
human mind working on the reality around it could reason to the existence of God. The
work of unassisted reason had indeed achieved much reaching a zenith with Plato and
Aristotle but then broke into confusion. The message of Exodus delivered to the world
outside its first recipients, the Jews, by the Church was taken to heart with gratitude by
many thinkers and philosophy began to move again. The nature of God was revealed
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beyond Aristotle’s dreams. Yes God was the uncaused cause, pure thought, but more.
God was pure being whose very essence was to exist. “AM.” The necessary eternal being
that makes nothing forever impossible “Whoever sees by faith that God is Being and
creation is the gift of being by Being,” has a great advantage on the road to understanding
both our world and us. Thus aided they can now see a lot more by reason than before. It
was, so to speak, reason on steroids. The myriad dead-ends not to mention dead bodies
left by modern philosophies from the materialism of Marxism to the social Darwinism
and race ideology of Nazism, both eschewing revelation and even demeaning it, seem to
confirm the medieval approach. But still we must always look the gift horse in the mouth.
True faith never stills restless reason and never will nor will it discard such a gift as
revelation without very convincing reasons to do so. Recently some have walked away
because of sex scandals, a very unconvincing reason to do so, for the Church was
promised truth never sinlessness.
Even without the aid of revealed truth as embodied most especially in Christ, the
metaphysician whose science is beyond the laboratories of the physical sciences and also
the ordinary person who has never even heard of metaphysics but is one by virtue of his
inquiring mind, both realize that Hawkins’ spontaneous creation from nothing is
erroneous. The refutation can be stated in several ways. As was mentioned before, “from
nothing only nothing comes.” Something always existed for something to exist now.
Reverse the logic; something exists now therefore something always existed. Put another
way, if for even a split second nothing existed, there would never be anything; nothing
would be forever, past, present and future. There would be nothing now. Nothing would
win. We would not be here. So, we have a tough problem. We have to fill up the huge
gap of infinity stretching forever before we were born and came into being and stretching
forever after too. We have to find something eternal to fill it or else there is going to be a
little nothing and then we are not here. But we are! We win. But what enables our
victory, our existence? What exists forever and prevents nothing’s victory?
We are looking for eternal existence, something of or with eternal being,
something that always was and always will be. Honestly, I can’t fill the bill. I was born
in 1937, celebrated my 73rd birthday yesterday. That leaves me out. I presume you are out
too. Even the universe with all its matter, energy and forces like gravity and its heartbeat,
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time itself, can’t do it. The universe had a birthday too about 13.7 billion years ago
according to Ken Croswell in the Dec. 2010 “National Geographic.” And our galaxy, The
Milky Way, one of billions in the universe and a rather large and old one as galaxies go is
slightly younger than the universe. The whole universe started up with a big bang of a
birthday and birthdays are nice but this one raises questions. Who or what was at it? We
need something without a birthday. That’s what we are looking for. We know that it, that
something, whatever it is has to exist because we exist, because there could never ever
have been nothing because something can’t start from nothing and the universe started.
Therefore we must ask, who or what was at its birthday party? Who or what set it up?
What was there before the universe was born and had its birthday? What is that ultimate
eternal something that must be pure existence, have it in its very essence with no cause
outside itself or beside itself; eternal being that makes that awful instant of nothing
happily impossible? It is not to be wondered that physics will never get to the point of
answering these questions which lay beyond laboratory capabilities and are in the realm
of reason, logic and philosophy and when physicists like Hawkins leave their field and
attempt a metaphysical answer they can sometimes come up with highly unconvincing
responses like gravity. So, we are faced with the question of questions. As far as the
existence of the universe goes, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of forever. So,
what was there before it? Again, what is it that exists forever?
With these vital questions we are entering the realm of metaphysics and the
questions here push beyond the physical sciences but there is in addition a question even
more profound, more basic than those just raised that pushes not only beyond the
physical sciences but also beyond even metaphysics and into the realm of revelation and
the theology that rests on it. Not who or what but why? Now we are talking motive. Why
does anything exist at all? Is there a motive for it all? Why is there anything? Indeed, the
greatest mystery might be the why of it, why there is anything at all rather than nothing at
all. Nothing seems just as likely if not more so. So then, why is there anything instead of
nothing? We know there is an eternal something. There has to be. There is no escaping
that but there is a lot of something elses that are not eternal including, by our physical
nature, us. The eternal something is here pure and simple in itself and must be selfexplaining, self-existing, but not us and everything else with us. Unlike the eternally
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existing essence or being that prevents nothing, we don’t have to be. Why are we and
everything else here? Here we have the motive question, a question of will and to repeat,
as such it goes beyond philosophy and metaphysics to that outgrowth and fruition of
revelation, the theology of the Church. It is in revelation that we find the solution to the
problem and what a solution it is!
It’s a gift, a sort of loving, generous birthday gift. That’s what the existence of the
universe and us in it is, a sort of tremendous and fabulous birthday present. And we know
what’s the motive behind all true presents, generosity and love. Here the Christian
metaphysician gladly accepts the help extended by revelation to achieve the most
complete picture of our world available to us. Without it the why question is eternally
unanswerable but with it our understanding is greatly expanded. The answer revelation
gives is love. The reason for creation lies in the goodness of that necessary eternal Being
who met Moses in the desert and gave him a name that reflects his essence, “Tell the
Israelites “I AM” sent you to them.” The same Being who through evolutionary form and
process set humanity going upon Earth as told allegorically in the earliest part of Genesis.
The reason for it all is in “AM,” Yahweh, “the Lord,” God, and God’s generous love. The
love is magnificently demonstrated in God’s wish to share the two finest gifts possible,
the greatest gifts there can be, being and love. In essence they are the same gift. The New
Testament calls God love. Since God can acquire nothing that does not already exist in
him and that he doesn’t already possess in his being, this is all pure, generous giving
love. He didn’t need us but willed us for love’s sake and our sake so that we could feast
in love and share the love God freely shared and shares with us. Indeed, God so loved the
world, as the New Testament tells, that later He, Being, “AM,” became a being, a
creature, a human being, Jesus Christ, and gave Himself to it and for us out of that same
generous love in order to reorient creation towards its original goal which had not been
completely lost sight of but for many had become severely dimmed, a dimming that is
always threatening and which the Church at Christ’s command has been fighting off for
two millennia. That goal, that end, that love that lay behind all creation, he had to remind
us, is not for death but for love, the gift of abundant life and fullness of being. It’s ours
for the effort we make to live and reflect and share God’s love here. What a present!
Happy birthday forever!
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XII
A METAPHYSICAL BIRTHDAY PRESENT
But, leaving aside for now with regrets the motive, the why question with the
answer of overflowing generous love, a return to the first question is in order. The answer
to the question of motivation was entirely dependent on revelation but the “what”
question is much more susceptible to our unaided reasoning efforts. What is it that fills
forever since the universe cannot because it evidently had a beginning? Gravity or mass
or matter-energy and answers of that ilk that the materialist must cling to or cease to be a
materialist are in themselves very poor ones because all material things are impermanent.
They don’t last. They suffer from contingency. All material things and energies,
everything composed of matter, atoms, electrons and so forth from galaxies and
mountains to molecules and DNA to trees and you and me, all come and go, wax and
wane, arrive and depart, grow and decay, none of it shows anything like the eternal
staying power of Being. They have being, possess it for a while and then lose it, decline,
decay, and die. No material things nor the forces and energies associated with them are
permanent but are always in flux. They are always changing, always passing in and out of
existence. How can anything like that, something so temporary that it is time doomed, fill
up forever? Organic matter, inorganic matter, it all ages. William Golding the author of
“Lord of the Flies,” with the big bang origin of the material universe in mind, put it in a
rather poetic way: “The universe had a beginning. If there was no beginning then infinite
time has already passed and we could never have got to the moment where we are.” In
other words, if matter was unnaturally eternal and time being a measure of matter’s
change, thus tied to this eternal matter, the time will never come for us, we will never
arrive, never get here; that is if the universe was eternal. The mind winces at the thought.
And I recollect Golding adding, “I offer you a simple proof that the universe had a
beginning,” and then advising not to examine it too closely meaning it is self-evident if
you think about it. We know it had a beginning and our time came. And by now we know
that though the whole universe may have had a beginning, everything couldn’t.
Something didn’t or we would not be here. There has to be something outside the
universe so to speak, outside time and very different from it. Something not time
doomed.
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In a nutshell then, we have this great span of time to fill but not infinite time just to
get from the beginning of the universe to the moment where we are now, over 13 billion
years, but, and here it comes, the big hurdle, there is an unimaginable infinititude to get to
the start of the universe during which there cannot be a moment of nothing and obviously
something not of the universe has to fill it up. What fills infinity? We are running on
reason here with no help from revelation. Reason, in order to avoid God, the eternal
Being, a non-contingent, non-material, non-time doomed uncaused cause, to borrow with
liberties from Aristotle and Aquinas, by substituting anything material, try as we may or
as people like Hawking may, will not do it because of matter’s very impermanent nature.
Dismiss Hawking’s gravity and try to fill up the infinite span with something else, a chain
of material causes coming and going in line or circle configuration and causing one
another forever, stretching infinitely back, or some other such scenario as most
materialists must do is also a dodge because these material causes, no matter how many,
are still in themselves contingent and no matter how many there are they could never last
long enough for what we need, to fill the incomprehensibly immeasurable infinitude. On
top of that, an infinite string of material causes causing one another would have to exist
without a first cause because a first would mean it was not infinite, that there had first
been a void, a nothing before the beginning point. But, without a first cause the whole
thing would be uncaused and we know material things don’t cause themselves to exist
rather they demand a cause for themselves. Even without revelation simple logic
demands an uncaused cause at work somewhere to get us to where we are, indeed for
anything at all to be here, to exist now.
Aristotle described God as the uncaused cause. Fifteen hundred years later Aquinas
put it this way, “Now if there were an infinite regress among efficient (material) agents or
causes, no cause would be first.” That would mean the subsequent material causes are
uncaused and since they cannot cause themselves or give themselves existence they
therefore would not exist. Nothing material would exist. This is what classic philosophy
arrived at without the aid of revelation and long before science seemed to confirm their
work with the discovery of the big bang. Even without the Big Bang matter screamed out
its contingency, impermanence and total incapability to fill forever. And since that time
we have come to know the material universe started 13.7 billion years ago. So then, if
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the material universe or contingent matter is incapable of filling up the infinite, what is?
What fills up forever? What has always existed? An uncaused cause it would seem and
that of a non-material nature for as we’ve seen, the material can’t handle the assignment.
It’s out of its class. Goodbye to materialism.
To summarize, nothing permanent has ever been found by the science and the
search of man. Everything starts, changes, declines, decays, and demises. Matter, energy,
solar systems, galaxies, atoms, nothing is Being but only possesses it for a while and then
loses it and gives it up, but not everything. That would be impossible for if it was
possible the danger of nothing would raise its ugly head. A split second of nothing dooms
everything. That self-evident truth bears repeating because something cannot come from
nothing, nothing can.
The long history of metaphysical endeavor, pre-dating modern science, tackled
this question and reduced it to two basic answers and we’ve been over both. The
materialist, often an atheist or an agnostic and usually a secularist, must of necessity cling
to the material with all the impossibilities of that answer especially its contingency and
impermanence and now in the face even of science, the Big Bang. He is increasingly
being backed into a corner. Almost it seems out of desperation and perhaps revulsion
against the moral demands of the God of revelation, the materialist will sometimes
postulate without any evidence a great many other shadow universes from which the seed
of ours was born. The Hawking school favors this idea while still proposing the
spontaneous creation out of nothing idea. To repeat, “because there is a law such as
gravity, the universe (including ours) can and will create itself from nothing.” But the
error here is the same. Something creating itself from nothing is impossible. There can
never have been nothing. In order to create anything, something first has to exist. To
avoid the problem some try to fill nothing with an infinite string of material universes
coming and going in and out of existence ad infinitum without any first cause, in other
words, uncaused and just there by chance. The illogicalities are compounded by the fact
that there is not a modicum of evidence of any universes besides our own. It is pure
materialist speculation to avoid what many are increasingly calling the obvious and it
requires such an act of reverse faith that it is beyond the capability of most believers who
are usually people of common sense.
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Most people see the obvious. They hold the eternal necessary something cannot be
matter. It is not in the nature of pure matter to be eternal, to be anything other than
contingent and passing. If not matter then what? There is only one alternative, something
not matter, something non-material and eternal, something most people call spirit. They
observe the material world changing, growing, decaying, stars and planets coming and
going, passing in and out of existence and see this impermanence and contingency as
insufficient for anything eternal and we definitely need something eternal to avoid
nothing and to fill up forever. They conclude that the eternal and essential something that
we are looking for must of necessity be non- material. Going further, by looking at how
all the material stuff around us from gigantic galaxies to microscopic DNA molecules act
and work with orderly laws of “flawless harmony” and mathematical beauty, they deduce
not only a non-material existence or being but one of great power and intelligence, a
“Sublime Reason,” that always existed and most call God by many names. As physicist
Janna Levin said, “Why is it that there is this abstract mathematics that guides the
universe? The universe is remarkable because we can understand it.” It is a fitting object
of mind, our minds.
So, it seems what some have called the hidden God is not so hidden after all. He
(for simplicity sake we will still use “He” although as said, Christ explained that God is
spirit and sexuality applies only to the material realm) has given us a macro and micro
universe from galaxies to DNA molecules to contemplate and study and thus revealing
himself, as we shall see, in ways profounder than even Sagan’s tablets on the moon.
To avoid this conclusion and to explain the existence of thinking life in at least one
part of the universe, there are those who will believe almost anything in order not to
believe and avoid the gift horse. Some materialists, we have noted, call forth the
existence of these myriads of universes, an infinite chain of them for which, as said, there
is absolutely no empirical scientific evidence and then speculate that with enough
universes the odds are good that something like us, thinking life, will pop up by chance,
the Knox’s trunks routine that is mentioned below. Not only is there no evidence of such
a thing but little logic either. Though Hawking denies it, it appears to be introduced to
avoid the conclusion that the general regularities and particular fine-tuning science
increasingly discovers are due to the work of an intelligent cause and creator.
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A final summation can be restated thus: a chain of contingent causes in themselves has
to have a cause. They can perhaps lead into more universes though there is absolutely no
evidence of it but they can’t cause themselves. There is need of a first cause. Aquinas,
following Aristotle, called it the uncaused cause and agreed with Aristotle that any chain
of cause and effect must ultimately begin with an uncaused cause. Any chain or regress
of material contingent causes, no matter how long, needs a ground or cause other than
itself in order to be. Why is it there? How is it there? Being material and contingent it
has no need to be. It must root in something that has existence not from another but rather
from itself. Without this first uncaused cause, no effects, no chain, nothing, nonexistence
is all. Matter, whether alive or dead, is always tending toward dissolution, decay and
demise. There is nothing permanent or enduring about it much less eternal or forever and
simply adding to it does not solve our problem, which is to fill up forever. We have this
forever gap to fill. More importantly, matter like evolution cannot even explain itself or
why it exists, why it is and has being. Evolution cannot account for life because it
requires pre-existing building blocks upon which to work. Nor on the moral level can it
account for consciousness or altruistic moralities a’ la George Bailey. Increasingly,
scientists like Oxford physics professor, Peter Atkins, have come to admit, “we simply do
not know how the universe can come into being without intervention.”
The intervention, the something we are looking for, what we need, needs to be for
without it we are not. Its essence is existence. It has no contingency. It is unchanging,
uncaused and absolutely unique in that unlike everything else its essence is to exist. It is
existence itself and here we’ll use revelation for the first time as a cap. The interventor is
and has to exist, his name is AM. The name conveys a Being eternal and by logical
extension, powerful and intelligent. A first cause who simply is and is the cause of all
else that is. But all else need not be because the essence of all else is not existence.
Himself uncaused, an uncreated creator as different from his creation as eternal Being is
different from being. Reason takes us far along this road and with revelation makes a
smashing combination that can finally bring sense to the questions that have stayed with
humanity from the beginning. This to a great extent is the conclusion many are driven to
by metaphysical logic or simple common sense. Reason brings us to the existence of
God. Revelation brings us to the essence of God and eventually the motive for God’s
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creative activity, overflowing generous love. Unaided reason could not arrive at that.
Help was needed, the help of revelation. There are the Hawkings and Durants who reject
that help of course but many more who don’t.
Leaving the origin of the universe and turning to the origin of life and especially
intelligent life, for most the chance scenario with its variations is simply too hard to
swallow. The typical reaction is “fat chance.” While some in science and academic
circles may grab on to it as an escape from belief and the strictures it can bring, chance as
a causal explanation for the origin of the biological information found in DNA is
accepted by very few serious researchers in the field of origin of life biology today. Even
on the scale of billions of years the chance of chance putting together intelligent life is
vanishingly small. Consider that the probability of constructing a rather short functional
protein at random becomes so small as to be effectively zero, 1 chance in 10 to the 135th,
according to Stephen C. Meyer in his essay “The Origin of Life and the Death of
Materialism.” There is not that much sand on a beach! This irreducible complexity, the
laws of physics, consciousness, all are very powerful arguments and while they cannot
amount to laboratory proof of God thereby completely eliminating any need for faith,
they do make faith very appealing to the logical, inquisitive and unbiased mind. The
essential hiddeness of God mentioned earlier will never be entirely dissipated here on
Earth to the extent that Faith, Hope and Love are made unnecessary or actually
impossible for being forced.
To conclude this section with a final anecdote on the concept of chance as
accounting for the rise of thinking life on one of the billions of planets in the universe,
many years ago Father Ronald Knox of Oxford addressed the idea this way: There are
millions upon millions of travel trunks in the world. “If Scotland Yard found a body in
your trunk you would not get away with telling them there are millions and millions of
trunks surely one of them must contain a body. They would still want to know who put it
there.” We still want to know who put us here. What’s giving us being? Where did matter
come from? What’s giving it being? Chance wouldn’t satisfy Scotland Yard and it
should not satisfy us.”
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XIII REASON LEADS TO REVELATION AND AWAY FROM PANTHEISM
We have been dealing with challenging subject matter but much of it open to normal
reasoning and common sense. The subject is of universal interest and supreme
importance to us as human beings and we have been given the tools to deal with it
namely mind with its reasoning capacity. These tools need to be commensurate with the
task and they are. Like the tell tale crumbs along the forest floor of fairy tale fame, the
proper study of our material world will bring us to answers far more rational than mere
accident or chance. Mind properly used will eventually lead us to truth. No need for
sentinels or monoliths on the moon here. Mind working on the material world around us
is enough to bring us, like it did Aristotle, to the uncaused cause and when combined with
revelation to the uncaused cause who is also a loving father. Faith and reason are the best
two tools we have for our investigation.
God, to use the accepted word, is the necessary pre-condition for the astonishing fact
that we exist, that anything exists; that there is something rather than nothing. Why not
nothing? Why not total blank? As pointed out, it requires nothing and seems so much
easier. Yet there is something and a lot of it, a billion galaxies following the most
intricate mathematical laws. In the fact that there is indeed something, it is the peculiarity
of atheism that in all of this something, all this reality, the only exception to the rule that
every effect has to have a cause is its claim that the something all around us, reality itself,
the world, the universe, all matter is uncaused… call it spontaneous creation. Call it
chance. Most call it “unbelievable,” some irrational, others unscientific still others bull.
Causeless phenomena, chance if you will, would be the downfall of all science and
sound knowledge and is the first poison fruit of true atheism. Might as well close the
labs! And trying to replace God with evolution, as many atheists are prone to do, does not
even begin to confront the problem. Far from explaining ultimate reality evolution can’t
even explain itself except by that most unscientific of responses-chance! But what we
find in the universe is organization and direction. They are the direct opposite of chance
and shout out purpose. Nor does evolution allow for life, consciousness or even an
altruistic morality in defiance of its central code of natural selection by the survival of the
fittest. A George Bailey going off the bridge to save a weaker less fit person is a
phenomenon that is inexplicable to evolution without the most tortuous and contorted
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explanations. In evolution, as E.F. Schumacher put in “A Guide for the Perplexed,” “We
are asked to believe that inanimate (dumb, unthinking) matter is a masterful practitioner
of natural selection.” The lesser giving the greater what it itself doesn’t have.
When we come to the pantheism of the new age variety popular today where belief
that everything, all reality, all nature, all matter with the energies and forces that are part
of it, all the planets and stars, mother Earth, goddess Gaia, everything including us are
part of one great whole and that whole is identical or equivalent to god or the closest
thing to god they know, may seem superficially at least to be the opposite of the atheism
but in reality it isn’t. They are very much alike for if everything is god or part of god
there is no god. The pantheist is a monist hooked on the all is one theme when by now it
should be obvious that all is not one by any means. The cause of creation is not part of
creation. God is Being itself. Creation is not being itself but has being and that only
temporarily. This was reasoned to with the help of revelation long before the big bang
discovery apparently confirmed it. There was a beginning and there will be an end. But
God by definition cannot have a beginning or end. God had to exist before the beginning
or there would have been no beginning because nothing, the cosmos included, can come
from nothing. Goodbye monism, for the essence of Being, Exodus’ “AM” is to exist, a
vast difference from everything else in that everything else’s essence is certainly not
existence or it would be eternal which it certainly isn’t. With everything in the world
including us in possession of being temporarily as if on loan, it is an inescapable exercise
in odds that nothing would have to triumph. But that will never happen. It bears
repeating, as soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that God alone
permanently is and all the rest is and is not at one time or another. All else, all mother
nature and us have only temporary being. It is this difference that destroys monism.
Our being is a gift if you will and who could possibly have known that the gift of
permanent being was to be ours too if not told by revelation? That’s the good new that is
the heart of the Gospels and epitomized in Christ’s words, “I have come that you may
have life and that in abundance.”
Monism and pantheism simply will not stand logically or scientifically. They share
the atheist’s difficulties and then some. Besides the illogic, the more extreme forms of
pantheism demean humanity. How demeaning is it to have intelligent creatures adore,
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worship or even be influenced in decision-making by non-intelligent entities? The
deifying of non-thinking lesser creatures be them forces, energies, planets or stars or
whatever, is not to our credit as thinking beings. In a sense this is all déjà vu. Ironically,
that old materialist Lucretius who died in 55BC most clearly saw such illogic gaining a
foothold in his beloved Rome as reliance on dreams, cards, charms, stars, incantations
and magical rites spread among the people. What drove him almost crazy was man’s selfinflicted and degrading enslavement to crude non-thinking things. Science is not
equipped to deal with ultimate reality. Reason and revelation can. When all three are
abandoned the door is open to gross superstition. Such superstition is rife in our
supposedly sophisticated and technological age. Judging from the spread of new age
trends and the popularity of horoscopes and “signs,” of the Zodiac, crystals and other
mind shackling beliefs, many seem to be doing today what Lucretius complained about
over two thousand years ago. This is not exactly progress.
Though we of course cannot live without nature, the Sun and our own planet Earth,
they nevertheless follow laws and rules of which they as non-thinking entities know
nothing. In a word, they haven’t a clue. They follow blindly and unknowingly and should
not be elevated as powers of influence or divine status by thinking beings, even primitive
ones. Put bluntly, mother Earth and her entourage with or without fields of energy tapable
or not, are as dumb as dirt and mindless as muck. Nature has much that is exquisite no
doubt but like the flowers and seeds with beautiful and purposeful design, total
unawareness and consciouslessness is its status and it should not be romanticized into
semi-deities. We who have mind and are aware should not forget that. This is not
homocentric by any means, but simply the recognition of truth and reality.
The pantheist’s problem is compounded, as was mentioned before, by the scientific
fact that the universe and all in it, galaxies, forces, suns and planets, everything had an
absolute beginning and will have an end. We too are thus doomed to go with it to
oblivion. But maybe we are not doomed. Maybe there is hope for us. We know that
something cannot come from nothing. Not to belabor the point but if as the pantheist
believes what he calls god, if he uses the word, is part and parcel, identical with the
energies, life forces and “streams of being” of the material world and as science tells us
all this had a beginning and will have an end, the inescapable implication is that since his
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god, the god of the monist, is included in everything, god along with everything had a
beginning and will have an end too. The problem with that as seen above is it most
definitely cannot include everything. Something must have pre-dated the beginning. We
are back to square one for as we know if everything had a beginning there would be
nothing now. We would not be here. An instant of nothing dooms everything. The
pantheist’s god being part of everything, as such is doomed. It cannot fill the bill. We
need something apart, something other than all this matter and energy, all this passing
phenomenon. The something that always existed cannot have had a beginning of course
or a cause outside itself. As we saw, Aristotle and Aquinas called it the uncaused cause.
The mass of humanity being master metaphysicians by nature if they put their mind to it
and most do at one time or another, sees the need for an uncaused something apart from
passing matter, that has no beginning and usually call it the eternal God or the like. And
they know the Cause had to be very powerful and intelligent to bring about everything
that is and it must be very different from and very separate from what He brought about.
God unlike all else, unlike all material things is the essential and absolutely necessary
non-contingent, non-material being, the I AM” of Exodus. But here, even with sublime
reason and physical science both pointing increasingly to this same conclusion namely
the existence of an ever existing intelligence, many are still conflicted because among
other things the motive for it all was still missing. Why does the material universe exist at
all and we in it? It is here that, as we saw, the gift horse of revelation came to the rescue
and helped us escape the miasma of eternal worlds with no explainable purpose or an
inexplicable spontaneous creation from nothing with no rational cause. The missing
motive, the “raison d’etre” was love, generous overflowing love. That’s the closest we
can come to it. With the aid of revealed truth, the application of reason can uncover
profound truth. Love is at the center of the Jewish Bible and the Good News of the
Gospel. Taking it all together, if the flawless mathematical laws of nature reveal a
tremendous intelligence, revelation reveals a tremendous lover who said, “In the end
there is faith, hope and love these three and the greatest is love.” The motive revealed!
The ultimate mystery, why God created anything since he can acquire nothing, is
laid open to the stares of humanity, love overflowing with generosity.
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XIV THE GREAT GIFT HORSE: AUTHENTIC LOVE AND LIFE IN ABUNDANCE
How is love demonstrated, authentic love that is, not media land’s X-rated
rendition of sex that masquerades as love? There is quite a difference between love and
sex although sex in a marriage quality love is far and away sex at its noblest and most
glorious. Of course, the greatest human demonstration of love is to freely lay down one’s
life to save another’s. That was done and the cross of Christ became the Christian symbol
of love. On a more ordinary level love is often demonstrated by giving gifts. That was
done too. “I have come that you may have life in abundance.” That’s a gift horse with a
mouth begging for examination. For most gifts it would be impolite to inquire of the cost
or check the label. In days long ago before autos if the gift of a horse was made it would
be gratefully accepted without examination or question. It would be considered very bad
form, a great discourtesy, to inquire about the age of the gift even if old dobbin appeared
to be on his last legs. But when purchasing a horse or anything else things are different.
The buyer would want to know the soundness of the horse and precisely how old the
horse was and would often ascertain the age by checking the wear and tear on the
animal’s teeth, no tires or odometer being available and the use of horseshoes making a
foot check very unreliable. But because horses were not known to slip on false teeth, the
teeth were a reliable way to check. With the gift horse of revelation we are asked to buy
into something infinitely more valuable and important than a horse and with much more
serious implications. We have to look the gift horse of revelation squarely in the mouth
so that our hope in its promises will not be in vain. Is that horse of eternal life viable? It is
only right and proper, necessary and fitting to consider the teeth in the offer of life eternal
and abundant. We want our hope to rest on solid ground. But, above all, the offer should
not be shelved or ignored, as the subjects in the Reinhardt drawing seem to be doing. If
the offer is rejected out of hand and as Pascal’s famous wager indicates he thought
rejection a foolish choice so long as it does not empty reason of meaning, for with so
much to gain thought Pascal, what’s lost by a little faith and hope. Nevertheless, the
reasons for accepting revelation should be cogent and worthy of a rational thinking being.
So far we have emphasized many of those reasons. There is another consideration. There
are serious obligations to be considered in following Christ namely the love of God and
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neighbor that He demands, not requests, of us and all that that entails. The love that lay
behind creation in the first place was to be reflected in that creation by the only creatures
capable of doing it, human beings. We are not talking here of the trained, learned or
instinctive loyalty and devotion that some of the lower animals display but the love of
creatures with intellect and free will. Creatures, who can, and here’s the rub, refuse to
love. This is what happened early on in that garden of Genesis and it has disturbed
creation ever since. Call it the original sin.
The duty to love is great but almost invariably involves sacrifice. Thankfully,
Christ assured us that his yoke is sweet and his burden light. Love and God’s grace and
forgiveness make it so though as human beings we know it is not always exactly easy.
It should be obvious that the love here being discussed is not Hollywood sex
saturated “love” as so much of the world thinks of love but authentic Christ-like love that
implies sacrifice and the giving of self to the beloved, especially to spouse, family,
neighbor, stranger even to the point even of turning the other cheek. It’s heroic and most
of us are not heroes but God’s helping grace can at least make the goal approachable.
This is humanity’s glory and greatness and about as easy as passing a camel through the
eye of a needle but as Christ explained, with God’s help, a help even do-gooders need, all
things are possible even real genuine love. For “my wayers” and the like, deeply
involved in self-love even to the point of narcissism it’s almost impossible but again with
God’s help a life can be turned around. The big obstacle here is pride. Small wonder the
ancients of both the Classical and Christian periods considered pride the most deadly sin,
more so even than greed or lust. Lust can dissipate and rationality return but pride is often
forever. Like Dante’s frozen hell it prevents movement. It blocks change and makes
conversion, to use an unpopular word, all but impossible and it blinds one to all concerns
outside self. Thus it can make looking the gift horse in the mouth rather difficult. For
those who do look but finding the offer unconvincing and turn it down, at least the
reasons should be of the very best for the loss can be great. It makes good sense to look at
the great offer of life eternal, the great gift horse, with open mind and heart and it is up to
each one of us to do so, to evaluate it fairly.
Pride may indeed have been a major stumbling block historically in this regard but
for the handicapped generations of our epoch just understanding exactly what love is can
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be an additional problem. Love has been so distorted and mythologized by Hollywood as
to make it beyond the comprehension of some. Because love is at the core of creation and
the Gospel’s good news, St. Paul described it in practical and concrete terms for the
Corinthians in his first letter to them. What follows is an attempt to apply what he wrote
then to now thus distinguishing authentic love from counterfeits.
Love is very closely related to the word give. It is not synonymous with sex as so
much media portray it but faithful sex can be a truly noble expression of love. On the
other hand, aberrant sex can debilitate and retard growth of authentic love. In a pornified,
sex-saturated society, sex frequently is taken for love and often drives actual love from
the field creating a mini-morality ideal for mini-people for whom making self-sacrifice
for the sake of another at great personal inconvenience is almost a foreign concept. A
good gage of such a society is the open season it declares on its own progeny. It is an
unequal war with the more powerful destroying its own pre-born offspring usually on the
altar of convenience. Abortion is not love and fifty five million abortions since Roe is a
national disgrace. But grabbing all the gusto you can, can do a lot of damage.
Sexual continence or purity to use a word falling from vogue, common prior to
the 1960s, is currently deemed impossible. Moral robustness is not part of the present’s
resume’. The permanence and commitment of real marriage are assiduously avoided in
favor of shacking up, to use the older terminology. Cohabitate is the preferred term now.
When a marriage does happen it doesn’t resound with the rugged love and devotion of
the traditional Christian wedding vows but is rather surrounded with pathetic pre-nuptial
agreements backed up by no fault divorce laws. For this kind of mini-generation with its
almost 50% divorce rate, is it surprising that 25% of its newly conceived offspring
usually end up in the abortion clinic slop bucket? This kind of “love” can be down right
deadly. In N.Y.C. the abortion rate is about 40% and for African Americans in the city
the rate is a ghastly 61? This is not the love Christ came to inculcate. Many in such a
self-enshrined generation know little of his love. They are media’s offspring and can
rarely get his message there. Unfortunately, they are part of an era hardly up to the real
thing upon which real love and marriage is based. To such a mini-generation, the words
of the traditional Christian marriage vow based on authentic love and requiring a true
commitment to someone other than self are as incomprehensible as Sanskrit, ” Forsaking
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all others, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, in good times and bad, till death
do us part.” That’s love!
It seems to be in dwindling supply today. One reason is not hard to find. Roe vs.
Wade taught well the deadly lesson involving the placing of self and self’s “choice”
number one, above everything, even above life, the life of one’s own new child. This is
not love, quite the opposite and America has not been the same since.
The present loveless mini-morality has high costs. It leaves behind a world full of
walking wounded, hurt and fatherless children if they have not been completely robbed of
life by “choice,” often lonely, embittered and impoverished spouses, usually women, and
many victims of STDs including deadly AIDS spread by promiscuity and drugs with
costly government programs to try to contain the damage. Having thus already burdened
the times, the present pop culture rallies to fight any limits on abortion at one end of the
life spectrum and supports assisted suicide at the other though education in illnesses,
palliative care and pain containment are more available now than ever before. They can
make a life drawing to a close comfortable, honorable, meaningful and even love
producing. What is often lacking is the love that makes the personal and sometimes
monetary inconvenience of caring for another, even a “loved one,” more than just
bearable but even love and life fulfilling. Good Samaritan type love can be very
inconvenient. By avoiding it many think they can construct a lifetime full of “fun” and
freedom from “burdens” meaning commitments of time, money and self to other than
self. Many extensive studies show how tight the “cool” swinging secular segment of
society is compared to the odious church going gang of “hypocrites” when it comes to
helping others. The self –sacrifice of authentic love that such helping commitment
involves is not frequently to its liking but it has a real weakness for pets and spends in the
area of 45 billion dollars on them annually all the while downing bottled water to the tune
of 16. 8 billion dollars a year while justifying abortion because of the lives of poverty the
victimized children may have had to face!
Very money sensitive, it often decries the Church’s “wealth” without examining the
forms it is in, often property and buildings in beneficent use as schools, hospitals, nursing
homes, leprosaria and AIDS wards where 25% of the world’s victims are cared for, not to
mention orphanages and facilities for the poor and destitute and churches open to all the
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public, rich and poor, at no charge. Chip into the basket whatever you want or nothing.
We’re describing the giving-ness that is part of authentic love. Try getting into an
important museum, art show or rock concert for nothing! There is hypocrisy out there but
not where many think. Most clergy, for example, get room and board and live on hardly
more than token salaries. The motivation, love of God and neighbor. All this the media
overlooks in favor of concentrating on the 4% who broke their celibacy vows and a
hierarchy so unused to this sort of thing as to botch its handling. Meanwhile we hear of
farm aid, AIDS aid concerts and such by mega stars with mega salaries that love the poor
though they won’t let them into their concerts without paying. And not many live as poor
as the poor old Pope living the monk’s life in his simple two room flat in the Vatican.
Not knowing the strictures often attached to gifts to the Church including the sometimes
binding intentions of those who gave and the purposes and works to which the “wealth”
was to be put, today’s critics condemn, nevertheless, all the while frequently spending
bundles on animals, rock concerts, sports events, vacations and other entertainments and
diversions. Interestingly, the annual budget for running Vatican City is less than Dutchess
County’s here in N.Y. State. Criticism based on ignorance or bias is not love.
The idea that love may mean that we are supposed to take up one another’s crosses
and burdens, to give and give, goes down hard. Donations of hard earned money to those
more in need aside, the giving of time, of self until it hurts, that’s love. None of this is
easy even in the best of times, which this isn’t. In this era of self- aggrandizement, for
many people it borders on the impossible though how else love is to rise above mere talk,
words and posturing, is a mystery. There are of course many exceptions to this bleak
portrait of a morally decrepit era, perhaps more exceptions than we know and there are
many exceptionally good people perhaps more than we can imagine since they seldom
make it into media land or the nightly news. But the number of complicit is so vast as to
more than sufficiently stain the portrait of our time. According to Government statistics
kids in single parent homes are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids from
intact families with both parents on the scene and 21% of American kids live in poverty.
Abortion was to solve that problem, as if killing the innocent can solve anything, but the
road to hell is paved with good intentions and intentions not suffused with authentic love
are very dangerous, they can kill you. What you do in the privacy of the bedroom is
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nobody’s business? Tell it to the kids alive and in poverty or dead, the 50 million missing
due to abortion. The plague of missing fathers, deadbeat fathers, burdened single women
and impoverished children in this very rich nation is a direct legacy of the moral
meltdown commencing in the 1960s. That meltdown, in spite of all the singing about
peace, love and flowers, swept away a lot of authentic love. Theodore Hesberg of Notre
Dame University said that the best thing a father can do for his children is to love and be
faithful to their mother. Now that’s authentic love and a sure remedy for much heartbreak
and poverty, more effective than any expensive government program. But it’s difficult
and so not part of the resume of the times for many people. Difficult is not “in,” but
music was and is and in the 60s “making love not war” was sung about with a straight
face by thousands! In the mind of the time and the college crowds chanting it however
love was synonymous with promiscuity and the promiscuity, especially the homosexual
variety, helped bring us the AIDS epidemic, with a boost from the newly established drug
culture, in less than twenty years. And sad to tell some of the popular rock groups at the
time helped promote that culture by their songs and style. The toll in lives so far is more
than 400,000 dead from AIDS with about 18,000 additional deaths each year. This is not
authentic love. It is “make love not war“ type love and killing more people than the war
they were chanting about and protesting. Apparently the road to hell can be paved with
song too. Viet Nam, took 70,000 Americans lives. The irony is sad and painful.
Sad too, wars sometimes have to be fought but Viet Nam was avoidable with a better
understanding of the situation in South East Asia at the time. This is much easier to see
long after the fact. But, on the other hand, no other way worked to get rid of Hitler or
eighty years earlier to end slavery and save the U.S. union. And seven hundred years
before that Europe would have fallen to aggressive and faith driven Islamic invasions,
invasions that had captured most of Spain and penetrated into France in the West and in
the East later captured Constantinople renaming it Istanbul and then advanced all the way
to and almost captured Vienna had not the Christians organized Crusades to try to protect
pilgrims in the Holy Land, save Constantinople and later Vienna and in general fight off
Islam’s aggressive expansion. In 849 St. Peter’s itself was sacked by Moslems and Rome
almost taken. It happened again in 916 but it wasn’t until 1096 that the Pope called for a
Crusade. It was not a retaliatory attack on Mecca, the Moslem holy city, for their assault
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against Rome. Indeed Mecca was never attacked by the Crusades. Rather it was for the
legitimate objectives mentioned above. There are those who characterize the Crusades as
acts of European aggression or imperialism. By that kind of rational the Allied invasion
of Normandy in 1944 was a case of American expansion and aggression.
Singing about peace and love doesn’t help too much in those unavoidable situations
when war is just about forced on a people for singing about peace and love doesn’t make
it so. If those distant generations had sung about peace rather than fighting for it the West
might well be a realm of Islam or of goose-stepping Nazis today. And, if we can handle
more irony, many of those singing out against war in the 1960s were strong supporters of
legalized abortion, rampant promiscuity’s deadly stepchild, in the 1970s. In effect they
declared war and made war against their own. Their dream came true in 1973’s Roe
decision and. by 2010 poof! Fifty million new American lives were gone. No war like
that had ever been seen, Where had all the flowers gone indeed! This was not authentic
love, far from it.
It was authentic love however that infused the creative work of “AM,” the eternal
Being who generously gave life and being to us and only asks us to love in return. It was
authentic love that revealed that work and it’s meaning to humanity first to the Jews and
later through Christ to all of us. The message is clear, we are here to love one another as
the Father loves us, to learn authentic love and practice it. There is no better way to do
that for most of us here on Earth than in the married state that Hesberg was talking about.
Marriage, like all schools can be difficult but it is our best laboratory and classroom for
learning the meaning of love and practicing it. Many people quickly discover in marriage
what it takes to make love work. True marriage encompasses a frail humanity really
learning love. Two people at first and often more later really learning to love one another
even when “burdening” and sacrifice are a part of it. But millions still bring it off, this
wonderful thing called marriage and family, even in this toxic society.
One way to tell love is working is when you achieve more true satisfaction doing for
others often at the expense of doing for self. Many work a lifetime chasing after
happiness by putting themselves first and never achieve anything beyond a quickly
passing elation. The irony is that the solid satisfaction bubbling often into joy and
happiness comes in pursuing help and happiness for others. No doubt about it, love is
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often a labor of love but untold millions have and are at work making it work often in the
marriage classroom. They are among the world’s great lovers.
The message at the core of revelation is clear. The motive for all that is is God’s
love. We are here to prove that free creatures will choose to love one another and thus
overcome betrayals, abandonments, hatreds and worse. But the message is under great
stress today. In the hands of quite a few, especially when faith falters, the message of
revelation is a hot iron quickly dropped in spite of its promise of life in abundance. Faith
falters for various reasons with intellectual doubt often taking back seat to the
abandonment of the moral strictures that are part of revelation and form the foundation of
authentic love in action. They are neatly summed up in the Decalogue but are as old as
the human conscience. Sexual temptations, present in every age, are in our pornified time
especially ubiquitous and often pushed flat into the face on a media platter. Pascal
marveled even in his time at the fact that many men and women taken in by the ever
popular pleasure equals happiness con-game, became indifferent to the loss of the
fulfillment of their being in an eternity of abundant life, a banquet of it. Many get lost,
enslaved by thoughtlessly acquired fallacious and damaging habits and ideas. They
sometimes fall into a despairing sea of non-caring. But the love of “Our Father,” as Christ
taught us to address the one who created everything, never gives up.
Later, specifically though not exclusively in Part XXI which treats of the
confirming power and authentication of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, we will
examine the ways that the good news of revelation in general can be confirmed and
authenticated beyond what has already been said about how greatly it advanced the
understanding of the origin and purpose of our existence and enabled us to achieve more
consistency and rationality in our philosophical understanding of creation than had ever
been achieved before. The Greek philosophers had made some notable advances
especially Aristotle’s God as pure thought and as the uncaused cause but they were far
from advancing to God as pure Being whose essence is existence itself, the necessary
eternal being that makes possible all being and makes our greatest enemy non-being,
nothing, impossible. Many back then were also unable to rise above strong polytheistic
and pantheistic tendencies coupled with the idea of an eternal uncreated universe. Bereft
of revelation’s aid, it was the only way of avoiding the void of nothing that would make
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everything impossible Revelation and Christian philosophy, long before the big bang
theory, had moved far beyond those ideas. But before pursuing a further authentication
and confirmation of revelation, a deeper and closer look at “Our Father” is in order.
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XV HE”S ALWAYS ON THE PORCH
To explain the persistence of his Father’s love for us, especially when we have
become in our own view of things, “losers,” beyond repairing, beyond caring, despairing,
tired and defeated, cynical, down on everything, perhaps tied to habits of life destructive
to ourselves or others, unable to kick them or lift a spirit killing mind set, down on
everything, the government, the world, sometimes ourselves most of all, maybe young
and the “fun” is beginning to wear thin, maybe older and feeling played out but fearing
that any late change would be too difficult, even smack of hypocrisy, no matter, it’s all
the same to Our Father, the “AM” the eternal loving Being who created us out of
overflowing generosity and love and who became a man, Jesus, to help us. For us he told
a story, in fact he told several of them. They are called parables. He told of a great feast
thrower who so wanted no one to miss the party that he sent his workers to the highways
and the byways to beat the bushes for each and every one of us to get us to the feast on
time. It was no ordinary feast but the banquet of life prepared for us from the beginning
of time. He even provided time for people without the proper attire to go home and
change, to take time to make needed changes in their way of living suitable for
attendance at such a loving banquet. This is the authentic and overflowing love Our
Father, the thrower of the great feast, the great banquet of abundant life and the
determined bush beater, has for us and how determined he is to get as many of us to it as
he can. That’s love! The same kind of love that created the world in the first place and
that he wants us, thinking creatures made in his image, to fill it with now.
Meanwhile, to help keep us imperfect and often floundering souls afloat in the rough
seas of life, Christ came and launched a boat, the great hospital ship known as the
Church, sometimes called the Bark of Peter. Christ, Son of the Father, identical to the
Father in Being came to us, became man and appointed Peter the great fisher of men
captain of the ship. Christ, truly human, truly God, great bush beater, fisher of men, great
seed sewer knowing some seed will fall on stony ground, nevertheless became the
crucified one who exemplified authentic love to the last degree by dying for us. There is
no greater love than to lay down ones life for another. But before he died he gave us ways
to always remember, to keep in mind the tremendous love that he and the Father, Our
Father, who sent him has for us. For one thing, he told us to call God “Our Father” and
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before he went to his death he asked us to do something special in remembrance of him.
To remember him in the breaking of the bread, the Mass. “Do this in remembrance of
me,” he said at the Last Supper, the first Mass. And for almost two thousand years now
the Church has done just that and bid everybody be there on the first day of each week to
remember and say thanks. In fact, that’s what Eucharist mans, “giving thanks.”
And he told parables. He knew people loved stories and they would help them
remember. Two love stories in particular are especially well remembered. People took to
heart and still do the story of the shepherd who loved the lost sheep so much and fearing
it would be devoured by wolves, left all the others, the safe ones, to look and look and
look until he found it. He was called The Good Shepherd and is often pictured as happily
carrying the lost one safely on his back. We of course know who the lost one is. We
didn’t have to be told that.
Then there was the story of the old Father pacing back and forth on the porch,
ditched and abandoned by his cool fun loving son who had taken off for the Playboy
Mansion in the next county. There he had a ball, had a great crowd of friends but then
things went wrong. Hard times hit, a terrible famine and recession, and the so-called
friends in turn ditched him when he ran out of money. He ended up at something like the
municipal dump scrounging for food with the pigs. He is called the Prodigal Son. The
hospital ship is full of them.
But that’s not the end of the story. The Father never stopped loving, waiting, hoping,
standing on the porch, pacing day in and day out as the years went by, looking down the
long road from home in the direction he last saw his beloved but lost son. For years he
looked and hoped and then he saw him, a tiny dot way off. He was coming home. He
was sure of it. It was he! He called out in sheer joy and happiness but there was an older
brother who had never left, a good, loyal and hard working son whom the Father loved
greatly too. The Father was distressed that this son was not happy also. But this son
resented the return of his prodigal brother and may even have called him a phony, a
hypocrite, coming home because he was broke, dropped by his friends and nowhere else
to go.
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Yes perhaps, somewhat probably but no matter, whatever the imperfect and mixed
motives, his son had turned around, he was coming home. He was overcoming that
deadly enemy, pride that sadly stops so many lesser men in their tracks. That in itself said
something to the Father, said a lot. There was enough love and humility in the boy to
make the turn around; enough to keep him from despair, from throwing everything away;
enough to keep him from going off the bridge, this the Father knew and told the other
son, let’s have a party, kill the fatted calf. Yes, you guessed it. It was going to be another
feast, a banquet of life and that in abundance. Evidently Our Father is very fond of
parties.
So, the Father saw his lost son coming back home. That’s all that mattered to the
old man. The motivation may be mixed but for the Father it was enough. His love could
fill in the gaps. It can cover multitudes. Our Father actually ran off the porch to meet his
son struggling to return home, kissed him. The stunned kid only said “ Father I have
offended you and am unworthy of your love.” Don’t throw me a party I don’t deserve it.
Just treat me like a hired hand and not as your son. But Our Father would have none of it.
There was going to be a party you bet, and what a party! There would be life, eternal life
in abundance overflowing.
The son’s decision to return home and his few words to his father whatever the
human, mixed and less than perfect motives behind them might have been was enough
for Our Father and with tears of joy streaming down his weathered face, the Old Man, He
who IS, The Great Spirit as native Americans like to call him, he whose love created
everything and was the very motive for creation and for our being, whose love wakes and
shakes the hardest hearts, killed the fatted calf and the feast that will never end began.
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XVI
PRODIGAL SON LITE
Such persistence Our Father has! Quite amazing. All else may fail but not the
Creator’s love. We can fail and absolutely turn down the helping hand, spurn the alwaysproffered love, true, but that love will pursue us right to the grave. As poet Francis
Thompson expressed it graphically in his poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” “I fled him
down the nights and down the days. I fled him down the arches of the years…From those
strong feet that followed, followed after.” He fled but it did no good. Yet, it must be
repeated, great as the love is, Our Father, the Hound of Heaven, cannot allow it to
overwhelm us lest we lose our freedom to say “no.” Without that freedom, dangerous and
destructive as it has been and can be, love becomes impossibly forced and forced love is
no love at all. That kind of love would be the true hypocrisy. The danger with freedom is
it leaves open loss, the risk that the son will decide never to come home.
The addled are excused. It’s the prodigal son lite who is in the danger. He’s the one
who refuses to turn around. He is often a victim of that hubris so feared by the Greeks,
the overweening pride called deadly by the Christians. It swells one’s self so into one’s
self as to be blinding, binding and immobilizing; no room for change, frozen. It’s the
pride sometimes expressed in the self-important glow of “I’m too far gone.” Such people
often think their evils are more special, long running and unforgivable than anybody
else’s and they are so self important that they actually believe it. But really, as we know,
all it takes is a “Father I have offended your love.” “I just didn’t know how much you
loved me.”
Though the Father is always on the porch waiting, it rankles Prodigal Son Lite’s proud
little, almost Grinch little, heart to, as he would likely put it, go crawling back. He is
likely to consider a simple apology or admittance of a mistake groveling. I will never eat
crow, No turn around for me. I made my bed and will lie in it. This is the attitude. He’ll
respond to nothing not even authentic fatherly love. He’ll stand alone and defiant or not
at all. This is the phony existential bravura that he’s swallowed, often media and movie
fed, all his life. He hardly knows authentic love at all, just the self-love and selfrealization held up to him for years as the end all of life’s ideals. He knows not how to
respond to the genuine article if he even recognizes it. Prodigal son lite would rather
starve with the pigs than go back to the Father. Anything but submit is how his rather
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simple mind sees it. My way or no way, stand tall, defiant, face to the storm and other
assorted self-deceiving and hackneyed hogwash. This is why pride is always ranked at
the top as the dumbest and deadliest sin. It’s as if in Dante’s frozen hell prodigal son lite
has locked himself up tight, immovable and immobile. He can’t make it over that hill on
the road called pride to make it back home. He made his bed and Father or no Father on
the porch; always-extended hand or not, he is going to lie in it. He refuses love! Pride
can be that blinding.
Similarly immobilizing is the equally sad and related case of the love blinding fear of
hypocrisy. It is as if sorrow must be inhumanly perfect to win the Father’s hand. No
doubt the hypocrite is to be disdained but fear of becoming one must not mislead us into
believing we must lie to ourselves or to Our Father. The Prodigal was not required by the
Father to claim his life away was fun less, that sinning was joyless, pleasure less,
profitless. That is not needed. All that is needed is something like this: “Father, I had no
idea of how much you loved me. I didn’t fathom your tremendous love, never realized
how valuable I was to you and when people told me I didn’t listen, didn’t hear, didn’t
absorb it. No! I had no idea of such love for me and how priceless I am in your sight and
if I had realized it I don’t think I could ever have left you and spurned your love. If my
sorrow is shallow, even in my weakness a little self-serving, please make up for it with
your generous loving care for me. Help my sorrow.” Or, simply the real Prodigal Son’s “
Father I am not worthy of your love, not worthy to be called your son.” Something like
that and it will be done.
A deliberate decision to choose to love Our Father in return for all the love and life
bestowed by him on us is very human and if difficult for some, very possible with God’s
loving help. Just ask. Remember Christ who knows the depth of his father’s love for us
and his own love, which is the same, revealed to us the abyss of his mercy and
understanding by using simple stories. These stories are the greatest of love stories and
are designed to bring out love in us, to help us reflect Our Father’s love if only a little bit.
That’s primary. Secondary is the sorrow for wrongdoing that flows naturally from love
no matter how weak and faulty. Like leaven, a little love can go a long way.
The sorrow can be tied to feelings but it is more a realization of the mind. The
feelings are incidental. If present they can be helpful in moving the mind but they can be
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entirely absent too. Feelings and tears are an accoutrement. If they happen fine but they
are not essential for true sorrow. Some show feelings and some never do. Often they are
passing and in reality they are often not a very reliable gage of sorrow.
A final word about those who like to “break all the rules” and take seriously other
popular media claptrap is in order. Most rules and commandments are there to encourage
love or protect others from the damage caused by the lack of love. The accumulated
boiled down wisdom of centuries, of saints, prophets, philosophers and thinkers and
simple ordinary people who have been through it and have seen and understood, only
confirms the soundness of these rules and commands as summarized in revelation and
called the Decalogue or Ten Commandments. What a gift to the wise they are! They well
post the road we all travel not denying healthy leeway and room for adventure but
without the people damaging disasters and detours to nowhere that come with their
violation. Offending these rules creates havoc and often harms others and is called sin. If
a feeling of sorrow is desired but seems lacking or hard to come by it sometimes helps to
look at the people hurt or damaged by our actions resulting from the violation of these
rules. They are people like us, not perfect but still not deserving what they got because of
our failure to achieve the love Our Father created us for and expects. This is what sin
usually comes down to, unwillingness to shoulder the personal sacrifice love often
requires. But when finally grasping, glimpsing the Father’s love for us epitomized not by
parables alone but by the ultimate sacrifice on the cross, a sacrifice that would have been
willingly made even if you or I had been the only humans who ever lived, then we can
sincerely say, in the words of the old Latin Mass, “mea culpa, mea culpa,” and “Domine
non sum dignus.” “My fault, my fault…Lord I am not worthy,” Father, I gratefully let
your love take over and do what I stumble at doing and did so poorly. Let it heal me, and
my victims too.
Like the Prodigal you may believe firmly that you are not worthy of the fatted calf
and the great welcome home. Our Father does not agree. There is the feast awaiting all
who learned love here no matter how faltering and late in life. None of us is worthy, all
have faults and failings but the Father is still on the porch waiting for us nevertheless.
Don’t harden your heart. God’s help, called grace, is always there just for the asking.
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When in the 5th Century AD a priest from Britain called Pelagius said we must do
and achieve our salvation ourselves without God’s help or grace, Augustine and the
Church denied it and condemned him when he persisted. We all, saints and sinners, need
the help of Our Father, a help called grace and sometimes called amazing. One great
grace is the bark of Peter, the great lifeboat that is the Church. If you have left the home
of faith or jumped the great hospital ship, the door is always open and the gangplank
always down. Don’t look at the gift horse and turn away. It is well to recall the “Hail
Mary.” It’s been a favorite prayer of the ship’s captain, crew and passengers for a
thousand years or more, especially the second part of it. “Holy Mary Mother of God pray
for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” All have sinned and could use some of
Our Father’s loving forgiveness. The poet Greg Norbet paraphrasing the Old Testament
Prophet, Hosea, captured the thought in verse. “Don’t let pride keep us apart/ Come back
to me with all your heart.”
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XVII
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
Here’s a sad story but true; perhaps the saddest story ever told. Once upon a time,
a long time ago, everything we wanted or desired was not only good but good for us. Our
natural longings coincided with the will of God and all was well. The things we wanted
were not, as the saying goes, illegal, immoral or fattening. In other words once upon a
time the natural was synonymous with the good and desirable. Unfortunately this is no
longer the case. The natural no longer necessarily equals goodness. The two were once
the same but have become sundered. Nature, both internal, our human nature, and
external, meaning the rest of nature, often gang up on us in the form of unhealthy
compulsions and natural disasters. It’s a fine kettle of fish we find ourselves in. What has
happened, why is it that “what nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man,”
as songwriter Tom Lehrer wrote? Why are our human desires often deranged? Once, in
the words of the old song, “doing what comes naturally” was perfectly safe and good. It
was the way to peace, contentment and happiness. Now it can be damned dangerous even
destructive and is often the formula for disaster and despair. Our desires have moved
from order to chaos, sometimes-addictive chaos. In some instances we have become
slaves to them and our impulses, the very thing St. Paul complained about when he wrote
that often the good that he wants to do he doesn’t do and what he would not do that he
does. That’s how conflicted and divided we have become! It might be said that now we
no longer really have natural desires just ones bearing careful watching. Natural and
good, once one and the same are no longer. Now they are sundered. Why? What
happened?
Professor Paul Griffiths of Duke University explained that, “we lack natural desire
because our desires have been removed from their proper (and truly natural)
arrangement.” The original harmony was lost to such a degree that some argue we should
even avoid the typical uses of the adjective “natural” when used to modify or describe a
particular human appetite because the core meaning in the context of “a harmonious
response to a gift of the Creator” is gone. Henry Sidgwick concurred. He wrote, “give a
special precision to the meaning of “natural” since in a sense… any impulse is natural but
it is manifestly idle to follow nature in this sense,” and dangerous! So distorted has the
meaning of natural become that an ethic built on it might consider theft, rape and murder
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as natural as love and philanthropy. The meaning of the word has become so confused as
to mean almost anything you want it to. For one person, heterosexual is natural but
another argues that homosexual is just as natural. It seems almost to come down to, if you
like it, it’s natural. But there have to be limits some of them drawn, thankfully, by that
mysterious entity called conscience and for safety sake by law. Doing what comes
naturally could land you in jail. But to repeat, once upon a time, before its distortion in
that primal, prideful and disastrous use of free will told about in the allegorical garden of
Genesis, there was harmony. But that resounding act of defiance by our forefather,
“Adam,” against the will of Our Father, the “I AM,” given Moses when he requested a
name, that disaster that Catholic theology calls The Fall or the Original Sin put an end to
it. Much of the natural and the good permanently parted company in that clash of wills.
The natural and our very nature as part of it, that once coincided beautifully with the will
of our loving Father, no longer does. Now they are very often in conflict, at war so to
speak. This is the tragedy of the Fall.
The meaning of natural originally was obviously very different from many of its
current meanings but why? To reiterate, something went terribly wrong to accomplish
that tragedy and bring about the present great derangement. For a long time the Church
has called it Original Sin and it along with the Resurrection are often termed its easiest
dogmatic teachings to demonstrate. The fallout from the damage done to our natures by
the Original sin is all about us every day. Just look around or pick up a newspaper. No
doctrine of the Church is more obvious, apparent or easily demonstrated.
The human race seems to have long been aware that something had early gone
wrong. Almost every culture has something along the lines of an early fall from grace
story, a garden once lost long ago. Three millennia ago the writers of Genesis using the
parable of the allegorical apple assessed the problem as an early act of defiance and
disobedience. The original hope for the right use of free will had been dashed in the
clash. Man had used it in some way Our Father had commanded not to. The motive often
given is pride. But the original goodness of human nature was affected and damaged, its
original natural God given inclination to the good enfeebled and impaired though not
annihilated. The idea of annihilation became central later on in the Reformation’s
erroneous teaching of total human corruption and depravity resulting from the Fall. The
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Church maintained in the face of this assault, as it had always done, that the original
goodness of our nature was wounded, deformed, but not entirely destroyed or eradicated.
A nature created good by God Our Father could not be made into something totally bad
but it could be compromised and that could happen in only one possible way, the abuse
of our freedom. A decision to use the gift in a way its giver did not want. As Gilson puts
it in “The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy,” “The rectitude of the will (was) lost but
recoverable” with God’s helping grace. It is good to know that for, as the Church teaches,
weak as we are we can still will to cooperate with that helping grace or for that matter
refuse to. Our free will has not been so totally corrupted as to be unable to choose the
good even though it often doesn’t. Original Sin may have weakened our will with regard
to its original orientation toward always going for what is good for us and our neighbor
but it did not remove the freedom to do so.
What a wonderful world, as the song says, and it is indeed, but how much more
wonderful it might have been with no wars, murders, lies, betrayals, abortions,
Auschwitzs, evils of all sorts! Could all this have been avoided? Why didn’t God Our
Father, make us perfect creatures, his perfect children. Not just a wonderful world then,
we’d have a perfect one. Or would we? That way no more evil, true, but unfortunately
there could be no more love either because as we know, love needs freedom to be love.
Otherwise it is sham. And, besides, it would also be impossible! Impossible for God?
How is that possible?
If God had made creatures that were perfect, that is non-contingent and immutably
good; he wouldn’t be making creatures anymore but beings identical to himself. In other
words he would be making himself. They would not be creatures at all they would be
him, the Creator. Creator and creature having the same perfections would mean no
creatures anymore, just God. It would be impossible to tell creature from creator. They
would be one and the same, identical. But, God as we know him by logic and through
revelation is impossible to replicate. More than one God is a logical impossibility since
they would all have to be identically perfectly one and the same. Back to square one.
God sets natures it is true but evil flowing from the misuse of freedom is
imperfection and can only belong to creatures. A perfect creature is as contradictory as a
square circle. There are circles and squares; there is Creator and creature. Because God
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set the nature and definition of circleness and squareness, they are eternally different and
to make them the same means to destroy their natures so that they are no longer things
called circles, no longer things called squares anymore. They would no longer exist. God
cannot make a circle a square without destroying the very natures he gave them. They
would not even exist anymore. So too, making a perfect creature would destroy the very
nature and definition of creature, which encompasses, as we know, mutability. There
would be no creatures anymore because they would have all perfection and so be
indistinguishable from God. Gone. A perfect creature is the heart and essence of
contradiction because they would have to lack no perfection thus they would be identical
with and the same as God. They would be one. There would be no creature. Annihilated!
Creatures by definition are not one with God because God is all being and all
perfection and creatures aren’t. A creature only has being for a while and by definition
has mutability and contingency. They are contingent, changeable and therefore not
perfect. They are not the same as the Creator. Only God by his essence is infinite
existence and infinite perfection. To be a creature means not to possess these qualities.
Making a perfect creature annihilates the creature as in no more square-ness or circleness, no more creature-ness. Natures gone. Eradicated.
That said and then some, now the plot thickens. Giving a creature freedom was
unnecessary. It didn’t have to be done. Creatures by definition may be mutable,
contingent, impermanent but they don’t have to be free. That is not part of the job
description. They can be programmed robots similar to insects or the beasts that are
creatures similar to us in mutability, contingency and impermanence but there it ends.
The gifts to us of a reasoning mind and free will, given to make love possible, set us
worlds apart. They were just that, gifts, and no true gift is forced. God, Our Father, didn’t
have to give them to us but he did with generous love and for that reason, love. It was a
risky business but necessary if love was to be possible in the world. This laid creation
open to the possibility of the misuse of that freedom by the will and decision of those
very creatures who had been bestowed with it in the first place so that love, the very
purpose of creation, was attainable. And it happened. The sad story, as mentioned, was
told by allegory in the Genesis garden parable. A simple request, “don’t eat the fruit
of…”a certain tree was ignored. A request, and more than that, an actual command of
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God was ignored. We don’t have the details but the loving Father was disobeyed
somehow. That’s about all we know. The misuse of the gift of freedom, perhaps
motivated by pride, led to tremendous loss, the loss of that original gift, that original
harmony between Creator and creature, between our natural desires and God’s will.
Disharmony and discord entered creation. The ties of goodness and love that once existed
between Creator and creature were greatly weakened though not entirely vanquished. The
wholeness and health that might have been ours was lost but the damaged condition, the
weakness that remains, that is ours, our sad inheritance. Like the father who squanders
the family fortune, the inheritance of harmony was no longer there for us; no longer ours
to inherit. It was lost by our earthly forebear. In its place disharmony reigned with hate
going toe-to-toe with love and sometimes winning. Following soon after this debacle
described, as said, in the first part of the Genesis story in allegorical fashion and
illustrating a profound religious truth, namely how evil entered a world created good,
sure enough it happened, a murder was committed as if to bring the changed reality
home. The actual blow-by-blow of the disobedience, Fall and murder was too remote to
capture, all participants long gone, but the effects of the calamity were not remote at all.
Genesis soon told how Cain envied and murdered his own brother Able. And the history
of the human race was off and running! The original goodness was badly tarnished, an
inheritance spoiled, and much trouble was out lot.
Reason had originally been in full control of the passions but now no longer was.
Anger, hate and violence were loose. No longer were human desires and the things on
which they focused arranged beautifully and cultivated in accord with the Creator’s will.
The damage has been so great that progress on the moral plane has ever after been slow
at best with many reversals. A look at the last century with its wars, concentration camps
and Gulags is enough to confirm that. Since the Fall, it is a struggle just to fulfill the good
remaining in our nature but things have become so awry recently that something as basic
as the natural desire for sex obviously designed for pleasure and procreation has been
sundered. Ironically in an age that idolizes nature and the “natural” with back to nature
nostrums as common as cold prescriptions, procreation has become artificially separated
from pleasure and what was by its nature life giving has become in the present twisted
state of things a major death dealer. Even something as basic and admirable as the
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motherly instinct, a “natural” instinct if there ever was one, is, like all nature, far from
inviolable to corruption as the steady stream of heart wrenching stories of mothers
destroying their own children often to gain favor with a male consort, usually not the
father, attests. Our nature is damaged, its connection to the good so greatly weakened, it
makes even the use of the word “natural” highly problematic. The scar of the original
disobedience, the original misuse of the gift of freedom, the Original Sin, alienates us
from the giver of the gift, the recipient from the donor, the Creator from the creature. We
are betwixt and between, schizophrenic creatures. Whether we kow tow to or defy our
troublesome nature with its drives and instincts, we find true and complete happiness
down neither path. Every pleasure here is incomplete, every fulfilled desire carries with it
discontent. Everything, all we taste and enjoy is imperfect, producing a happiness and joy
that leaves much to be desired. Nothing completely fulfills us because, according to
Augustine and Aquinas, the true object of all our longings is not any mere thing, any
creature but our Creator, Our Father, He who IS, and the font of all being. There alone
complete fulfillment lies.
Our longings can only be partly met by created things. But that generous
overflowing of love that brought creation about was not to be denied. Hope was held out
as far back as Genesis. Help was promised that took a form beyond our wildest dreams.
The Jewish people and Prophets were set aside to keep the hope alive and they did so
from Abraham’s time four thousand years ago even to the present. Then, two thousand
years ago came Christ. The old spiritual phrases it this way, “Oh happy fault” that
brought us such a one to help us, such a Savior, to use the traditional expression. Healing
and wholeness would indeed be ours again with the banquet of abundant life, the final
great gift promised, but along the long way great suffering and disharmony was on us.
Even nature became a grudging partner when it was not actually working against
us. The Earth would sustain us but not without labor, much labor. Not only that but the
material world, mother nature if you will, was also alienated from us despite the New
Age movement’s near worship of it. It surrounds humanity but exists independent of and
not in harmony with our wishes, desires and activities. Its awesome power intended to
serve but now, be it hurricane or earthquake, often results in human destruction. Rather
than simply human delight and wonder in nature as originally intended, now we often
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experience fear and awe. Nature like sex misused has become, instead of life enhancing,
often death dealing. So now we have to contend with the effects of the original Fall,
nature disrupted, actually two unruly natures, our own and “mother” nature’s.
With all that going against us, isn’t it strange, not that we are discontented, that
makes perfect sense, but that we want more, not more chaos and evil, though the way we
often act may have fooled observers, but more life. Humanity became so disjointed that,
as Adam Phillips put it in his book, “Darwin’s Worms,” ”How could it be possible that
we were the only natural creatures…but that felt nature to be insufficient to our needs.”
That’s easy; we are the only creatures that know nature is off kilter and with faith and
hope know it will be restored to its original loving harmony. All life hopes to survive as
long as possible but only humans hope to survive death, and why not? Now more than
ever do we hope, especially with the support and promise of revelation still ringing in our
ears. That is why we alone are often discontented with this small slice of life. From
whence this disconcerting idea that we can survive death? Even before revelation the idea
was widely about. We are divided, torn creatures far from intact, as mentioned, we are
betwixt and between almost schizophrenic. This is true but nevertheless that yearning for
life is in us. Augustine in his autobiography captured it clearly, outlining the only escape,
“we are restless and will never rest until we rest in Thee.” That’s when the healing
comes, the harmony returns, and every tear will be wiped away. Should it be said, “it’s
only natural?” After all, every one of our natural appetites be it food, sex, knowledge has
a real object, an actual goal, one that is good and only abuse, the abuse we are so prone
to, turns it bad. If that is so, if all our yearnings have real objectives, why should our
natural yearning for God and the gift of life in abundance be an exception? But our new
secular priesthood will have none of it. Life is a meaningless accident. This is its central
dogma and many listen. As one wag put it, now the only time taking the name of the Lord
is approved and acceptable is when it is taken in vain. Many people suppress the ancient
thirst for transcendence. They settle for temporary life in spite of Christ’s assurances.
Christians especially don’t settle. But, what’s to be done for the others?
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XVIII THE COSMOS VS. MONISM, AMAZING GRACE VS. AMAZING
DEBAUCH
Prone as we are to evil we are not totally corrupted, none of us are. To repeat, we are
a lot like St. Paul in that what we will not that we do and what we will we don’t. To put it
in more modern terms we are Jekyll and Hydes, split beings. We are damaged goods but
salvageable goods still. A nature compromised but still possessed of the remnants of our
origins, which were good, very good according to Genesis. That natural moral law graven
in our hearts and called conscience still indicates to us the right and the wrong. It still
tells us that the right or good should be done and the wrong, evil, avoided. That notion is
universal in mankind and in direct defiance of the keystone of Evolutionary theory,
natural selection resting on the dog eat dog dogma of survival of the fittest. By it George
Bailey should have let the helpless and obviously unfit old man Horace drown after he
jumped from the bridge in “Bedford Falls.” So, from whence came this noisome thing
called conscience, this old glow from a remote and marred past that is often confused,
abused, muted and ignored but still with us always? Its specifics were revealed to the
Jewish people on Mt. Sinai in the Decalogue, more familiar to some as The Ten
Commandments, but that promulgation merely put before men’s eyes, as Gilson
explained, “What they had refused to read in their consciences where nevertheless they
might have found it already written. Written by whom? None other than our loving
Father, ”AM, ” Being, the absolute Other that we call God and who gifted us with it as a
guide in the use of our free will.
Conscience can become terribly distorted of course by the likes of a Hitler or a Bin
Laden when evil becomes a good in minds so twisted that only the Father, the originator
of everything we have including what we are discussing here, the natural moral law
graven in our hearts and called conscience, can discern and decide cause and guilt. Our
Father will know the culpability of these human disasters and will see the whole truth.
Individuals will be judged accordingly and justice will be done. There is indeed a place or
state of justice for those who sow hell on Earth. Conscience with its draw to the good can
obviously be terribly distorted, ignored or left in a vacuum into which flows culturally
endorsed misinformation similar to the justifications for abortion. Even with the Ten
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Commandment’s clear prohibition of the killing of the innocent and the teachings of the
Church about love and mercy, teachings meant to make conscience more informed and in
conformity with God’s will, terrible evils still occur. They are part of the awful downside
of our free will and the price paid to make love possible. Evidently love must be the most
important thing in the world to be worth such a price, so many murders, so many
abandonments, so much abuse, so many Auschwitzs all flowing from the parade of usual
suspects from self-love rooted in pride to hate. This entire refusal to love must be
counterbalanced by love itself in order to make creation worth the pain and suffering.
This is why it is so important that there be growing multitudes of authentic lovers
reflecting our Father’s love for us. The Church’s job given it by Christ is to produce
lovers, lots of them for every age. Sometimes they are called saints. Sometimes they are
even publicly recognized and canonized as such by the Church. They keep the boat afloat
and the world worth living in. But it is never an easy job and there are never as many
championship lovers like a Mother Theresa or Max Kolbe or the mother in Rayne as we
would like and need to make up for those who refuse to love such as the Costco mother in
Manhattan, Casey Anthony in Florida, Whoopee Goldberg in New York with her six
abortions and the raft of failed fathers denying love and life to their own children.
To help rise up more lovers, conscience must be informed and this the Church works
at through teaching and preaching (currently an unpopular word) and the dispensation of
God’s grace and help through the sacraments so that moral judgments are enlightened or
at least do no harm. Conscience operates in and through rational reflection but we are free
to act irrationally and ignore its promptings. From such abuse of freedom flow gulags,
concentration camps, nine elevens, Hitlers and Bin Ladens.
Aside from human beings, the rest of nature and all in it have no such freedom to
defy law. Inanimate nature with its energies and forces is unknowing. It cannot will evil
as we can nor mistake evil for good. Science communicates to us the laws directing the
natural world and those laws are obeyed without question by all of creation but us. The
pertinent point is this, although we know why we should obey the promptings of
conscience we don’t have to. Why then is it that nature invariably obeys the laws
governing it? The fact is of course, it has no choice in the matter. The law is built into it
much like our conscience is built into us but it has no freedom like ours to defy. It is
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commanded and must follow. This implies a commander but as Patrick Wolf of the
University of Arkansas writes, “Given the insufficiency of purely nonreligious
explanations of our natural world,” all this will eternally puzzle those devoid of religion
and also those who elevate or even worship nature in true pantheist fashion by equating
nature with God. The type is common today. Many travel to exotic places to feel united
to nature and nature’s God viewed as equivalents inextricably mixed. But as James
Matthew Wilson writes “one can only greet the universe with awe and gratitude for so
long before desiring to bow down in worship before the founder of that feast.” Unless
they do, unless they make that advance, they will be perpetually at a loss for the
explanation of the origin of the laws of nature and especially why nature, Earth, mother
or not, Sun and all else dutifully, worshiply, obey those laws. Many will find it difficult
to explain why man, a free and rational creature, should worship at the feet of things that
are not free and not rational. Worshipping creation rather than Creator is a good way to
further demean human beings and for some that seems to be a popular past time. Often
we hear how “insignificant” we are especially compared to the size of the Cosmos. This
passes for wisdom these days.
Our Father, the necessary Being and absolute Other, existence itself, whose very
essence is existence is the only Being. Out of love He created other beings. Beings like us
who are capable of love but the difference between the Creator and everything else that is
including us is so vast, the chasm so immense, as to be of two entirely different orders. It
makes pantheism an obscenity. In the order of existence this one Being is necessary
because without it there would be nothing. Nothing would triumph for there would be
nothing capable of filling always and forever. The fact that there is not nothing screams
out “AM.” We, and everything contingent like us, are of the other order of being, the
created order. We are unnecessary and need not be. We are because of love. The
difference is unimaginably enormous. One needs to be or else nothing is and the other
doesn’t need to be at all. The latter’s being is a gift of love and not a necessity. We have
not one but two distinct orders of being, one eternal and necessary, one contingent and
temporary. There can be no greater difference. The monism of pantheism is dashed into
two pieces forever apart. Even more, we rational beings are in important ways not even
one with the rest of created nature. Nature must obey. We don’t have to and early on
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didn’t. Early on the freedom not to love God, neighbor and self but rather self-alone, the
putting of “my way” first above all else often at else’s expense, was exercised. The
havoc that resulted is still with us. It is still rattling through the ages, a schizophrenic
humanity finding no completion, no permanent and happy fulfillment anywhere. The
only rational and free, the only God seeking creature, indeed the only creature capable of
blowing the gift did. Now in desperate need to reclaim a lost happiness and true
fulfillment found only in conjunction with Our Father, we needed the help of revelation
to get the wreck back on the track. We still have a ways to go.
Now consider that different creature, the only rational one that we know of, us.
Science has discovered no other like us nor has revelation made known any other like us
but of course in so vast a universe with 50,000,000,000 galaxies it is not out of the
question. Nor do we know what lies beyond the galaxies. This may serve as a reminder
that Our Father need not reveal everything to us. It is pleasant to speculate about other
rational creatures possible in the universe and whether they had a Fall too or are they,
unlike us, living in perfect harmony and sync. with their nature and their Creator? Author
C.S. Lewis has a science fiction series around that theme.
There is certainly a lot of creation out there and the very amount of it all and the size
of it all is a wonder. Many seek an explanation for the vastness of the universe. Stephen
M. Barr in “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith” asks the question, “Why is the universe
so big? Scientifically the scale of the universe, he states, is tied to life. “It takes
1,500,000,000 years for life to evolve. In that time, the universe has been ever expanding
at a colossal rate. In terms of space, life comes at an enormous price.” Light travels at
186,000 miles a second or 6 trillion miles a year. The furthest known galaxy may be
72,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (72 sextillion) miles away!“ Yet in all that as far as
discoverable up to now we are the only rational creatures. We have taken dramatic steps
to signal our presence and to reach out to others but no one has reached out to us except
that is, our loving Father, the creator of it all.
The life that took 1.5 billion years to evolve, no time in the eternity of our Father,
eventually resulted in uniquely rational and free creatures, creatures with elements such
as consciences indicating good and bad, right and wrong, that runs counter to
evolutionary dogma. This, along with the origin of the material cosmos, Darwinian
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theory is at a loss to explain. A morality calling for the fit and useful to care for the
“unfit” and “useless” is hardly survival of the fittest. Why keep those around who drain
scarce resources with nothing worth contributing. Off with them! That’s the evolutionary
dogma. But no, conscience tells us else wise. Where did it come from? We deduce the
answer, Our Father who even went into specifics with the law, the Ten Commandments,
given Moses. Would man devise such inconvenient rules and regulations? Rules he often
seems to take delight in ignoring? These consciences that are to be followed can be
ignored and often are. Nietzsche proposed a philosophical escape. He saw God as dead
and modern liberated secular man as beyond good and evil but we know where that went,
Gulags and death camps. The evidence of history points to the terrible price of the
freedom to abuse conscience and break the commandments. Is love worth it? Our Father
obviously thinks so.
The beautiful mathematical laws found in nature and the magnificent call of
conscience in us are for our good and it is a good world when we honor and obey them
but that choice belongs to us alone. That’s the problem. Nature must obey but not us and
sometimes this leads to spectacular evil. To our shame as human beings some among us
have become monsters and even the average and kindly Joe and Jane Doe down the street
in a private reflective moment would probably agree with the statement of one of our
own “I don’t know what’s in the heart of heart of evil men but I know what’s in mine and
it terrifies me.” The command to love, and love does no harm, is the best handle for
containing that terrifying and ever-threatening nightmare.
Sex is a major human drive and one of the great ways of expressing love but it can
be a fly in the ointment too, a major one, because it too can often be abused. The message
revelation clearly pronounced to the Jews on the topic Christ more than confirmed and a
healthy society heavily depends upon it. It is that marriage is the only acceptable
relationship for the sexual expression of love. Monogamy was the original ideal though
polygamous arrangements existed. But Christ reinforced the original monogamous intent.
The others arrangements outside marriage are faux and often very damaging and
dangerous. Marriage is imperfect because people are but in faithful monogamous
marriage we have a man and a women seriously committed to one another’s happiness to
the point of serious sacrifice. Here sex is kept from doing all the awful harm that flows
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from polygamy and promiscuity. Women in communities built on polygamy are often so
damaged by early marriage at very young ages, more subject to domestic violence and
birth related illnesses that according to researcher Rose McDermott of Brown University,
their life expectancy is shorter than their monogamous sisters. Where religion does not
rein them in with strict prohibitions, males will create polygamous societies and where
existing religious restraint weakens, often sequential polygamy of the type made
fashionable by Henry VIII and his new church will come to be accepted.
With promiscuity too, the self invariably comes first. Not so with authentic
marriage, it can’t work that way. There the happiness of the beloved is the primary. The
true test of authentic love is the “forsaking all others” part of the Christian marriage
commitment. Loving spouse as self dispels infidelity and actually results in the highest
quality happiness possible here for the deferred joys purchased by loving sacrifice are
always far and away the sweetest and longest lasting. When worked at, and it takes
work, and with faith and love present, it prevents the life wrecking deceits, lies, betrayals,
infidelities, and hurt hearts that are the number one factor in two of the U.S.’s great ills, a
better than 40% divorce rate and a major child poverty problem with about 22% of the
children involved. Fidelity, the mutual refusal to cheat, is the key that prevents marriage
from becoming just another form of promiscuity like the hooking up, the cohabitation or
shacking up, to use a more imaginative term from a far less promiscuous time, so
common today and so fit for its mini-morality.
Marriage is indeed a challenge because it is other centered. All else is less because
the self-centered element is dominant. And marriage usually produces children that
demand still more of the other centeredness that stands at the heart of authentic love. This
is what Hesberg meant when he said, “the greatest love a father can give his children is to
love their mother,” and it should be added, mother the father too. No doubt about it, the
married state is life’s great love learning crucible. It may start, get kicked off with raw
passion and desire, a preliminary form of love, but takes off from there into a far more
substantial level of love which stays after the passion slowly and naturally dissipates and
cools with time. This produces the most long lasting and satisfying happiness we can
hope for in life. Life, as we know, has many passing pleasures, food, sleep, sex, alcohol,
drugs, tobacco, fame, sweets, games and all the rest that may thrill for a while but always
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leaves us short of full contentment, satisfaction, joy and happiness. Overindulged in these
things produces demeaning addictions and often a life full or remorse.
Nothing we do here fully satisfies and that includes marriage but because marriage
requires authentic love, a love that defies and is far above the mini-self centered “love” of
modern convention in that it puts giving above taking, the other co-equal with self, our
way above my way, contrary to conventional thought it actually ends up getting us closer
to true happiness than anything on earth. If anything, the wisdom of the ages testifies to
that point, as did the aged Sultan with a lifetime of many women and the finest of
everything in foods and pleasures behind him. He calculated he had a total of about seven
truly happy hours during his lifetime. His witty vizier exclaimed, “that many?” Sex in
marriage produces more health and happiness and less harm and death statistically than
any other form of sex. The faithful and devoted love that it requires is acquired through
determination and effort, as anything good and worthwhile is, and needless to say, with
grace requested and given. The love learning experience gained in the married state,
kicked off by passion but sustained by love, makes the needed sacrifices including the
“forsaking all others” part possible and with progress, if not easy at all times and nothing
worth building is, at least a source of a self-esteem nudging into a joyful sense of
satisfaction in a purpose well carried out and a life well lived. And, that’s about as close
to true happiness as we can get. It happens when you live it for someone else beside
yourself. He who dies with the most toys doesn’t win and only the fool thinks so. Only
those who learned to love win and there is no better place to do that than in marriage and
family.
This lesson, life’s essential one, seems to be getting increasingly lost amid the
mindless clatter of our media inundated culture which blandly, blindly and almost
exclusively dances to the dead end beat of the happy promiscuity tune. Much is lost to
those who listen. Their chance to learn love is greatly diminished and, in a word, love’s
reward, a happiness above any other possible here, one not heavily laced with remorse
and littered with damaged victims goes missing. Adding to the tragedy, most victims as
always are the betrayed wives and most poignantly, the children, the dead and many of
the living too, 22% of whom live in poverty.
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Marriage, like writing a symphony, a hit song, a simple little ditty or doing anything
worth doing, is usually not easy and often challenging and so it has always been but it is
becoming more challenging by the day in our heavily pornified and faithful-less culture.
Our media saturated culture, loaded with titillation, makes fidelity not just a challenge but
often an extremely strenuous one and the culture is not exactly turning out a bumper crop
of robust authentic lovers to meet it. And as long as it tries to mute and marginalize
religion there will be even fewer. If it is tough for those working at authentic love,
needless to say the mini-morality folks grown or growing up on tripe like the “Playboy
philosophy” and its many imitators on and off line are far from being up to it. So
promiscuity and infidelity soar and so do divorce, family disruption, damaged and not
infrequently impoverished spouses and children. These children, many in the heroic care
of struggling and overtaxed single mothers, are nevertheless bereft of what all children
need to grow and prosper, authentic love of the Hesberg type. With all this come multiple
government programs to try to remedy the spreading problems and a budget bent out of
shape and balance by heavy borrowing to meet the costs. And, disease and death come
too. The STD- AIDS epidemic has cost the public billions and has killed almost half a
million people so far. So much for the 60s mantras “make love not war,” and “what you
do in the privacy of the bedroom with a consenting adult stays there.” Would that it did!
That the life-style preached in the declining 60s killed more people than the war they
loudly protested is the tragic irony of our era.
To make matters worse the sexually active characters parading around many prime
time TV series are hardly ever married. Its as if the world was made up almost
exclusively of singles and divorcees. This goes for realism. Promiscuity is almost taken
for granted as if there were no well known consequences. But there are indeed and yet
today’s media lack the courage to proclaim them. It did so with smoking and deserves
credit for it but speaking against the damage and dangers of promiscuity is just too hot a
politically incorrect potato for it to handle. The panacea of condoms sometimes
mentioned has proved ineffectual as the spread of STDs and the 18,000 annual deaths
from AIDS testifies. There was not a year in Viet Nam that the U.S. suffered that many
deaths. Fidelity in marriage hardly exists anywhere among prime time media land’s
heroes and the dysfunctional family has replaced the happy family as if there was no such
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animal. Picture our cool detective coming home after a hard day cracking cases to a
happy spouse and family, sitting down for dinner and saying grace! You are
hallucinating. The only way the name of the Lord is taken in prime time media land is in
vain. Even though or perhaps because religion is a major factor in encouraging the
authentic love required for marriage it and it’s teachings on the subject, especially
Catholicism’s, are frequently held up to ridicule. An early Law and Order episode, for
example, had the ludicrous theme of the murder of a husband by a “devoutly” Catholic
wife because “the Church doesn’t recognize divorce!” The fact that it doesn’t “recognize”
murder either didn’t come into it. Mindless nonsense like this is common. The secularist
mind set has so invaded state and media that there are now new commandments replacing
the old and they bear watching. Thou shall not take the name of the Lord unless it’s done
in vain, is the new second commandment. It is the one honored more now that our bold
and adventuresome media envelop pushers with no better cause in mind than spreading
vulgarity and promiscuity, often with the self-satisfied thought that they are cutting edge
trail blazers of an enlightened and shackle-less era of freedom, more and more have their
way.
Our new commandments are indeed a little skewered. We are commanded to never,
never let your child ride a bike without a helmet yet gain respect in some quarters if you
deprive him or her of a father. But single parenthood, much more often motherhood, an
apparently growing trend which the media strenuously tries to normalize, is not
conducive to good and happy living, quite the contrary statistically. Divorce and single
parenthood for most, Hollywood actresses and media pundits excepted, often mean
depleted resources, financial and emotional loss, fatigue from overwork and children in
greater jeopardy, educationally and otherwise, than if the parents were together and
working at it. But that takes authentic love and all that means. With the rise of single
parenthood illustrated by the fact that out of wedlock births hit 33% in 2008 compared to
6% in 1965 and illustrative of the failure of a pervasive sex education system based on
condom use and the de-emphasis of abstinence, single parenthood has spread and
contributed greatly though not entirely by any means to the sagging of the American
educational establishment. It is at present 25th in achievement score rank out of the 30
leading industrialized nations. Thirty percent of our high school kids do not graduate.
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That’s about 7,000 dropping out each day, a disproportionate percentage from single
parent homes. The sex featured in movies, music and TV shows suggest that the
practitioners of bed bouncing, a similar term was first used in classical Greece, have
nothing but fun. The fun such as it is tends to favor the male. The reality is fraught with
consequences that should make anyone blanch and hesitate. Statistically, emotional
problems especially for women spiral and often STDs do too. If a child is conceived and
not destroyed, the common emotional problems often following abortions are escaped,
but a life of single parenthood looms because often the male dances away free with the
attitude that she could have aborted but didn’t so the “problem” is hers. Nice how
abortion, so favored by the vast majority of feminists, liberated the male precisely as
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth C Stanton and company had warned. With single
parenthood, marriage becomes less a possibility for many while shacking up with all the
instability and abuse that it is open to becomes more likely. The fact that a new and
innocent life was nor killed is wonderful but a life under better circumstances was a
possibility had mom and dad, a dad the child will likely hardly ever see, not succumbed
to the spirit of a very ill era. But the child has a chance at life and where there is life there
is hope. Perhaps some will learn from the mistakes of the parents. This chance is of
course denied to the aborted, over one in four to the tune of more than a million a year.
The courageous single parent who spared her child’s life even though a corrupt law and
complicit society says it is all right not to do, though Eagle eggs get protected,, has her
work cut out for her. Promiscuity is indeed a major taker of life health and happiness.
On top of all that, add in the greater risk of child abuse especially for the female child
now that divorce, cohabitation and sex out side of marriage are common. We now have
more single moms with lusty new husbands or boyfriends at home than ever before and
of no blood relation to the children. Though some claim the level of abuse we are now
experiencing is nothing new, is not unprecedented, there is ample evidence that it is. The
secularized culture has made successful love, marriage and happiness far more difficult
than it normally is and only religion stands in the way of its complete and destructive
domination. In point of fact, statistically the happiness meter has never been lower and
antidepressant use never higher, up 400% since 1988, as many studies have shown.
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The penchant for promiscuity, already a resident member of this troublesome
nature that we have inherited, is strengthened and encouraged in our decaying culture
with enormous direct and collateral damage to many innocent men, women and children.
It gets worse as more people, especially the young and impressionable, take their
marching orders from it. The Church alone, it seems, continues to stand in defiance with
its call for authentic and faithful love and damn the difficulties. The difficulties dim in
comparison to the damage done by their shirking. With our sickened and weakened
nature, outside of marriage “doing what comes naturally” frequently produces physical
and social harm of enormous scale and doing the unnatural, to again use that unpopular
term, often produces sickness and death. To repeat, the U.S. has seen 400,000 die with
AIDS with 18,000 added each year.
So betwixt and between are we in our present state that faithful marriage, itself no
easy thing even for the person of good intentions in a more aware time, is in today’s
soured culture even more of a challenge. The good man who was terrified by what’s
harbored in his heart of hearts may not be contemplating thoughts of bloody murder
though they might well be there too, so much as the more common thoughts of happy
infidelity. Abortion aside, the culture still frowns on murder but playfully winks at the
betrayal and deceit of cheating spouses. Here is a typical scenario of how badly awry our
weakened nature is as well as the culture that is wounding it. Ditch the good wife or
husband. Throw the kids under the bus but visit them now and then. Make sure they wear
seat belts but follow your heart’s new desire and get on with living. Go find your new
true real inner self. Be true to yourself and fulfill the real you, your honest inner being
often in the arms of a new and really fated love. Grab all the gusto you can while you
can, and so forth. The lower, dangerously self-centered part of our nature is at war with
what’s best in it. We are still Jaekel and Hydes, always have been. This is ancient
history going back to near the beginning and in some periods of history it seems the
lower gets the upper hand. In our era up to the 1960s such was not the case in the private
lives of most Americans. It was not usual for people to hurt people they said they would
always love but statistics now show it becoming very usual. They now show much less
resistance to the demands of the self-supreme. Infidelity is a major factor in the almost
50% divorce rate, a rate never approached prior to the 1960s where it usually hovered in
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he 10% range. The result is not happiness. For the best chance at some happiness here we
need to learn authentic love. It is indispensable for marriage and for most marriage is
indispensable for learning authentic love. In our present condition, we need help to
achieve the virtue and willingness to sacrifice that produces happiness for others and
ironically for us too and help is available. It is called grace, sometimes amazing.
The Creator, marvelous to say, did not stop loving us because of the original
harmful misuse of our freedom or its continued misuse and abuse. Grace is a gift of the
Father on the Porch. It is the unmerited and unilateral act of love, the same act that
created us in the first place. By it he continually calls souls to himself, sons and daughters
home, and even helps them answer the call but with care lest he impinge on that ever
priceless and ever costly gift of freedom that makes us human and makes love possible.
We read of awful murders, deceits and betrayals every day and yes the price is high,
awfully high. But with the help of grace the prodigals still turn themselves around and
trudge the road or crowd the ship helping them to come back home. There is a lot of help
available, some of it institutionalized in the Church and called the sacraments. They are
visible signs conveying the Father’s help and grace to us but, and here’s the rub, just how
much help can be given without compromising our human freedom? Thankfully, much
but it’s been a contentious question in the Church for many centuries. It was answered
thusly.
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XIX THE STORY OF PELAGIUS-MR. OPTOMISM
Once upon a time there was a man named Pelagius. We mentioned earlier that he was
a priest and was born in Britain around 355AD. His answer to that question was simple.
No problem, we need no help. We can do it ourselves, grace unnecessary. Where his
optimism came from is a puzzle. Certainly he couldn’t have been raised in the 20th or 21st
Centuries and still maintained it. Was Britain in his time such a peaceful and bucolic
place? Perhaps. Rome had occupied Britain in the 40s AD and the area prospered as part
of the Empire. In 313 AD the Empire recognized Christianity as its official religion.
Catholic Romans and missionaries from the continent had brought Christianity there even
before that time and with it all the bright hope and delight that the announcement of the
good news often carries. But, the Romans departed in 410AD and in twenty years night
closed in on the former Roman province of Britain with barbarian invasions from
northern Germany. Britain became England. But by that time Pelagius was long gone so
perhaps he did indeed reflect a very upbeat time and place. It must have been, for his
optimism was such that he didn’t believe that we had been damaged by “Original Sin” at
all. Our nature was unwounded, undamaged, and so had no need of the aid of healing
grace. Why should it if it wasn’t in any way weakened or prone to evil? Human effort
alone was enough to get us to God. All we needed is to use God’s great natural gifts to us
of intellect and will. That would be enough. These great gifts were all the grace and help
we needed according to him. He rightly treasured human freedom and independence and
feared that reliance on help from God would severely compromise them if not destroy
them completely. He proclaimed that we could make it on our own with no hospital ship
needed. To this day he is admired, often by people who don’t even know his name and is
one of the most popular heretics the Church has ever had to condemn. He was in a way
the Mr. “My Way” of his time. He would quite naturally appeal to the type.
The Church did not agree with him. Some said it was because, even though a priest,
he was making the Church and the sacraments unnecessary for salvation but the real
reason was the Church with its more universal experience even up to that time knew
humanity better than Pelagius did. The Church saw the damage Pelagius’ blind optimism
could do and knew as the Gospels and tradition testify that Christ established it to extend
God’s much needed gracious grace and help precisely because struggling humanity
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obviously needed it. Despite a bucolic Britain, if that was the case, humanity as a whole
and individually were often lost, often losing and sometimes downright more into hating
than loving. No doubt the will is free, as Pelagius stoutly proclaimed and defended, but it
is wounded. That, he couldn’t see. The human will is led by intellect but the intellect can
err and lead it wrongly. The Church as teacher works to inform the intellect and make it a
better more sensitive and knowledgeable leader. A debate over the issue of free will and
grace broke out in the early 400s between Pelagius and Augustine. We have mostly
Augustine’s account of it so its only fair to treat Pelagius kindly to compensate.
The problem as St. Augustine and the Church saw it was Pelagius’ unrealizable
expectations of what human nature can accomplish on its own in the order of goodness.
Like the incident with the ancient apple of the Genesis parable, pride in our freedom, a
pride we all share within reason, seemed to blind Pelagius. Augustine debated him and
the Church approved Augustine’s damaged nature thesis against Pelagius’ more
optimistic but evidently less realistic view. In essence the Church held that we enjoy free
will and our nature is by no means totally corrupted (chalk one up for Pelagius) but it is
in greatly weakened state and in need of help from Our Father on the porch. We can’t do
it all ourselves (chalk one up for Augustine). Interestingly, there are some who claim we
are semi-Pelagians to this day because the Church has always maintained that many can
and should do much more to help their own salvation. Asking for help is the essential
starter and that calls for anything but pride. And actually God may even provide a nudge
in the asking direction, discretely. The Church’s name for that action is as you might
suspect, Actual Grace. It’s a starter grace. For some it might be a blessing in disguise like
the Prodigal’s running out of money. After that though, as the parable makes clear,
hitting the road for home is up to you. Or maybe for others it’s the dawning of a
wonderful little humility after a something event in our life, not humiliation by any
means, humility, and with it the recognition of the reality about what we are, what we
need and what we really want. Or it may be a jolt that leads to the asking for help and the
first steps in the journey back. Whatever it is and it can be as varied as humanity, it takes
the shine off that damned old allegorical apple, gets us moving in the right direction and
keeps the Father on the porch always hoping, always looking down the road for us.
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While Pelagianism demands superhuman willpower, no nudging needed, as the
path to salvation, the Church’s teaching on Original sin places us all in the same boat. We
are weakened of will, wounded, often erroneous of intellect, sometimes almost helpless
and sometimes active in ways not good for others or for us. We are dependent on the
grace of God for needed help. It puts our feet on the road and is ours for the asking.
Interestingly, about twelve hundred years after Pelagius, the Church had to
excommunicate another priest who got the same question wrong. The issue came to a
head when Luther had gone to the opposite extreme from Pelagius and was teaching that
we are so totally and absolutely corrupted by Original Sin that we can do nothing
spiritually beneficial for ourselves. Salvation is not a cooperative venture; it all depends
on God’s grace. He denied free will altogether. The will is totally enslaved. But the
Church said no. The will is free and can choose the good at times by following
conscience, which is a kind of grace for everybody, but without the constant need of
special grace. However, to stay the long course requires working with the grace of God.
Often the will is led by what the intellect sees as good and that might be in error. For
many good reasons the comely beauty working in the office might seem to the intellect a
better deal than the wife. The intellect can and often does err leading the will astray,
leading it into making bad choices but it can and does make a choice. The Church has
always been the ultimate defender of human freedom and it hasn’t always been an easy
struggle. Shortly after Luther there was Calvin. He even went beyond Luther. Not only is
man’s will lacking freedom in that it is totally enslaved to evil but the liberating grace
doesn’t go to everyone, just some, God’s chosen ones. And the Church had to condemn
Calvin for preaching predestination. Rough waters!
Yet the great hospital ship stays afloat. The Church declared that our journey to
abundant eternal life with Out Father is a joint venture, our will freely cooperating or not
with God’s grace, perhaps with a little nudge on the cooperation side. That’s what all
good Fathers do. They want to help. The Church’s long experience made clear that
freedom had to be defended against the errors of both extremes, from the no help needed
we can do it ourselves side to the total helplessness, corruption and dependency thesis
because it always knew from revelation the purpose of that freedom. Without it no love is
possible.
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As human beings we cannot make or retain one moment of time. It all comes to
us as a pure gift of God and, as someone said, what we do with it is our gift to God.
Grace is a lot like that. It’s a gift. We are free to accept it or not. That’s the ultimate
freedom. It’s the gift of loving help to which we respond or not. The situation gives hope
to “the waverer, the backslider, the slacker, the putz, the schlemiel,” everybody it seems
except the overbearingly and blindly proud and complaisant. A sincere “yes” no matter
how late in life can turn everything around. Of the deadly sins pride’s the one. It enables
one to turn his back to the Father on the Porch, even slap his helping hand. If, especially
with the advance of age and wisdom, that be the stand, it might be prudent to have strong
and cogent reasons for the rejection. And for those who do desire a change in course
there is always the atheist’s daily prayer, “I declare myself a seeker of truth. I want to
know the truth and live the truth. If you are THE WAY, THE LIFE, THE TRUTH, please
help me.”
And the help will come. By grace man’s free will achieves power and liberty over
the things that enslave it. Grace, if accepted and that’s where freedom comes in, can
liberate the will from its enslavements. With its help history is full of great turn arounds.
John Newton a slave ship captain in 1772 captured it in his song “Amazing Grace.” He
became an abolitionist. Bernard Nathanson leading abortionist, over 50,000 of them, and
co-engineer of the Roe decision in 1973 later became a leader in the pro-life movement.
He died this year. And Ms. Roe herself, really Ms.Norma McCorvey of Texas, is now a
leader in the fight to rescind for the sake of life the Supreme Court decision that bears her
name. Grace achieves great things. It can be amazing.
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XX LOVE, FREEDOM AND THE HIDDENESS OF GOD
There are those who complain that the revelation of eternal life, most clearly
outlined in the New Testament along with the grace to attain, it is not convincing enough.
More is needed. They feel that God the gift giver should make the offer and his presence
much more obvious. Astronomer Carl Sagan once suggested God might have engraved
the Ten Commandments on the moon, a sort of 2001 Space Odyssey monolith. But years
earlier Pascal offered a plausible reason for what he called “the hiddeness of God.” If
God were to get in our face where would our freedom go? According to Pascal’s
thinking, if God were to declare Himself beyond our ability to reject Him He would be
forcing us to believe and awing love out of us. In effect, it would reduce us to robot status
almost like the docile domesticated humans responding to the sirens in “The Time
Machine.” Theologian John Haught writes in “God After Darwin,” “An overwhelming
and suffocating display of divine presence or omnipotence would leave no room for
anything other than God.” All would lose independence and in a sense be absorbed by
God. It would be a kind of neo-pantheism. Again, love is the key and it can’t be forced
even by omnipotence. That would destroy it. It is as God intended, risk and all. Only
creatures with mind and free will can love and unfortunately, on the down side, hate.
That’s the risk but for God love is worth it. And, amid all the terrible things and
disappointments, it is worth it to us too for love is the thing that brings us the pearl of
great price, life eternal with Our Father. Love then is what it’s all about, creation and all,
but forced love is no love at all. Unfortunately, history amply illustrates that the necessity
of freedom carries great risks and makes possible the other side of the coin, hate and
holocausts, murder and slavery, fraud and deceit and all the other human failures. But,
hard as it is to say with so many individual victims, without the risk there can be no
freedom to love and that is the purpose of the whole thing, the missing motive for why
anything is, why anything exists at all besides “AM.” How strongly God desires love to
flourish! He created for it. Christ suffered on the cross for it and many others suffer
everyday in their own way for it.
Overly influenced and conditioned, driven to love by overwhelming in your face
proof, presence and necessity, real human freedom perishes and with it the ability to love.
Forced love is false and dishonest. The reason why there is something rather than
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nothing is, as was said, precisely the love of God the Creator and his desire to see
authentic love flourish in His creation. We creatures have the capacity to reflect, in a
creaturely way, the mutual love within the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We
do this by loving one another in a way analogous to that Godly love. The triune nature of
God was arrived at through revelation and long and intense reflection on what Jesus said
of himself, his Father and the work of the Holy Spirit. It is beyond the achievement of
reasoning alone and requires faith in the divine knowledge of Christ. It should be added
as an aside that the old English word “ghost” had been used for spirit over the centuries
but had to be discontinued because media absurdity and sensationalism turned it into the
popular nonsense epitomized by current ghost hunting programs and the like.
Thus to return the love of God for us, we are commanded, not requested, to love
one another but we need not. We are free to ignore, abuse, hate. Unfortunately we have to
be. But the God who created us out of love in the first place and demands but does not
force us to share that love with our fellow creatures gave us help in the form of grace to
achieve that goal. But not only that, he showed us how to do it, how to live love. He gave
us the Ten Commandments, a specific summary of the Natural Law already engraved in
our nature, to help us realize that love in practice. Freedom is the necessary ingredient
that leaves us the ability to accept or reject love and life. Love requires freedom to also be
loved, to accept the love of others or not. We are free to reject not only the love of God
but the love of our neighbor too. In rejection, often again it is pride in one or another of
its many manifestations that is the culprit. It’s a destroyer. But love is the reason why
there is anything at all instead of nothing at all except God. It is the end of creation, its
goal. The risk, as mentioned, is great for with the ability to love comes the ability to hate
and we have the freedom to choose. It’s the heavy price and responsibility of freedom but
the ability for true love demands it. So in the end, when this life is leaving us, all we have
are these three, writes St. Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:12) “Faith, hope and love,
they remain, these three, but the greatest of these is love.”
Love, the kind of love the Creator wants to flourish, is difficult at best for us but can
be achieved and is in multitudes of unsung lives. Not screen stuff; they are the great
authentic lovers who stave off the horror and calamity that is always threatening to
overcome creation. They keep hope alive. Love indeed is the greatest of the virtues but
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with regard to the other two, faith and hope, the reasonableness of faith and belief in God
even without the aid of revelation has hopefully been demonstrated effectively, though as
Paul added “At present we see indistinctly…but then face to face.” From this faith flows
our hope for the gift of eternal life, the pearl of great price of the parable in Matt 13:45, in
which the man sold everything he possessed in order to buy it.
There are only two kinds of reasonable people in the world wrote Pascal, those who
serve God out of love because they know him and those who seek God with all their heart
because they don’t know him. Philosopher Peter Kreeft authored the seeker’s prayer to
God and begging indulgence, it bears repeating. “I declare myself a seeker of the truth. I
want to know the truth and live the truth. If you are the truth please help me.” A much
older prayer simply states, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” As R. Guardino in “The
Life of Faith” put it, even “ the ill disposed if he truly wishes or tries to have faith will
remain in God’s eyes a believer.” We saw some of those ill disposed make remarkable
turns around. There is always grace enough to move ones thoughts and direct them
toward the all-important last things, our final end and that pearl of great price, the
promise of life eternal with our Father. In doing that, in doing that much seeking, with
that much faith and love, scripture assures us, the grace of God, that amazing grace, will
be there to help. Earnest and open hearts draw forth his love in torrents. Like the Prodigal
we must place our feet on the road and He will help in that too but ultimately the first
step lies with our will to take it or not. The Prodigal could have wallowed in self-pity
with the pigs or headed off in a direction other than home. But he didn’t.
As perhaps this essay demonstrates albeit ever so weakly, the so-called hidden
God is really not as hidden as some would have it after all. Increasingly, reason and
science observe him in his works. As Cecil Laird put it, “God doesn’t have to put his
name on a label in the corner of a meadow because nobody else makes meadows.”
A lot of prodding to faith, hope and love there may be but never love negating force.
The freedom to love or not is the line God does not cross. But as it is put in Matt. 7:7 and
Luke 11:9, “Seek and you shall find…Knock and it shall be opened.” As true as it is, the
real mystery focuses on those who refuse to knock. What holds back the hand? Not
always but often enough it is the ceasing to behave that comes first. The refusal to live in
accord with one’s conscience, even an abused, muted, weakened and neglected one, and
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to ignore one or more of the Commandments often leads to the abuse and neglect of faith,
even ultimately in some cases the cessation of belief in God altogether.
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XXI THE CLEARING EFFECT OF REVELATION ON RELIGION & SUFFERING
It is a fact that bears repeating and a consolation too of sorts for the many Barbara
Walters out there, the people who are put off by what they consider the multiplicity of
conflicting religious paths, that there really are not that many. Albert Mohler, author of
the book, “Atheism Remix,” commenting on the late rash of new non-scientific atheists,
wrote that they are “certainly right about one important thing, its atheism or biblical
theism (revelation). There is nothing in between.” Though his point is a good one,
“nothing,” seems a bit strong. This nothing that’s in between includes the often
pantheistic leaning Eastern religions of which Hinduism and Buddhism stand out.
Though, as said, Mohler may be a bit strong in his dismissal of them and we will take a
look at them and what else is in between before too long, the fact is Revelation simplifies
the world picture by enabling us to divide religions into two distinct groups, revealed and
unrevealed. We can, with most people, dismiss atheism, a third option. We have already
looked at its failure to provide a convincing explanation for being. Its chance scenario is
too irrational and unscientific to be convincing for most people. What remains are the
two and one of them, revealed religion, specifically Judaism, Christianity and to a lesser
extent the later derivation, Islam, all valuing the Exodus metaphysic to varying degrees,
has been examined at least to a partial extent. Though more will eventually have to be
said about Christ and the claim to resurrection, we must in due time begin our
examination of unrevealed religion, the religions that grew up outside the influence of
revelation most especially the various forms of Animism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Are
they really as empty of import as Mohler strongly suggests? We shall see.
But first, speeding the whole simplifying and distinguishing process along is of
course the person of Christ himself. The claim of divinity and resurrection splits the
revealed religions thus further helping the narrowing down process. As scripture scholar
Timothy Luke Johnson of Emory University observed, “The good thing about
Mohammed, Moses, Buddha, Confucius…is they didn’t present themselves as God
incarnate. Jesus and His followers did.” That splits things pretty wide. In this claim Jesus
is absolutely unique and that makes the sorting process much easier. The advice to all the
Barbara Walters’ should be to focus first on the only one who did make the claim to be
“AM,” he who IS, in the flesh. His incarnation and resurrection must be examined. Did
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the necessary Being, he who always exists and from whom our existence graciously
came, become man, live, die and rise? In other words, did the Creator descend into the
level of the creature? The Barbara Walters’ must look carefully at the Christ of
revelation, as presented in the New Testament, if it hasn’t been thoughtfully done. If the
claim is dismissed then the other options may rate a look though Mohler denies it.
Perhaps we can understand his strong statement. History records no one who ever came
remotely close to saying the things Jesus said. To cite just one example of many, to the
crowd wondering how he could say that Abraham, dead 2000 years, had rejoiced to see
him, he told them, “I say to you before your father Abraham came to be, I AM.” The
crowd had no doubt what he meant and almost killed him for it then and there.
But we don’t have to take him at his word. What we do have to do is look at that
capstone and confirmation of his word and the bulk of the rest of revelation too, his
resurrection. Does it hold up? We shall have to see because we don’t know by natural
reason that Jesus Christ is God, “I AM,” or for that matter the triune nature of God either
but we can reason to it in the light of revelation. And much of revelation rests on the
authenticity of the resurrection. Reason and revelation are compatible and indeed overlap
in many ways. Therefore, a yes or no response to that claim of Divinity after due study is
possible and whatever the decision, it should reduce Ms. Walters’ multiplicity of
“conflicting paths,” rather well.
It is Christianity, of the revealed religions, that teaches along with Judaism that
God sent prophets to us by way of the Jewish people but far beyond that, it is only
Christianity that holds that the Creator loved us so much that he didn’t stop at that but
became one of us himself and suffered and died too like we must but with a difference.
His disciples said he rose from the dead as he himself said he would and promised that
we will too. We are meant to join him in eternal life with his Father and Our Father.
There was nothing like it before and nothing like it since. Some of the earthy gods of
classical poetry and myth had died and rose, died and rose, much like the cycle of seasons
or the crops of the fields but never a concept like the “I AM” of Exodus and the promise
of Christ of life eternal with no more death and with our Father “AM.” Death was
conquered for us. There would be no more dying. The incarnation and resurrection leave
the gods of myth and even the two other religions that are in the revealed category,
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Judaism and much more so Islam, on a very different level while those in the nonrevealed category, mostly New Age types and Asian religions, on a very distinct third.
The number of available choices therefore is not really that overwhelming.
With regard to faith as the Christian understands it as well as science and
philosophy, we have seen that they show that true faith is anything but unreasonable and
in fact quite the opposite. Indeed, as Regis Debray wrote in “God: An Itinerary,” “ Belief
is natural for the only animal that knows it is going to die.” The knowledge of our
eventual death spurs thought and reflection and that reflection, call it metaphysics, points
to something of necessity that always existed along with powerful indications, for
example the rigorous and precise ordering of everything from galaxy to the living cell,
that show great power and intelligence. What reason could not tell us, the only creature
that knew it was going to die and did not want to, was why. Why life had to end when we
longed for it to last. Why was it this way when in vast numbers we longed for more life
not less, for life in abundance? More precisely, we stare at the problem of why the
disorder of disease, suffering and death that disturbs and disrupts the obvious order of
creation and our desire for life so drastically intrudes and we wonder? For that answer
reason drew a blank and needed the aid of revelation. Genesis told in parable fashion of
the horrible disruption of that order by man’s revolting decision to bite the hand that gave
him being, existence, and love. Man’s free decision to love himself above all else
including God and neighbor led to defiance and disaster. It disrupted and upset the
purpose of creation and brought great disorder including death itself, the necessity of
which some speculate had been rescinded, into the Divine order of things. This death and
disorder is painfully obvious in many ways and is perhaps best epitomized by the all too
common occurrence of a healthy human cell becoming a rogue, a disruptive and deadly
cancer cell.
Thus revelation, the Old and New Testaments or more accurately the Jewish and
Christian scriptures, although Christianity is based on both, comes in to fill out the
picture, supplying the motive for creation, namely overflowing generous love, and
revealing an offense against that love that introduced the disorder and death we must now
live with and die for. Reason and revelation are the two great tools for arriving at the
answers to the life questions that we all wonder and think about at one time or another.
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As Gilson says, “revelation opens the way for the work of reason.” Philosophical
reflection based on reason seeks to clarify what the revelation found in both the Jewish
and Christian Testaments indicates. Some Medieval philosophers expressed it by saying
that they valued revelation because it helped them to better understand the world and
man’s place in it. Thus the clearing effect of revelation helps distinguish religions.
Specifically, on the one hand, the non-revealed ones, mostly of Eastern origin, and
tending strongly to a hope reducing pessimism embodied in a world view so dismal,
painful, even nightmarish, as only to be escaped. On the other hand, the more hopeful
and optimistic Genesis based disposition of the revealed religions that see the world as
tarnished by man’s misuse of his freedom but still good, or as Genesis puts it “very
good.” Indeed it is the creation of a loving God who, far from abandoning it and us, loved
it enough to become part of it.
We are commanded to use our freedom to love but we don’t have to. For the loving
use of that freedom the gift of life in abundance is ours for the asking. As we all know it
is very challenging. For example, one demonstration of love is forgiveness, not always
easy but it must be extended whenever sincerely requested. Discussing love and
forgiveness, Peter asked Christ, how many times must we forgive, seven times? Seventy
times seven said Christ. Only the opaque literalist would conclude 490.
To summarize, we have the combined one two punch of reason and faith, intellect
and scripture, philosophy and revelation, call it what you may. The philosophy that
thrived on revelation originated with the classical Greeks, mostly Plato and Aristotle.
The Early Church took it over and developed it with the help of revelation, especially
Exodus and the four Gospels, the good news. That union of faith and reason is a
hallmark of the Church and the hallmark of revealed religion in general though Islam
eventually turned away seeing philosophy more as a threat to faith than a help. It bears
repeating that in general the revealed religions, Islam to a lesser extent, tend strongly to
optimistic hope as opposed to the endemic gloom of most Eastern religion. Christianity
more than any other religion has taken advantage of the two approaches to God, namely
the metaphysician who studies God through reason and the theologian who does the same
using reason and revelation culminating in Christ. Unlike classical Islam, Christianity
finds no insurmountable conflict between the two. From the metaphysician, especially
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Aristotle whose claim that human beings by nature desire to know, especially to know the
first cause of everything, the Early Church found much helpful support in its endeavor to
bring the good news of the Gospel to those who looked for reasonable confirmation from
outside revelation of what the Church was presenting. As the culmination of Greek
classical thought, Aristotle’ metaphysics elucidated by reason some of the attributes of
God, namely the eternal necessary being, the uncaused cause of all that is who reveals in
his creation great order, intellect and power. From the theologian we approach the same
God of reason but who also revealed to us attributes beyond the unaided comprehension
of reason and philosophy alone, the Triune nature of God and most prominently his love
as epitomized in the motive for creation and finally the incarnation.
It was out of that love that he sent us prophets and helped lead his first people, the
Jews, to himself. To them he revealed not only the love but also his ten commands
involving how to love and also his name, “I am who am,” “I am he who is,” Yahweh.
From them would also come the great gift bearer himself, Christ, with the promise of
eternal life not only for the Jewish people but for all people. For the Christian theologian
especially, God is the tremendous lover who became one of us or to use the Eastern
expression for the incarnation, pitched his tent among us, his forlorn but beloved
creatures and loved us so much as to die for the beloved. There is no greater love than
that. He shared in but did not remove suffering from our shoulders. Why not? Gilson
explains this hard fact with philosophical concepts. The nature of created beings, the
essence of creature, involves not eternal self-sufficient being but rather mutability,
impermanence and contingency else creature would have the perfections of God, would
be God, Being, thus the creature would be eradicated. The intention of creation, the
procreation of love would be defeated. Love could not be free and would not be love.
This creaturely mutability and changability however leave us open to discomfort,
suffering and demise though it had only been a potentiality, a possibility, until sin and
defiance actualized it. Essentially, the hard uncomfortable fact is the removal of the
possibility of suffering would have to involve the removal of freedom. Our decisions and
choices to be real and not merely hollow facades have to have real actual consequences,
even the bad and destructive ones. This is the fact that holds back the hand that could
remove all suffering right now. It is another one, the worst, of the terrible consequences
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of the abominable Fall from grace. Beyond that, suffering is surrounded by mystery, that
is to say it does not succumb completely to the mastery of reason at least not at this time.
We will have to wait for complete understanding. But we do have Christ now. At least his
suffering tells us something. It shows us suffering is not a waste. Ours need not be either.
Our pain and anguish can be intense; intensity captured for all ages in Christ’s cry to
his Father from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” As the old
song says, “By your cross and resurrection you have redeemed the world.” Many carry
their own crosses every day. Their suffering united to Christ’s can also bring blessings
like Christ’s did. And far from proving Christ was not God as some took this anguished
passage to do, it shows the consummate reality of the Incarnation. When “the Word
became flesh,” it was no play-acting and the Gospel writer of that passage knew and
understood that. God really became human, really suffered. It was no façade as some
early heretics of a Gnostic bent believed and whom the Church had to censor for that
reason. They were distraught at the idea that God actually became a real human being
with all the flesh and blood icky-ness that meant, the gurgling and suckling infant, the
adult suffering intense pain and death. They proposed that Christ, being God, just put on
humanity as one would put on clothes but really wasn’t human and really didn’t suffer
and die. It was the clothes that got ripped up and destroyed. But the Church reasserted
and proclaimed at Nicaea in 325 what it had held and taught over the years, that God
without giving up divinity undertook humanity and became real man, no suit of clothes;
one person of both real human and real divine natures. That is the incarnation. Being,
“AM” incarnate in Christ the son, could and did actually suffer like we do and then die to
affect the defeat of death for us. It gives some consolation to know that the Incarnate
God loved us enough to really become a human being, Creator becoming creature,
descending to our plane of being, to our level. As Lorenzo Albacete states in “God at the
Ritz,” the incarnation was the self-inflicted humiliation of the Supreme Being.” “AM,”
actually shared in our broken condition in all ways except sin. In Christ was a creature
like we were originally intended to be. Evil is so alien to how we are made though not
how we choose to act, it makes suffering and death absolutely repulsive. Imagine what it
was like for him who unlike us always chose love.
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If his incarnation was humiliation and he himself said, “Learn from me for I am
meek and humble of heart,” it was for us the beginning of hope just as the resurrection
was its fulfillment. With his resurrection comes the full hope of life, not temporary but
permanent and in abundance. It is this that so separates the revealed religions most
especially Christianity from the non-revealed ones. With Christ the greatest evil and our
greatest enemy, death was, as is said in Mass, defeated. With His resurrection, the new
abundant life that is ours was revealed in the concrete.
What this means to creatures like us, creatures of body and soul, matter and spirit, is
that none of it is to be lost lest we cease to be the creatures we are. This new life is held
out for our full and complete selves, not only our souls. Our body is not a suit of clothes
either. It and our immortal soul together are us. That is why our mind can affect the body
and the body mind. We are not facing a future of flitting around like some sort of ghost or
disembodied spirit. We will be fully our human selves chastened by the love learning
experience here or in God’s way, in a period of purgatory. Thus our humanity will be
changed in eternity to what it could have been here had we attained our holy loving
potential. But we will be intact as Christ was after his resurrection when he met with the
disciples in the room and on the lakeshore and asked for something to eat. It was he, body
and soul and not some disembodied spirit or apparition. So too shall we be.
The price of our new lives is love, Christ’s on the cross and there is no greater love
than that and ours, the love we learned here even in our little unspectacular daily ways.
His love can make up for a lot of lacks. Not a bad deal, almost too good to be true. The
gift horse is greater than anything we could have dreamed. “Eye has not seen nor ear
heard what the Father has prepared for those who love him.” The magnificence of the gift
is no reason to reject the horse. Only the distracted, the foolish, perhaps the perverse,
would reject it without looking into it. Not looking the great gift horse in the mouth is
like putting another great gift, our intellect, on hold as if it was not up to this its greatest,
most challenging and important task. A task, it would seem, it was made for and is equal
to. And grace is always there to help.
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XXII
JESUS, THE RESURRECTION AND PROMISE OF ABUNDANT LIFE
We need not rely on revelation, specifically the New Testament, the Gospels and
Epistles, to know that Jesus existed. There is more evidence that Jesus crossed the Jordan
than Caesar crossed the Rubicon. He is cited in pagan literature, Pliny, Tacitus,
Seutonius, and the Jewish author Josephus. He died at Roman hands with the complicity
of the Jewish leaders of the day. No Roman author denied it nor did any Jewish authority.
The question is, would someone who died for us lie to us: “I have come from the Father
who sent me.” “I and the Father are one.” “He who sees me sees the Father.” “I have
come that you may have life in abundance.” “I am the way, the truth, the life.” “On the
third day I will rise.” “No one goes to the Father except by me.” “Before Abraham was I
am.” These are words unheard of before or since. Perhaps his words to the Samaritan
women at the well in John 11:25 sums it up best: “I am the resurrection and the life: he
that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whoever lives and
believes in me shall never die.” Is all that true? What is truth asked Pilate. The answer
here is “I AM.” Are the words true or is the diagnosis one of insanity, delusion, a
tremendous liar rather than a tremendous lover of truth, the greatest of con man of all
time or the duped front man for a bunch of devious conspirators? Forget etiquette, this is
one gift that has to be examined. One gift horse that calls for a good look and St Paul puts
it and its right on the line. “If Christ did not rise from the dead our faith is in vain.”
To briefly repeat the point as was made in the Christmas 2009 essay, “From
Swaddling Clothes to Shroud” that was dedicated to “Head” O’Leary as he fought his
losing battle against cancer and in Arnold Lunn’s book “And Not So New,” no one at the
time denied that on that third day Christ’s tomb was empty. There is no Jewish or Roman
source claiming that the body was still there and there is independent Jewish evidence for
the fact that not only was it not denied that the body was gone, that the tomb was empty,
but that the Jewish Sanhedrin explained the emptiness of the tomb by the alleged theft of
the body. That was the Roman line too. They all insisted that the disciples must have
stolen the body. Motive? A prank? A hoax? A conspiracy? A dream of wealth and fame?
Group insanity? Pride? Start a new religion they knew was phony, for money? Laughs?
Excitement? Or perhaps secret suicide pact? In this multiple choice question the closest
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answer is the last one. Preaching Christ risen from the dead eventually got eleven of the
twelve and many others killed when a simple denial, a simple coming clean, would have
saved their lives. Suffering and dying, not just one, but many, for what they knew to be a
lie is a first in history. If the disciples had stolen the body they all would have known
Jesus had not risen from the dead. But they preached it anyway, the lie, taught the lie,
spread the lie, and established a Church to keep the lie going after they were gone. And
they were going to be gone in relatively short order to the most horrid kinds of death.
This hoax would be the death of almost all of them. If they pulled it off for excitement
this was excitement no one wanted. Most of them were killed propagating what they
knew was a monstrous and ghastly lie. There is no record of anything like it happening
before or since. Hoaxers are not known to lay down their lives for their hoax. People have
been known to die for the truth. They have been known to die for what they mistakenly
thought was the truth or were fooled into believing was the truth. But to die broken and
broke for what you know was a lie, a hoax? Unheard of! Explanations? There is really
but one. It wasn’t a lie.
Even psychologically, the bearing of a secret that wasn’t true even to painful and
premature death, defies reality. The pressure would be far too much and relief far too
easy, a simple recantation. The apostles were persecuted, tortured, brutally murdered,
crucified, beheaded and stoned to death. But none of them, to quote Charles Colson
(another one of those turns around) in the new biography by Jonathan Aitken,
“snitched…copped a plea by confessing to their tormentors: ‘we’ve been part of a
conspiracy to tell lies about the resurrection.’”
The reality and truth are far more cogent than any cooked up conspiracy theory.
There is no convincing ulterior motive for what they announced in the face of death.
What gain in promising eternal life with no ability to deliver? They didn’t sell it. They
didn’t get rich. Instead all were willing to die penniless for something they knew to be
true. No one ever gives up health and life for what they know is untrue. The disciples
were willing to go to their painful deaths because they knew the resurrection of Christ to
be absolutely true. He had risen as he said. The blinding, breathtaking new Easter faith,
the good news of the Gospel, “Tidings of Comfort and Joy” in the old Christmas carol,
began to spread through the world and still is and always will until time ends even at
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times against organized opposition, sometimes against ignorance, despair, indifference,
defeatism. It swept up some good people like Pelagius and made them giddy and
unrealistically optimistic. But it wasn’t called the good news for nothing. It was called
that because humanity’s worst enemy death was destroyed and the life eternal awaiting us
revealed. The news was spread with joy and in spite of persecution. Paul wrote his letters
spreading it. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote their Gospels telling of it. Clipped and
to the point, they teach the same message from varied angles. Hear and listen, we are
made for life not death. Far from a mad man or hoaxer, Christ, the incarnate “I AM” who
was before Abraham came to be, before anything came to be and comes through the
Gospels in deep earnest, a tremendous lover of humanity and abiding in his own
humanity to the point of referring to himself as, “the Son of man.” As fully human, he
faced his cross with fear and trembling as we too might when we think of our coming
deaths but then he conquered this our worse enemy and revealed the life that awaits us.
Good news indeed and his cross became the symbol of hope and proof of the love of God
for us. Christ in his death on the cross became the sign of the great gift of new life.
Generous and loving men and women took the good news with them on missionary
journeys far and wide and far from home to help announce and share it with the world
and the Church has been doing the same ever since. That’s the job it was given almost
two thousand years ago. It would be very wrong for us to sit on such great news and not
share it with others, to help spread it. It’s another great way of showing love.
And, to say it again, what was the good news, the break through news, the great Gift
Horse? Life in abundance, permanent life was ours for the asking. To qualify, move to
belief and love from whatever condition you find yourself. Our Father is always on the
porch looking with outstretched hand. In the end then, there are only three things that
count, faith, hope and love and the greatest is love. Work on the one and the rest will
come.
We have come to the bottom line. The reliability of this promise rests, as St. Paul
wrote, on the truth of the resurrection. Without it our faith and hope are in vain. The
Resurrection is the capstone and confirmation of all New Testament revelation; the
mouth of the horse.
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XXIII REVELATION AND NON-REVEALED RELIGION
The resurrection put the seal of confirmation, reliability and veracity on what had been
made known through revelation going back even to Genesis and Exodus. Men and
women flocked to the good news because it brought sense to what before had made no
sense, namely the purpose of existence. But the coming of Jesus did not happen in a
vacuum. Beside the Judaism that Jesus, a Jew, said he was sent first of all to fulfill there
were, among other religions, the Greco-Roman Paganism of the Roman Empire as well
as the great religious traditions of the East such as Hinduism and its split off Buddhism.
Except for Judaism, of course, they were all to a great extent polytheistic, often
polygamous with strong strains of pantheism. That is why, with the Jewish parentage of
Christianity in mind, Pope Pius XI in the face of the growing Nazi threat made it clear
that Catholicism’s spiritual roots were in Judaism and that spiritually we were Semites.
The roots of the faith go through Christ himself and the disciples all of whom were Jews,
back to the Jewish “Old” Testament. The Pope knew that Christians had to be reminded
of this and that Judaism had to be respected. Over the centuries, because of disagreement
and controversy between the two, it had often not been, sometimes violently. Part II of
this six-part work that carries the overall title “The Lie Swatter,” is called, “Holocaust
and War” and covers those troubles in some detail.
Six hundred years after Christ, Islam, the third religion claiming revelation
status, arose out of Arab nationalism. Judaism for the Jews, the Roman-Byzantine world
had Christianity, both strictly monotheistic, but the Arabs still wallowed in pagan
polytheism. Mohammed determined that he would remedy that situation for his beloved
Arab people. Claiming revelation from Yahweh, the God of the Jews and Christians, his
religion was basically a male dominated monotheism combining Jewish and Christian
elements but with a heavy dose of Arab paganism devoid of its polytheism but retaining
its polygamy. Mohammed, besides being a visionary, was a war leader and his religion
reflected that fact. It spread quickly often by the sword. With the exception of these three,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, none of the other religions out there, Hinduism and
Buddhism for example or more current New Age variants claimed to be revealed by God.
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Actually they tended to have a very pantheistic and rather rudimentary concept of God if
they had one at all.
As non-revealed, both Hinduism and its offspring Buddhism arose from the honest
efforts over many centuries of good men, seekers and thinkers, to make some sense of the
human condition and to reach God, if there was such a being. If not, then at least reach
some state of relief from the pain and suffering of existence. Philosophically, their out
look was generally rather pessimistic. A dominant theme was escape from the pain of
existence in this unreal and nightmarish world and above all to escape the horror of
rebirth into more of it. Reincarnation, being an ancient part of the life outlook on the
Indian sub-continent, was part of both religions. Life was a search for the best way to
escape it, to escape more rebirths and more living. They tried everything from meditation
and Yoga to lives of compassion, detachment, induced trance and extreme asceticism as
ways of release and escape while living in the hope of achieving Nirvana, a consciousless blissful state of nothingness with no more life and no more reincarnations. At
bottom, these religions were a sincere and serious effort by many men and women of
good will over many generations to get some understanding of themselves and the world
they were in.
The differences between revealed as opposed to non-revealed religion are vast. In
addition to the fact that the non-revealed religions tended to look upon the world as
eternal, uncreated and more or less a nightmare while revelation holds to the tarnished
goodness of a world not eternal but at a point created by a loving God, the issue of
abundant life marked a great divide between them. One side wanted it; the other didn’t,
actually anything but. Christ’s revelation of more life awaiting us, the good news of
revelation on the one hand, as opposed to ultimate oblivion for the individual conscious
self on the other, the longed for life goal of Hinduism and Buddhism, turned a mighty
divide into a vast chasm. The strong common trait of these non-revealed religions is that
the “you,” the person you are, will not last, has no future. You will be gone. Ultimately,
after many rebirths, the you is dissipated, dispersed, recycled, remerged, reabsorbed into
the powers and energies, that is, into the great soul of an oblivious universe from which it
emerged quite by accident in the first place. Taken all together, it illustrates a great divide
that the Dalai Lama, with kindly intentions, attempted to paper over.
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The very concept of God in most of the non-revealed religions tended to be very
different. It was strongly pantheistic in that God was indistinguishable from the natural
world and part and parcel with the energies and forces of the cosmos. The worship of
things, world soul, forces of nature, stream of energy, or the “divine” embodied in the
things of nature be they trees, animals, mountains, Sun, Earth or Moon was not unusual.
Behind all reality, indeed the ultimate reality was the great soul, the life force, the stream
of energy, pervading all nature. This was often the only concept of God that these
religions developed. Needless to say it was not “AM,” not Being, Yahweh, the loving
Father and creator. Instead this ultimate reality, god with a small “g” if you will, was
unknowing, uncaring, unloving, an element driving nature and just a part of it, following
laws it knew nothing of, and by no means a separate intelligent being. Oblivious reabsorption into this soul of the cosmos, never really defined, sort of as ink into a blotter,
was man’s ultimate destiny and only escape from misery of life and existence. Such was
the philosophy and religious thought that, when Christ came, pervaded and still pervades
much of the East though things are slowly changing as the influence of Christianity
continues to spread and scientific advances are being felt.
Obviously this thinking was very different from the God of revelation who was
anything but part of the material universe, a stream of energy, soul or life force immersed
in it. The eternal, knowing, loving Being we were taught to call Father was not at all part
of that picture because everything immersed in matter is doomed by matter’s very
contingent, and temporary essence. The traditional idea of these religions that the
unknowing cosmos was to continue eternally, in a sense to be constantly reborn,
reincarnated so to speak, always starting again, an endless cycle or wheel of being, may
still be part of the picture in the East though the discovery of Universe’s actual beginning
out of nothing scientifically detectable in the big bang and its eventual demise may
instigate some rethinking. Actually, the rethinking, if that’s the right word, had begun
with Genesis’ creation revelation and was developed in earnest, as was seen, almost two
thousand years ago in the West by the Church’s use of Genesis to correct Greek
philosophy.
The God of revelation, I AM, is a being very distinct from his creation and
rectifies all the monism dominant in other systems. This difference, as remarked before,
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highlighted another great line separating the world’s major religions. For non-revealed,
God and world was one (monism), for the other not so. The God of revelation was
separate from and creator of a world that had a beginning. He sustains the existence of
this material world, so contingent in itself as to need sustaining, but is not part of it in the
order of being as the pantheist or monist would have it. This distinction between God and
the universe is key and marked a decisive metaphysical break between the many pagan
philosophies and non-revealed religions in their various manifestations mostly of the East
and the great revealed religions beginning with Judaism. The revelatory lightening bolt
that brought about the great break was the Genesis story in the Jewish Scriptures found in
the first book of the Old Testament. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the
Earth” There was a beginning. The universe and the world as part of it weren’t always
here, didn’t always exist. This was scientifically confirmed a few years back. It started
about fourteen billion years ago. The material universe was not eternal. But, something
must be. Its creator is or else nothing, no universe. Nothing wins. And, of course, the
Creator is not the creation, not part of it, as the pantheist holds, but eternal and distinct,
Being, “AM.”
Again, this distinction between God and the world as first put forth in Genesis, the
first book of the Jewish Bible, marks the decisive metaphysical split between Revelation
and the Pagan philosophies and Eastern religions that understood the natural realm, the
world and universe, to be eternal and accounting for everything that is, there being
nothing else, no Being outside it. Revelation also marks the raising of mankind to
something very special and beyond the purely natural realm. Humanity is not destined to
personal obliteration and re-absorption into something called the soul of the cosmos
whatever that is. This awareness grows during the Old Testament days and becomes fully
realized in the promises of Christ as detailed in the New Testament.
With revealed religion, especially Judaism and Christianity, the straining of
philosophy, especially metaphysics as we have seen, received an immeasurable boost.
Now headway could be made in earnest on the life questions. God is seen as Creator of
all that is, both seen and unseen, sustaining it all but wholly distinct and distinguishable
from what he created and sustains. The God of revelation is the only being whose
essence is to exist, existence itself as opposed to everything else that we know of.
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Everything else need not exist and at one time or another didn’t. Unlike God,
everything’s essence is not existence, far from it. Everything else is finite, temporary,
runs down, decomposes and is full of contingency. In other words, the God of
revelation is the something that always had to exist for anything to exist now; the
necessary Being making the chance of nothing existing impossible and everything that
is, possible; the Being who thereby defeated the eternal doom of nothingness.
To help us understand, the God of revelation, as we saw, when asked by Moses his
name answered, “I am who am.” “Tell the Israelites “I AM,” “HE WHO IS” (Yahweh)
sent you to them.” To repeat, the word has a complex history with vibrant eternality a
key element. And eternality was precisely what was needed to fill up forever and avoid
the split second of nothing that would doom everything. A good thousand years after
Moses, and two thousand after Abraham, Christ was confronted with the fact that he
had said about Abraham that he, Abraham, was glad to see his day. The retort was, “you
are not yet fifty years old,” as the crowd replied, “and you have seen Abraham?”
Christ’s answer almost got him stoned to death for blasphemy. “Before Abraham came
to be, before he was, I AM.” He was identifying himself and the eternal God and the
crowd knew it.
The God of Jews, Christians and Moslems is not the pantheist’s god. With the
pantheist all is one, nature and everything in nature including the individual is part of god
or together participate in god. God, whatever they may mean by the term, is part and
parcel with the world and its energies. In a pointed rebuke to individual existence, an old
Hindu poem states:
“Know that all is one self same soul.
Banish the dream that
Sunders part from whole.”
Here is pantheism’s monistic Apostle’s creed in a proverbial nutshell. No declaration of
independence allowed here. You are the part that is never to be sundered. We are not just
in the world, but also entirely of the world and destined to be reabsorbed into it. It is all
one, all god, all “one self same soul.” The part longing and dreaming to be “sundered” to
use the poem’s word, to be separated, to not go down into oblivion with all material
things as they are destined to do is you and I, the individual person. In such a philosophy
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of religion our hope of ultimate personal individual life and value, individual value that it
is to be preserved and is the object of the Creator’s love, is doomed. It will never be
realized. Of no permanent value as individuals, mindless re-absorption as our ultimate
fate, often societies resting on such ideas meant lives lived with very little caring for its
more unfortunate members and quite logically so. A good example is the Caste system.
This ultimate mindless oblivion that awaits us is considered bliss and, given the
extremely dreary not to say horrid view of the world these religions hold, it is not
surprising. The dream to be banished in the poem is our individuality as a person and its
continuance. Instead we were destined, according to Hindu thought, for ultimate
depersonalization, absorption and oblivion in the world soul. As mentioned, some might
consider this bliss but for many living, thinking beings with or even without the
inheritance of the hope filled message of abundant life found in revelation, it is more a
nightmare.
Rescue was to come with revelation, for its good news was that the individual
person is no illusion to be ultimately blotted out and absorbed into the eternal cosmos but
the unique creation of and indeed the child of God and of such importance that more life
awaits and he was even taught to call God, Father. The difference is immense. For one,
life is illusion but an illusion with pain and suffering the dominant reality only to be
escaped into an ultimate blissful merging and annihilation in the soul of the cosmos. That
is the aim and goal of life. Life is to be escaped with rebirth into it the constant threat.
Eternal life in such a worldview would be a horrible calamity. The message here is that
unconscious unity with the cosmos is everything and conscious life worse than nothing.
The individual, the part, is basically a dream fated to eventually fade into the whole and
into the bliss of painless impersonal nothingness. And if modern science is correct, fated
also to diminish with the whole universe as it goes on its way to extinction. Everything is
gone. No personal permanent abundant life awaits anybody. No loving Creator made us
because there is none, no Creator, no creation, no “In the beginning…” just the eternal
cycle of things and all reality just a terrible accident. With all due respect to the Dalai
Lama, the two theologies are very different, drastically so.
Adding to that difference is the monotheism of the revealed religions. John
Garvey of “Commonweal” has written, “Nonbelievers say that humans have created the
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gods, or God, in their own image, and that is certainly true of the gods who serve as
patrons of wine, war, sex, wisdom and so forth. Monotheism changed all that by making
God essentially other…” Essentially other is to put it mildly. Very other indeed, so other
that not too many humans would want to concoct and impose upon themselves such a
God. A God who imposes not wine, women and song on us but the duty and freedom to
love or not along with all the sacrifice that often entails. A God with all the often
challenging, unwelcome, unsought and uncompromising ethical imperatives found in the
Torah with its Ten Commandments combined with the awesome Christian demands of
love, forgiveness and purity. A god invented by men would be of much more friendly
disposition to the base desires of our damaged natures. Given the apparent male
domination in most societies throughout history, a god more understanding and
undemanding of his so called “favorite,” pushing rather than condemning favorite male
pursuits such as promiscuity, polygamy, bigamy, east male divorce, concubinage,
prostitution and such and by no means demanding quite challenging things like chastity
before and faithful lifelong loving monogamy in marriage. What male would concoct
such a god? Here love would really be learned. An invented god of the kind we know
through revelation is a laughable thought because of the essential contradiction involved.
Who would invent such a god? Much better one made in our image, not one like “AM.”
The God that we know through revelation is not like us, is not in out image, is so
other and with so “other” demands as to be unlike anything else we know. So, to help us
know him he revealed his essence which is existence, pure eternal existence, in the name
he gave Moses else we would never have gotten beyond Greek speculation about his
nature, though Aristotle’s surmise of pure thought and uncaused cause were quite fine as
approximations. On top of that, he commanded a morality of rugged and refined love
with specifics that were very other indeed, though contained even before revelation in
that natural law engraved in our hearts’ and shared by all people. But it, like the
commandments, was often honored more in the breech. Revealed religion, especially
Judaism and even more so Christianity had specific demands in the areas of justice, love
and their close and very important though certainly not exclusive arena of practical
action, sex. They are not often found in any of the non-revealed religions but are very
worthy of children of Our Father.
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This is not a god we would have made up or invented, far from it. Clearly we are
not God and not part of God and he is not us, though some of a pantheistic “new age”
mentality would like to have it such. We can think about God but full knowledge of him
is well beyond us even with revelation’s aid. Not everything by far has been revealed.
There is more to come, much more.
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XXIV BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM
Where does all this leave the Dalai Lama and the great religious traditions of the
East? Certainly they are in a very different realm with their strong polytheistic,
pantheistic and polygamous traits. Of the three faiths claiming a basis in revelation only
Islam maintains polygamy and a generally inferior status for women. But there are other
basic differences too that make the relativism of those who agree with the observation
made by the Dalai Lama before his visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in N.Y. City that all
religions are the same, even more untenable. With regard to human life, it is only in the
Judeo-Christian tradition and to a lesser extent Islam due to its attachment to polygamy
that every individual is something very special, is of great dignity and importance
regardless of gender. Male and female both share equally in that basic dignity. Each
person is an individual of great importance because he is made in the image of God and is
taught by Judaism and Christianity to call God his father. With the coming of Christianity
and its central dogma of the Incarnation, the value, worth and dignity of each human
person was immeasurably boosted by God becoming one of us, taking upon himself a
true humanity like ours in every respect devoid of sin for sin involves the failure to love.
The Creator thus graced his creatures and all creation.
In the East by contrast, the individual is an illusion and the self worse than worthless.
His final destiny is not personal and eternal life with our Father in heaven but a hereafter
of blissful unconscious eternal oblivion with the individual self reabsorbed into the
cosmos. Contrasting the philosophical Hindus’ and Buddhists with the ordinary believers,
Gerald McDermott in his essay “God’s Rivals-Why Different Religions,” makes the point
that the philosophical Buddhist insist there is no personal God because there is finally no
distinction between God and the universe, the cosmos. Everything is one, a great
unconsciousness stream of eternal uncreated and unknowing being. In Hinduism the
ultimate end for every person is to lose personhood by absorption into the
undifferentiated and unknowing soul behind all things. Life’s goal is to escape life and
merge into that unconscious stream. Life’s worst curse is to have more of it, to be reborn
into more life. The fatalism and the pessimism toward living is pervasive and would be
much more deadening than it is if the less philosophical rank and file believer did not
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ignore many of the dismal ramifications for daily living that could flow from such a
theology.
By contrast, the God of Revelation is not an amorphous unknowing essence or
stream of being, part of and indistinct from the cosmos, but, though spirit, a most
personal, intelligent and distinct being whose very essence is existence and more, the
universe’s creator and indeed our loving Father. Christianity, Judaism and Islam teach
that life and the world are great gifts not great horror shows. Oh, to be sure, like
Christianity they teach that the gifts are damaged, that this life and the world are to an
extent a valley of tears, that creation has been partially knocked off the track by the abuse
of freedom but, as Genesis insists, the world was created good indeed very good and as
Christianity confirms, so good that God in the flesh came to rebuild and redeem it. It is
by no means Buddha’s world of pain and suffering so devoid of real pleasure and
happiness and hope that it would be better never to have been born. For Buddha, escape it
was a must. Not only was the world beyond redemption it is not worth redeeming. It is to
be eschewed not renewed. No salt of the Earth here. The old Catholic prayer calling on
Our Father to send forth His Spirit and renew the face of the Earth,” would be
unthinkable and unimaginable in Hinduism or Buddhism.
In these religions, wants, desires, hopes all flow from ignorance and are the sources
of mankind’s misery. Making yourself into a blank in anticipation of the ultimate
blankness awaiting us is achieved by eliminating these things through meditation and
other techniques with final escape into blissful nothingness the only goal. This pessimism
was Buddha’s Hindu inheritance. He could not shake it so escape became his goal.
Buddha was a good man and an inspiring teacher who wanted to share this message and
means of escape with others so that they too may be free of life with all its desires, wants
and dreams. They are nothing but trouble. His was a purely ethical religion designed to
achieve release from the horrid existence of life in a world of pain. There was no hope or
promise of personal immortality, instead the ambition was to die once and for all and
permanently escape rebirth. How vastly different from the Judeo-Christian message, “I
have set before you life and death…choose life…”- Deuteronomy: 28. Life is the choice
of the revealed religions. Not so the others. Another vast difference
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Much of Buddha’s thinking in this regard came from the dominant Hinduism of his
time: “Sweet is sleep, better is death, best is never to have been born.” With such a
mantra, why not blow your brains out? Yet Buddha reproved suicide. He had absorbed
the Hindu belief in reincarnation. Suicide was useless since the unpurified soul would be
reborn, possibly into extremely unpleasant circumstances, an untouchable or perhaps an
animal, until escape into oblivion or Nirvana was achieved. Nirvana translated means
“extinguished like a lamp.” It involved the painless peace that rewards the moral
annihilation of self on Earth through a life of meditation and complete self-abnegation.
For the Hindu it meant the use of austere asceticism to cleanse self and sense until the
spirit returns to the great ocean of soul of which it is part. Then at last the individual will
cease to be. Buddha accepted this end but rejected the Hindu approach to achieving it. He
reacted against both methodological poles of hedonism and extreme asceticism all the
while accepting the rebirth doctrine. For Buddha, desire was the enemy and to escape
reincarnation one must extinguish the self with all its desires. When this forgetfulness of
both self and self-love with its wants and longings was finally achieved there would be
no bad karma and no more rebirth. As Buddha said, “One thing only I preach-Sorrow
unending sorrow.” The way to escape unending sorrow, the wheel of rebirth and the law
of karma to achieve Nirvana or annihilation and blissful absorption into the world soul
was to extinguish the desire-filled self. We are caught in a trap of endless rebirths into the
horror of earthly existence. We are stuck in this cosmic nightmare until we escaped by
self-forgetfulness and achieved the painless oblivion of merger into Atman, the world
soul, the only reality. Buddha had taken from Hinduism the meaningless of life along
with Karma, the sum total of past moral conduct that determines the quality of rebirth. A
rebirth that, as mentioned, could run the gamut from animal to untouchable through many
castes to Brahmin, the Hindu of the highest caste. He also took the ethics of Confucius
with the idea of doing ones duty no matter in what caste or position one’s Karma placed
one and thus tread the road of escape into the blissful oblivion of Nirvana. Buddha did
not explicitly condemn the Caste System but preached to all castes in the belief that all
was one and he believed even the most vicious person can ultimately achieve
enlightenment and thus escape into blissful Nirvana.
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The Judeo-Christian concept of the inherent individual dignity of every man,
women and child is foreign in all this. In contrast to Christ’s openness, equal dealing with
women and indeed the importance of women as Christ’s disciples right from the start,
was Buddha’s advise to a disciple not to see them and not to talk to them. Only slowly
did he allow women into his new order. Sexual desire was to be avoided because it led to
reproduction thus adding to the long horrible chain of rebirths. Unlike Hinduism,
Buddhism treats reincarnation and individual souls as illusory. The only reality is the
eternal undifferentiated stream of being. From it existences are produced and prolonged
according to Karma. Under Buddhism the oneness of the whole universe is stressed. As
in Hinduism, the individual is not a separate entity and reverts to the primal eternal
stream when desire ceases. Some dissenters emphasized that Nirvana was not extinction
but a supreme void of blissful light. But Buddha refused to answer whether persons in
Nirvana existed or were annihilated but some hold that he repudiated cravings for
annihilation or non-existence. Apparently there is some confusion on the matter but there
is no doubt that Buddha was agnostic on specifics as well as the question of whether there
was a God but he was evidently not an atheist. He believed something endures beneath
the shifting appearances of the visible world, something unmade but he refused to call it
god. It was certainly not the uncaused cause of western philosophy. What is clear was
that life’s dreary goal was to quench hopes and desires, to be purified of them in order to
escape existence and be off to some nebulous state of union with the unknowing cosmic
divine over soul where particularities and personality are erased in the oneness of
ultimate being. Besides the extinguished lamp motif, Nirvana has been described as a
drop of water returning to the ocean.
Complicating a clear understanding of all this is the multiplicity of interpretations
and schools that have developed over Buddhism’s long history and the mixing of
Buddhism with many local cults and gods. In this it is similar to a limited extent to
Christianity after the debacle of the Reformation. In addition to this multiplicity there is
an underlying problem with the central law of karma and rebirth. How can rebirth take
place when there is no permanent entity or self to be reborn? With the doctrine of nonself in place, what’s being reincarnated? And, how can a non-entity experience the light
and bliss of the ultimate void of Nirvana? .
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The pessimism of these Eastern religions was so severe that it contrasts glaringly
with the Judeo-Christian view of life’s ultimate significance and goodness. With the
Christian, the task in this life is to transform self and thereby the world, not escape it. To
renew it, as mentioned earlier, not eschew it. We are to be the leaven in the lump not the
Ostrich in the sand. Buddha would say such a goal is futile. With the aim to uncreate all
creatures making them into non-beings instead of the eternal beings envisioned by the
revealed religions, the quiet inertia, stagnation and hopelessness of the historical East
with its lack of zest for life and intellectual adventure was quite understandable. Also,
understandable in view of the amazing resiliency of the human spirit no matter where
found is the ability of so many there to rise above such a philosophically debilitating
world view, often with kindness and a smile, and get on with their lives. In addition and
without any neo-colonial tripe at all, it can be said that some of the zest of the west, in
spite of the unfortunate baggage of its human blunders, has increasingly rubbed off on
our greatly shrunken world including the traditional East where often such contributions
as Western science and political principles, those found in the Declaration of
Independence for example, are admired and emulated. In these principles the impact of
Christianity is felt for many of them, “all men are created equal,” and “endowed by the
Creator with certain inalienable rights,” to take two examples, are to a great extent
derived from it. More on that point later. So too is the charity and love exemplified by
well-practiced Christianity, Mother Theresa and her many followers being a good
example.
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XXV COMPASSION AND THE GOOD SAMARITAN
To try to understand the stark uniqueness of Christianity one must look ever so
carefully at Christ. In Christ our relationship with God is taken to a radical level, wrote
John Garvey. In the Incarnation, God’s becoming man, “God becomes one of us, as
powerless before evil as we are, and is murdered. This is not an incarnate god like the
mythical gods of Hinduism such as Krishna who can, quite wonderfully in the BhagavadGita, switch instantly from flesh to divinity. Jesus was not a divine being merely clothed
in flesh but a completely real and vulnerable human being of flesh and blood like us who
could be nailed to the cross and still be God. This (suffering) takes us to a new place.”
We’ve talked about the difficult subject of the suffering of the innocent earlier and its
exploration in the Old Testament book of Job but the “My God, My God why have you
forsaken me” cried out in death agony from the cross was the epitome of human suffering
and was no act. It was the cry of a person who was totally God and totally man too, Jesus.
That cry shook Chesterton out of his skepticism and into the Church. In that instant
humanity could see that God loved us so truly that he became one of us in living,
suffering and death. Jesus, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, Son of the Father
and identical in divinity with the Father and Holy Spirit as best we can understand the
triune-ness of “AM,” was a real human being with a real human nature as well as his
divine nature. This is utterly unique and when he taught with parables like the Good
Samaritan he wasn’t identifying with the helper, the Samaritan. He was the beaten
traveler in the ditch whom the Samaritan helped. That helping hand is what it means to
renew the face of the Earth. The eschewing recommended by Hinduism and Buddhism is
not. This Christian renewing, this engagement with the world, perhaps epitomized in the
U.S. by Martin Luther King, had a large hand in rolling back some of the great evils
plaguing humanity including slavery, human sacrifice, infanticide, abortion, polygamy,
concubinage, easy male divorce, segregation and racism. With less success it took on war
with “The Peace of God” and the “Truce of God,” in the Middle Ages and is still working
at it. Sad to say, though, some of these evils have returned or are creeping back especially
as the Christian influence is discarded or ignored. At the center of that influence is the
great dignity and value placed on every human being at every stage and even after
soiling.
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The story of the Good Samaritan is helpful in gauging the vast attitudinal gap
between the Eastern philosophies and religions and the Judeo-Christian ethic. Most
Buddhists refuse to take sides in conflicts. Presumably, this would include any
preferential option for the poor or persecuted. The aim of Buddhist meditation and prayer
is to avoid emotion. Enlightenment means a state of calm with feelings of neither extreme
happiness nor extreme sadness. The goal of contemplation is an awakening to a state of
pure being the germ of which is already in all things and the realization that mind has no
substantial self behind it at all. The individual person is an illusion that mature awareness
can see through. This desire for calm along with the karma concept can often be
stultifying and block reaching out to the forlorn and broken as the Good Samaritan did.
The upper caste reaching out to an untouchable was practically unheard of. This was
apparently a factor in Mother Theresa’ decision to work in India. In this regard the
reaction of a Buddhist Monk in Korea upon hearing the Good Samaritan story not long
ago is revealing. “What a beautiful story we’ve just heard.” he said. He went on to
explain “…Buddhists place high priority on interior peace. Anything that would fracture
that peace we avoid, such as the battered man on the side of the road.” But interestingly,
as if the message in the story enlightened the Monk, he went on. “But there is also a
higher value we should be striving for on our way to true enlightenment: harmony with
all creation. In the parable, helping the suffering man does not destroy the Samaritan’s
inner quiet but rather repairs the disharmony in creation caused by the robbers.”
Although both Christianity and Buddhism value compassion, note the implication in
the words “helping the suffering man does not destroy the Samaritan’s inner quiet…”
Apparently, if it did destroy it or even risked destroying it, no help would be forthcoming.
The Christian, on the other hand, would be obligated to help even if inner harmony and
calm were reduced to utter turmoil, great inconvenience and extreme discomfort, in other
words, a complete shambles. Professor Paul Knitter of Union Theological Seminary
writes: Jesus calls us not only to love and have compassion for our neighbor…but also to
confront the systemic powers that oppress our neighbor and be ready to accept the
uncomfortable or deadly consequences.
I’d like to find the one responsible for inventing this God and these strictures! But
that’s what renewing the face of the Earth is and the Earth needs it and is worth it. It was
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created good by God, not something to be escaped or eschewed. That should resonate
with all the “greenees” out there! True love goes beyond contemplation and begets
action; a Mother Theresa in Calcutta; a Father Damien with the Lepers of Molokai;
George Bailey going off the bridge in a fictional Bedford Falls; the Nun teaching in the
slum school for love and room and board; the faithful spouse resisting strong sexual
attractions at work or play for love of wife and family. This is renewing the face of the
Earth in action a little bit at a time. History is full of it (not literally). Look at the work of
the abolitionists against slavery and for the recognition of the humanity and personhood
of the African slave; look at the Civil Rights movement against segregation and racism;
look at its modern sequel, the continuing pro-Life movement as it works against the
human destruction of abortion and for the recognition of the pre-born’s human dignity.
Movements of reform and renewal like these have been rare to non-existent outside the
parts of the world rooted in Christian influence and only now as communication makes
the world smaller and more reachable is the effects of that influence finding resonance
elsewhere. Historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. makes that very point when he writes that
nowhere else outside the West with its own fair share of tragic evils have those crimes
and the crimes of society in general produced their own antidotes. He writes, “it is to the
Western standard that groups in other societies appeal to redress injustice.” The
generation of these antidotes is rooted in the value Christianity places on the person even
the most despised and discardable.
As noted earlier, feelings can be very unreliable and subject to change, hardly a
firm foundation for substantial reform and renewal. Feelings may act as a starter but
sustained effort requires something beyond them namely serious thought based
commitment. It should be kept in mind that feeling a desire to help, feeling compassion
without doing anything about it, is quite different from knowing that you are obliged to
help, to do something about it whether you want to or not because you have been
commanded to love. Much better to do it without the command but the command is there
because many of us need help, need a push, we have to be motivated otherwise it would
be lacking. And hopefully, after a while, the command will become internalized and part
of us. Law can have that effect, it can teach. Unfortunately, sometimes it can be a terrible
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teacher as Roe amply demonstrates. Before it, it is estimated there were about 75,000
abortions annually, now it’s above 1.2 million.
There may be some who would stop for the beaten man and get into the roadside
ditch to help him without command but many who would not, who would walk right on
by. They are the ones who need that additional motivation and then of course there are
still others who don’t give a damn either way. This is part of what Christ meant in his
parable of the sewer whose seed fell on shallow ground, stony ground and good ground.
Acting on a feeling of compassion for someone in trouble is very laudable of course
but if feeling is lacking and the person in stress is entirely unlikable even detestable we
must act anyway. That is our portfolio as Christians. Judeo-Christianity is the only
religious tradition that hands out such a portfolio. It makes Christianity rather difficult,
hence the need for helping grace in spite of Mr. Optimism. That is authentic love. It
makes the burdens and obligations manageable. It doesn’t make them go away as
traditional Buddhism attempts to do with its important eschewing element. Christ when
asked to sum up the whole law said: love God and love your neighbor. That’s the
command that takes all in. Buddha on the other hand said, “He who has no love has no
woe.” That’s a big difference.
Love is a level above compassion if by compassion we simply mean to sympathize
with someone. Compassion literally means much more than that. The Latin root is “compassio” literally to suffer with. It is one thing to say we sympathize with the plight of
those who suffer, the slave, the poor and the ill but quite another thing to say we suffer
with those who suffer so much so that we are compelled to act like a Father Kolbe who
took the place of an inmate in a concentration camp who was scheduled to die or Peter
Claver who took the place of a slave condemned to the galleys. This is precisely what
Christ did on the cross. As a human being, he truly suffered in our place, for our guilt and
the totality of human guilt for the crimes committed without number before him and after
him. The ledger was redressed. All we need to do is sincerely ask to apply his merit to
our need and who doesn’t need? Kolbe, Claver, Christ and numberless others share
humanity and love. Love is the motive and drive behind sacrifices great and small and the
hard reality of love is it is unattainable, undoable without sacrifice. The Buddha would
extinguish it.
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Compassion involves an active ingredient that is often missing in Buddhist
philosophy, the commitment to transform the situations that cause suffering and in this
way renew rather than eschew. The Samaritan put the injured man up in an inn. Christ
transformed death itself, our greatest injury, when he transformed our graves with his
own resurrection and promised that resurrection and life was our too for the asking.
Legions of people who have followed Christ have also done some transforming. We have
talked of some. Under the influence of Christianity the great reform tradition of the West,
the Wilberforces in England for example and the William Lloyd Garrisons here in the
U.S. both abolitionists, or Martin Luther King and so many other “do-gooders” such as
the Mother Theresas of the world have achieved amazing results. To repeat, as historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, “The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes.
They have provoked great reform movements against slavery, racism, injustice and the
subjection of women. It is to the Western Standard that groups in other societies appeal to
redress injustice.” Such appeal was necessary because they were not rooted in this great
Christian tradition that infuses the West to this day calling for the renewal of the face of
our good old Earth. “Do-gooders,” it’s a put down term in a world now infected with a
media that so often idolizes the “my-wayers” but they are still out there and how much
more suffering would there be without them? Princess Diana’s brother summed up the
attitude at her funeral during his eulogy when he commented on some of his sisters
critics. He could well have had the critics of Mother Theresa who died about the same
time in mind too. .”Goodness is abhorrent to the morally bankrupt,” he said. For moral
bankruptcy we need only turn on the tube and much of the “entertainment” industry. In
many ways it’s like a millstone around the neck of American society.
Today’s media morality represents a disastrous shift in values for the world’s
suffering and vulnerable targets, the unwanted pre-born, the dependant or terminal
elderly, the inconveniently helpless, handicapped, damaged, the Down Syndrome and the
similarly afflicted for when the capacity for true love and compassion is called for but fun
or convenience calls for something else, the latter is more frequently the choice now than
has been the case for a long time. Such is the expected result in a society where the
influence of its religious roots is being avoided and even forgotten in an educational
system that practically bars religious influence and display under a false notion of a
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barrier wall separating church and state. The First Amendment never called for such a
wall and it has risen only as secularism has risen. Good evidence of the change can be
found in New York City, the abortion capital of the nation. There 40% of the pre-born
never see the light of day, 61% among African Americans! It puts the lie to the mantra of
how tough and heart breaking the abortion decision is. For some it may be but over a
million a year, one out of every four conceived! The decision can’t be all that tough for
many especially since a good number are repeat abortions and the number continues to
raise. Indeed in 2009 47% of abortions were repeats. Some evidently see abortion as birth
control. Actress Whoopee Goldberg has had at least six of them! Contrast her with
Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, who is busy leading a new African American
Civil Rights movement, this one to roll back the slaughter of young minority Americans
in the womb. The national grand total for all abortions since the disaster of Roe in 1973 is
almost 55,000,000 and rising. Difficult decision? Law can be a terrible teacher especially
for the easily influenced. If it wasn’t for the influx of immigrants, and their number
almost perfectly balances the number of Americans destroyed by abortion, the effect on
the economy would be crippling and the present economic stagnation worse. Besides that,
it’s as if a large part of the older established segment of the American people, deep into
abortion or the avoidance of posterity as many of them are, are clearing themselves away
for replacement by newcomers. It’s the historic fate of all people who refuse to
reproduce. When Rome was experiencing a birth dearth, a problem that contributed to its
decline, the Emperor Augustus, like a growing number of governments today fearful of
the same problem, offered incentives of various sorts to families with more than two
children. The results were disappointing and the slow decline continued.
Worse still is the overall cheapening effect that abortion has on the value of human
life. It is a disaster waiting to happen. It should not come as a surprise that other innocent
and vulnerable human beings besides the pre-born and who are deemed useless,
inconvenient, damaged or as the Nazis used to say, “life unworthy of life,” will be
nudged and encouraged along the death with dignity path. For safety sake it would be
better to return to the days when abortion was illegal, mostly safe, in many ways safer
than some of today’s clinics as records clearly show, comparatively rare, and unlike now,
usually performed quietly in a doctor’s office. The coat hanger claim is mostly pure myth
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concocted for propaganda purposes. Statistics show 39 deaths attributed to illegal
abortions in 1972, the last year before legalization. As Bernard Nathanson said, the coat
hanger ploy was a brilliant propaganda devise by pro-abortion forces to break down
resistance to legalized abortion and about as accurate as the promise that legalization
would make abortion safe and rare. But more common it became, much more, about 1.3
million in 2010. The claimants were ignorant of the fact that, as any close student of
humanity knows, the law can be a potent teacher especially for the fence sitting
impressionables with no guiding principles other than going with the flow.
Renewal is possible. Reform is possible. Rising from the abortion horror is possible.
As possible as was the rising from the slavery and segregation disgraces was. In all these
reforms religion was and is a major catalyst. Is should not really be surprising that in the
giving to charities, in helping others, in serving in the world’s poverty wards, AIDS
hospitals, orphanages, homeless hospitals, leprosaria, poor houses and such, not many
my-wayers and free-livers are to be found. It’s the givers until it hurts group that carries
on. Not only that but it is the people of faith, the so-called do-gooders who usually staff
those kinds of facilities and statistically give far more in money and other resources to
help others. Arthur C. Brooks, professor of public administration at Syracuse University,
confirmed this trend. In his book, “Who Really Cares,” he writes “In years of research, I
have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than
religious people…An average secularist non-giver earns 16 % more money than a
religious giver…Yet secular liberals are 19 percentage points less likely to give to charity
each year than religious conservatives.” As if to underline the point he calculated that the
Dakota farmer gives more per capita than the San Francisco swinger. One group talks the
talk, beats the compassion drum, and preaches the good fight but the other does, it walks
the walk. This is compassion in action and that is love. It’s the Christian’s portfolio. You
must really value every human life to do it even the apparently “worthless.” It’s by no
means easy and sometimes in facing great problems calls for terrible personal sacrifice
that is hard for many of us to imagine as Michael J. Fox’s conundrum illustrates. But,
perhaps there are more Pat Tillman types, life givers, than we know.
Hard as it is to imagine, compassion has a down side. In the wrong hands it can
become freedom quenching and even deadly. As R.R. Reno wrote, “One can have
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endless compassion for the young women who feels forced by her circumstances to have
an abortion,” but nevertheless her action is destroying a new and totally guiltless life.
Here as with Fox, love requires serious sacrifice and without its guidance the vulnerable
will be in increasing peril. The taking of a life, be it only beginning, may benefit many
and do much good but, and here’s the part that doesn’t go down easily for any of us, so
what! It’s an innocent life. This was the point of the Dostoyevsky story of the killing of
the rich old widow before she could will her wealth to a monastery so that the money
could be used to benefit multitudes of poor peasants and their starving children. Other
ways to help must be found not involving murder. That’s the tough law of love behind
“Thou shall not kill.” Injustice cannot be used to solve injustice. Things cannot be made
right on Earth by the able and motivated, no matter how well intended they are,
destroying the vulnerable and discardable in order to help others. And practically
speaking it won’t be long before it backfires and the wildcat is loose. You know the one,
who decides…..? There is an elemental and essential injustice involved in a murder even
of a bad person to aid a good person, unless in self-defense, a basic right of everybody.
Ultimately the act of killing the innocent will not just kill the victim, it will become a
social poison with effects dangerous and inescapable. The wildcat once loose will be hard
to contain given our human predilection for selfish, self-serving acts. Compassion on the
rampage and free of the authentic love rooted in revelation is tantamount to pulling the
plug on multitudes. Abortion may well be only the tip of the iceberg. The proverbial road
to hell famously is paved with good intentions. Most of the people staffing abortuaries as
I suppose most of the people staffing concentration camps seventy five years ago did so
for the salary but were not devoid of some good intention, help the mother, help
Germany, misguided as they were.
Even on a lesser, less deadly scale, compassion can be a threat. Today on many
college campuses compassion in the form of hate speech edicts can severely infringe on
even hate-less speech when in the hands of those who have replaced love with political
agendas and such. On some American campuses even raising questions about
homosexual behavior, for example, can be labeled homophobia and merit ostracism or
worse. On French beaches Muslim women cannot wear burkas because they are in the
view of politicians “demeaning to women.” Meanwhile men in speedos still parade and in
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New Zealand compassion for animals has mandated they be stunned before slaughter
although it violates the ancient ritualistic procedure for producing kosher foods for the
country’s 7,000 Jews. One man’s compassion can be another’s tyranny when
compassion blind-sides common sense and the rule of love. This happens when
tenderness and compassion becomes detached from their authentic source, which is love
with its hallmark “com-passio,” and the readiness to sacrifice. Then, historically it often
gets busy cutting down human imperfection. The gas chambers and abortuaries and death
with dignity squads are usually not far behind.
It is interesting to speculate on the philosophical Buddhist’s view of the suffering of
Christ on his cross. Here the value of compassion clashes with the ideal of calm and
detachment. The cross represented severe disharmony no doubt! Suffering in any cause
was to be avoided not embraced. For many Hindus and Buddhists astrology is a major
and debilitating influence. According to it much suffering is caused by our stars or bad
karma and has no value. It is to be avoided on the path to peaceful, blissful oblivion. If by
now it sounds like a mantra it bears repeating nevertheless. In much of the traditional
East the problem filled world is to be eschewed. For the Christian it is to be renewed.
The old prayer calls upon us to “renew the face of the Earth.”
Problems and suffering cannot always be avoided and like the birth pangs of the
women in labor or the pains indicating health troubles, they can have value. As with the
man beaten and thrown down in the side of the road, suffering can bring forth, draw out
love like the Good Samaritan’s and with it, healing. But note, the Samaritan healed out of
his own resources not by killing or using someone else’s. Hard as it is to bear, suffering
can lead to and achieve good. If anything, that’s the lesson of Christ on his cross. The
suffering on the cross was the birth pangs of the new and abundant life made available to
all for the asking. Just love one another as I have loved you, Christ said. Christianity,
writes the late Richard Neuhaus, does not believe in non-attachment, but rather teaches
precisely the opposite, that we should weep with those who weep and rejoice with those
who rejoice.” And, it might be added, help out in spite of any personal disharmony. That
is true com-passio. These are lengths the traditional Buddhist would likely want to avoid.
The Buddha, as was mentioned, said, “He who has no love has no has no woe.” St. John
wrote, “He who does not love abides in death.” All religions the same?
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XXVI PLURALISM AND DIALOGUE
There is a saying favored by some that the various religions are just “different fingers
pointing to the same moon.” By now it should be obvious that the pointing fingers are
really less than five and different indeed. It should also be added; even the moon they
point to is far from the same. For Hinduism, Buddhism and most non-revealed religions
in contrast to Judaism, Islam and especially Christianity, the moon being pointed to is
individual annihilation. It has nothing for us but ultimate individual oblivion. For the
revealed religions it is life, and that in abundance for every loving individual. It can
hardly get more different than that! Oblivion, blissful or not is something far from
individual personhood and conscious survival in new life. Nor do Judaism, Christianity
or Islam believe that the material world is so reprehensible as to be avoided and escaped.
Indeed it is good, very good according to Genesis. Christianity goes beyond that to teach
it is the glorious if tarnished work of a personal loving God who entered creation and
blessed it even more by becoming a part of it, one of us. We, the tarnishers, are damaged
beings prone to use our gift of freedom for things other than love, sometimes terrible
things and with weakened wills inclined to sin. We are in need of help and grace, the
grace won for us and offered to us by Christ on his cross. Though the differences between
these two religious groupings are vast and even between Christianity and the two other
religions in the revealed category quite large too revolving around the person of Christ
and the question he asked shortly before his death “Who do men say that I am?” a
question no one should not answer in this life, yet, in all this there need be no acrimony.
As Alan Jacobs writes” Only the coldest of hearts and the most tightly shut of minds
could repudiate acknowledgement of one another and learning from one another and
having lots of fruitful interchanges.” This can be done, the Church believes, all the while
retaining the absolute uniqueness of Jesus Christ who alone presented himself to us as
God incarnate.
True pluralism need not mean that any window on the world and any take on the
destiny of humanity is as good as any other. Some are better than others and as Raimundo
Panikker has observed, some windows are more smudged than others. Dialogue
grounded in the hope of mutual learning and understanding may well lead to a conclusion
about precisely what windows are more smudged and which present a truer view of
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reality. Be that as it may, all people, all the window peepers, the window users
themselves, all demand and should get individual respect and love. Though some live
lives with beliefs very different from our own, these lives are nonetheless meaningful and
partake in the love that God has for all humanity. And when, as it too often happens,
these lives or our lives are lived in indignity, in sin and blinding narcissistic self-love, the
Father’s love is not withdrawn but still offered, to be accepted or not. The hope is that the
response will be the Prodigal’s. That’s true pluralism. It need not trample truth for, as
Aquinas wrote, “Every truth without exception, whoever may utter it, is from God.”
There is a popular bumper sticker that cleverly makes the symbols of the different
religions read, “coexist.” The impression can be that all religions equally endanger this
noble goal or that no one of them is more or less a problem in this regard than the others.
Historically, this certainly is not the case, as we well know. Earlier we brushed on the
topic of the military expansion of Islam. This aggressive tradition is not yet entirely
abated among important elements of that religion. But the overall intent of the bumper
sticker is well received so long as it doesn’t imply the banishing of public religious
expression and discussion or general moral standards in the name of a blind nonjudgmentalism. For too long we have been going down that road. It’s a road that tries to
ignore the metaphysics that has been discussed in these pages, the religious commitments
and obligations based on revelation that have been examined here and that form the
foundation for the civilization we enjoy. The belief that out religious roots could be easily
dispensed with without severe damage to that civilization is a dangerous illusion.
That we must co-exist in peace all the while respecting differences is a must for, in
spite of the Dalai Lama, the differences are wide and deep. If coexistence in that sense is
the point of the bumper sticker, it’s a good one. But rather than simply ignoring
differences in the name of toleration or diversity or inclusiveness, they must be examined
with the love and patience that Christ taught. Despite the differences there are strong ties
that bind. We all share a common humanity. We are all sinners. We share a natural law,
often referred to as the Golden Rule, with the freedom to follow or not. For the rest, let
us pray the prayer of Jesus that they all may be one Father as You in Me and I in You.
That oneness in spirit and love is something well worth “imagining” and working for.
Diversity itself can be overrated. Carried to extreme it becomes disintegration.
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.
XXVII NEW AGE ENDS AND DUST IN THE WIND
There are many people today who subscribe to “New Age” beliefs. The beliefs are
generally rather fuzzy, non-demanding and usually include the spiritual but not religious
mind trend. Adherents are often partly influenced by Eastern religion or at least
intimations of it and are sometimes consoled when confronting the mystery of death with
sentiments captured in a poem used at many funerals and whose title and first line reads
“Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep.” The theme that follows is, “I am not there.”
The rest of the poem explains what has become of the person and the first thing to notice
is that he or she is not a person anymore. “I am the winds that blow…the diamond glints
on snow…sunlight on ripened grain…autumn rain…birds in circled flight…stars that
shine at night…. “ The last line reads, “I am not there. I did not die.” The sentiment is
kindly, well meaning and probably satisfying to many but certainly not to anyone of a
Judeo-Christian conviction. The depersonalization of the person, the deconstruction of
the human being, the demise of the individual, the absorption of a thinking being into
non-thinking nature is far from satisfying, far from reassuring and far from the promise of
Christ, so much so that it would leave most Christians unmoved and totally unimpressed.
It is perhaps the New Age equilivant to the nothingness that awaits us according to most
Eastern religions and philosophies though, it should be noted, some Eastern religious
thought of a relatively late period and possibly due to the influence of revealed religion,
has evolved a so called process pantheism found in a variety of Buddhisms and has
introduced a personal element, even personal survival, to the death experience. However,
to those steeped in the Judeo-Christian promise of not just survival but abundant personal
life in the loving presence of God, the Father and creator of all, the poem is lacking and
ultimately depressingly sad. To think of a world brimming with life and intelligence,
flawed though it is, but nevertheless of great capacity and with the hope of life in
abundance, reduced to this, to glints on snow and circling birds, how can it be otherwise?
To think also of all the generations of talent, of striving to accomplish beauty and
understand truth, all the loving, laughing, grieving, suffering, sacrificing, giving and
receiving and begetting, all to become a glint or wind on grain, not even a thought and to
make matters worse, everybody sharing in the same fate, Attila the Hun, St. Francis of
Assisi, all achieving the same glint- hood, the same sunlight on ripened grain; it is a vast
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injustice, justice undone! The scenario, it would appear, presents a terrible deal to the
lovers of truth and justice and the lives lived full of love. A scenario only mitigated
somewhat in Buddhism by the karma concept that allows earlier escape from the misery
of existence for good lives of sufficient detachment. But, it is an escape much delayed by
many rebirths fraught with destructiveness and pain for poorly lived lives, until the
getting of things right enough for escape is finally achieved and the ultimate equality of
oblivion in the blissful non-being that marked original Eastern thought is attained. At
least, in the poem glinthood may top oblivion, but the difference appears moot.
As for the poem, it allows no separating of the hate and hell sowers from the sowers
of kindness and love! All apparently share the same end. Far from justice, this is
nightmare equality, inclusiveness gone mad. All are one and the same, glints on the snow,
dust in the wind. And the individual, honed here in personal struggle to grow, understand
and perfect self often amid great hardship, that individual like all individuals is to end up
as nothing much. To the Christian this scenario is horrific. Our life and suffering and
Christ’s who shared in it lead not to a banquet of life but to its negation and erasure and a
permanent personal mindless oblivion as glints or blowing wind. We can look forward
not to life but a final lobotomy.
Not so according to Christ. But in New Age sentiments, Eastern Religions and
Western secularism, we have the great gift horse that was revealed in Christ’s
resurrection rejected, often unknowingly, sometimes without the thought it merits,
sometimes due to the sins and crimes committed by Christians over the centuries or on
the weakest of grounds of all, that it seems just too good to be true, pie in the sky. Such
people often put it in the same bin as Santa and the Easter Bunny. To the superficial so it
seems. The fact is though, authentic love is also too good to be true but it most definitely
exists.
The world has been blessed with many great lovers. Think again of Father Kolbe at
Auschwitz volunteering to take the place of a condemned man who had a family in
needed of him or Kurt Jaegerstaetter the Austrian peasant beheaded for refusing to be
drafted into Hitler’s army because he detested Nazism. They were following in the
footsteps of the most tremendous lover of all, Christ, who died for all. But all this,
indeed all real love, in the poem’s scenario, is love never to be rewarded, never to be
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recognized the way it should be, never given its due and never to be fulfilled in the
tremendous lover who made us in the first place and who loves us the more in our
sufferings and struggles. Indeed, he even shared with us in those sufferings and struggles.
On the other hand, in our New Age poem, sharing the same dissolution into the
energies and senseless forces of nature as the lovers are the haters, the defiers and deniers
of justice and sewers of hell on Earth. In the poem the fate of the just and unjust is the
same. But if there is no justice in our future why strive for it in the here and now?
Nietzsche had it right. Remove God and his justice and the underpinnings of traditional
morality are gone because the end is the same for all. All are dust in the wind; all lives
are meaningless; it is a strange end to so glorious a story of human struggle, failure and
achievement. So then, we must ask again, why anything? Why not nothing? Nothing
would seem to be better. There would be no grief, no heartbreak, and no death. No
tantalizing taste of the good things of life, only to be finally withdrawn. Given the end
envisioned in the poem, the same glint hood for all, nothingness would make better sense.
So again, why? Why something rather than nothing?
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XXVIII WHY? A REVIEW
Why there is anything rather than nothing can never be known without the aid of
revelation. Only it provides the motive. Science is at a loss. Some believe there is no
motive. All is chance, the luck of the draw. To repeat, the best explanation that one
famous scientist of the atheist persuasion could manage was there is no why. All we have
is a spontaneous creation, an undirected happening from Hawking’s gravity. “Because
there is a law of gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Another
scientist, in trying to explain the rise of life from dead dumb matter says it is the result of
some “chance combination of gasses.” Still another prefers the slime of primeval seas.
The gasses, the gravity or the slime from which life emerged, whatever it is; it was just
there, just existed, no explanation. Though even the structure of slime is extremely
complex nevertheless, there it was! Push the envelope as far back as you want there can
never be nothing. There is eternal gravity or slime or gas (heaven forbid) or something
else from which intelligent life came forth. In this desperate materialism of the Atheist
persuasion we ourselves, our world, our universe, our literature, our music, all human
accomplishment, Aristotle, Dante, Einstein, you, me, everything came from anything but
“AM.” Instead everything is the product of pure chance. This is a miracle made even
more miraculous because there was no intelligence to perform it. It just happened. There
it is, a universe filled with material things, many extremely, mathematically, complex and
at least a small part of it brimming with something even more complex, life and
intelligence. In the face of all this, the best from a notable group of atheistic scientists is
accident! Most people just don’t have enough faith to be an atheist because obviously
something always existed and as one salty critic commented, “gravity, slime, gas, my a--!
And we know that life did not always exist here on Earth yet we are presented with a
world filled with it now and thinking, rational and free willed life too. Life and thought
rising by evolutionary chance though there is disagreement about what exactly the
evolutionary process had to work on in the first place and where it came from. This is
what we are asked to believe. Presumably it, whatever it was, was just always there.
Nevertheless, there it is, life and thought, as was said, rising from dead dumb thoughtless
matter and the matter itself coming spontaneously by chance from nothing or from an
eternal inexplicable gravity or gas. This is what some in the science profession of a strong
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materialist bent present us with. This is a faith for the desperate or gullible for bringing
all this something about is chance and the process of an evolution that cannot even
account for its own existence much less the existence of anything else. Evolution can’t
work on nothing. In itself it needs something pre- existing it to work on, a something that
one scientist who, disdaining miracles and especially the possibility of “AM”, attests
came from nothing “because there is a law of gravity,” a gravity that just happened to be.
This miracle is presented to us with a straight face and is called science but really it is
what happens when some scientists leave their field and dabble in metaphysics and
theology. We are asked to believe that living beings suddenly made their appearance by
pure chance. We are asked to believe that these beings had the capability of
distinguishing, good from evil, of choosing love over hate, justice over injustice. They
became capable of writing prose like Shakespeare, music like Mozart, poetry like Dante,
art like Leonardo and attain a self-knowledge that often leaves them discontented with
and in themselves. As was said, such belief is beyond most believers. They can only
marvel at this manufactured faith that apparently only unbelievers can manage. It is the
great atheist miracle. Anything apparently is better than taking a good look at the gift
horse. Looking seriously in the horse’s mouth is especially hard for people so immersed
in such a crude materialism.
But change is brewing. A growing number of scientists are becoming disenchanted
with these apparently desperate sputterings of a failing atheism and a dogmatic
materialism. In the words of author E.F. Schumacher, they “look at the strange and
wonderful mathematical order in physical phenomena” and cannot remain satisfied with
the crude materialism of the past. In his essay, “The Role of Chance in the Emergence of
life,” Donald DeMarco gives some details about the change taking place. He cites
Charles Townes a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and co-inventor of the laser who has
recently argued that new discoveries in physics “seem to reflect intelligence at work,”
and Allan Sandage, a world-leading astronomer has stated that the Big Bang can be
understood only as a “miracle.” The increasingly chancy chance scenario is under logical
attack because the extraordinary high degrees of order in the universe cannot be the
product of pure chance. Pure chance in our experience has never produced anything like
order. It produces disorder more than anything. The monkey experiment mentioned
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below illustrates that fact. As biochemist Michael Behe explained in his book “Darwin’s
Black Box,” random evolution cannot explain “the existence of a biological complexity
(DNA etc.) that did not evolve by a succession of slight modifications.” Darwin’s theory
cannot account for “irreducible complexity,” as found, for example, in DNA, our immune
system, the complexity of blood clotting and the human thinking process. As Chesterton
jokingly observed, “one elephant having a trunk was odd. But all elephants having a
trunk looked like a plot.” Playwright Tom Stoppard, with a creative artist’s colorful way,
states that the idea of God, (even without any help from revelation,) is more plausible
than the alternative proposition that given enough time green slime could write
Shakespeare’s sonnets. Famous psychiatrist Karl Stern calls the idea “delusional.” It is
easy to see why. Stephen M. Barr writes that the “slime” itself (or gas or whatever) “was
made of atoms that had all the structure, intricacy and potentiality that chemists devote
their lives to studying.”
The very concept of “chance” explaining anything is suspect. Chance itself depends
on a previous grasp of the notion of order. In that regard, order precedes chance. Order in
matter, however subtle, existed at the outset. The great mathematician and physicist
Hermann Wey stated that we have penetrated far enough into physical nature to obtain a
vision of the “flawless harmony that is in conformity sublime reason.” Almost sounding
like St. John’s “In the beginning was the word and the word was God,” astrophysicist Sir
James Jeans attests that order precedes chance, thought preceded matter and God the
Creator preceded creation. Or, as it has been stated in several of these “pearls,” Being
preceded being. We need only to add, they are by no means one, Being and beings are of
absolutely different realms of existence.
So, let’s now introduce being, men and women, beings so utterly different as to make
their chance appearance preposterous. Not to put down our nearest “relatives,” they are
admirable creatures indeed but in 2004 the “New Yorker” magazine reported about a
computer program that simulated the keyboard pecking of the equivalent of
42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years. The best the chance pecking of our nearest
animal relatives could do, the best from the mess, the only intelligible part
was”Valentine.ceasetoIdor:eflpofrjwk78axzvowm);8.t.” A three-year old human could do
better in two minutes. What a vast gap for an accident to fill!
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A look at the Big Bang confirms much of the above repudiation of materialistic
chance. Commenting on what scientists tell us the ratio of matter and energy to the
volume of space at the moment it happened had to be for the universe and life to develop,
specifically within about one quadrillionth of one percent of the ideal, George Will wrote,
“What is is staggeringly implausible.” Indeed, impossible without intelligence at work. A
secular faith that relies on the chance rise of life from slimy green soup or the chance
combination of gasses or spontaneously from gravity is increasingly becoming
unscientific. The reasoning of man is in tune to discover how it was actually
accomplished and increasingly as we learn more chance does not fill the bill, not even for
the scientist of a purely materialist bent. For the metaphysician, and all men and women
by virtue of their share of intelligence and curiosity are metaphysicians by nature, it never
did. And with revelation, well, we know our Father made us to make love flourish in
creation.
Taking a closer look at the something rather than nothing surrounding us might
help free those minds immured in the materialism of the past. Taking that look, they
would see a world of matter that came into existence but can’t account for itself. It is a
world that is rife with contingency, beings coming in and out of being but still following
discernable laws all pointing to great intelligence. Some might prefer to listen to avid
materialist Jacques Monod, the Nobel winning biologist who still maintains that “man is
a mere accident,” but to be complete he must also say everything else is an accident too,
both man and matter. Unfortunately, a science based not on seeking rational laws but on
the will o wisp of accident and chance is more voodoo than science. And of course it
leaves us severely handicapped when it comes to the questions before us. But science not
tied to a determined materialism sees the irrationality of accident, for accident itself
presupposes order and law. And science has discovered laws and orders of irreducible
and beautiful complexity. So much so that the old saw passionately embraced by Monod
that man just happened to evolve by a chance directed by an evolutionary process that
can neither account for itself nor its own origin nor the laws and rules it goes by but
nevertheless is supposed to account for everything else that is, leaves the mass of
humanity marveling at such blind faith. From a mindless lifeless matter here by accident
we get mind and life here by chance. But, it’s the chance of an algorithm, some argue, a
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process of repetition that always yields the same results and in this case goes by the name
of natural selection. Its result, they maintain, played out over billions of years and never
by design but always-blind chance, is life. But, what was there for it to work on and why
does it act that way instead of another? Evolution and natural selection cannot with
complete satisfaction account for life’s process much less its origin and so require a grand
exception from the rule that effect be predicated upon, flow from, cause. It is an
exception given nowhere else. Nevertheless, some people having rejected the great gift
horse sometimes because it requires belief in the miracle of the resurrection, yet the
above miracle they happily accept. It has to be wondered if one adept at such faith has
really looked at the horse? After all, electrons follow laws, seeds follow laws but .how
can they and why do they? They are without minds. And what laws! They were deeper,
more intricate, complex and beautiful than was ever imagined. They underlie the very
workings of nature and usually account for even the anomalies. Biologist Ursula
Groodenough has called it “the sacred depths of nature.”
Better to accept the resurrection, the confirmation at the heart of revelation, rather
than reject it out of hand if the alternative is to cling to the illogic of a dying materialism.
To reconsider the resurrection is always appropriate. The tomb was empty. It was a fact
that no one denied and everybody admitted. Christ’s was gone but how? There are only a
few possibilities. One is conspiracy. That he wasn’t really dead at all but had faked it and
had then sneaked away with the help of conspirators never to be seen again. Said
conspirators, presumably disciples, then announced his resurrection, the motive still a
mystery, They were all eventually killed because they wouldn’t stop doing it. Living a lie
is possible, maybe, but going to one’s painful death for one? Hardly. And , to death they
went. Can’t believe that scenario? Here’s another. Either somebody took the dead body
even, it seems from reports with guards posted at the grave, or it took itself. If the
disciples took it they all died for the same lie, motive still a mystery outside raving
insanity. Or someone else took it, who or why unknown, but whoever it was, tricked the
disciples, who were obviously very stupid, into believing he had risen hoping they would
preach the resurrection and get them selves killed which they proceeded to do. It’s the
most successful and dastardly mass murder conspiracy in history. It even has a motive
and a suspect. With a little imagination, It was probably a rival fishing company. And on
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and on the nonsense goes. Sort of like life arising from lifeless matter, mind from
mindless matter. As was said, some people would cling to anything rather than look the
gift horse of revelation, resurrection and life in the mouth. Perhaps it would mean very
uncomfortable life changes for them. Nevertheless the disciples went around, far and
wide announcing, “He has risen as he said,” and became what he said they would, “I will
make you fishers of men.” They became so good at it that it got them killed but the
Church has carried on ever since. Still, some fish try to get away, some don’t really listen,
some run into swift opposing currents or as in the sower parable, some seed falls on stony
ground, some dry ground, some weedy plots but some good ground. But with grace,
anything is possible.
To reiterate, though it is fashionable in some circles to still doubt the existence of
God, who can really doubt that if ever there were nothing there would be nothing now
and forever? As we saw, the Big Bang tells us the material universe didn’t always exist.
Everything, including space and time, matter and energy, as far as we know based on
hard evidence, came into being from literally nothing over 13 billion years ago. But,
whatever begins to exist can’t really come from nothing. Here is where revelation
supplied the answer and it will always be outside the ability of laboratory science to
confirm but not reason. The universe began to exist so the universe has a cause. From the
very nature of the case this cause has to be uncaused because logically, as we saw earlier,
there cannot be an infinite regress of material causes. This uncaused cause is a powerful
creator who is very different from what was created. Of necessity it is a Being eternal and
timeless having created time and since matter by its nature is contingent, always changing
and prone to decay and extinction, a non-material Being. A Being whose very essence is
to exist, existence itself. “AM,” is his revealed name, the essential eternal something that
the laboratory of logic demands. Being, known to most as God, is evidently very
powerful and intelligent having brought everything else into being. The essential nonmaterial Being that always existed thus avoiding the absurdity of something, the material
universe that had a start and will have a finish, starting from nothing.
Aquinas always held that reasonable people could arrive at God’s existence in the
laboratory of logic by a human reasoning strong enough to provoke a faith that is
anything but irrational. What logic points to revelation prods and confirms: “Tell the
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Israelites “I AM,” sent you.” “And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” “He
has risen as he said.”
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XXIX THE CHURCH, THE NEW AGE AND NEW MORALITY
Little wonder the new atheism never caught on and a default position, a vague
spiritualism of the New Age variety has sprung up to serve many as a gap-plugger; a
vacuum filler for those who for whatever reason still do not accept or sometimes even
approach the great gift horse that revelation presents. The reasons are varied and a look at
some of them may be helpful. In some instances it may well be a case of those who think
they are well but for whatever reason are actually not. Many minds get distracted and
reality is left unconfronted. The placebo of popular media entertainment or some other
such soother, innocuous or not, preoccupies many minds. Many are taken up in the daily
time filling clamor that much of the media provides or some other mind occupying
diversion and may well be lulled in this manner. They deem themselves in good health, in
no need of a doctor and let it go at that. In this mind frame, the Church, that great hospital
ship heading home with a crew and cargo of very mixed bag indeed but knowing they are
unwell and lacking in some vital arena of authentic love, is dismissible. Christ said I have
come to call sinners. That’s almost all of us but those who don’t know it, those who have
lost the reality and sense of sin don’t hear the call and see no need for the ship.
There is another group that accepts the message of Christ but not the ship that
originally carried it and still does. Often they are put off by some of the passengers who
were once on the ship in ages past or even now, people no self-respecting ship or
assembly should allow aboard although they are the very types Christ came to wake up,
as the Siegfreid Reinhardt painting attempts to illustrate. Nevertheless, these people
prefer a better church; purified, full of latter day saints so to speak, the very people whom
Christ said don’t need a physician or a hospital ship. True, Christ never promised the
church freedom from sin but nevertheless in the multitudes the Church contains are
remarkable lovers, yes, sometimes called saints though many more like us, often failures
at love but still trying. Churchgoers are sometimes labeled hypocrites and sometimes
rightly so but most are there because they know they need help and they know where to
get it. Practically the first prayer of the Mass is the “Mea culpa.” It means, “my fault…
my great fault.” The good people, those who are healthy, the true lovers, they are there
too and though none of them is perfect, they are essential in keeping things afloat.
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Of course, those whose consciences have been crushed, those who have given up,
and those who consider themselves simply not in need or not interested are numerous and
often won’t darken a church door. They sometimes delight in focusing on the historical
sins of those who have crammed on the ship over the centuries including captain, crew
and passengers. A recent captain, Pope John Paul II apologized in 2000 on the Church’s
behalf, a “mea culpa” for sins over the ages. Some ridiculed, some refused the seventy
times seven. For some the imperfection of the Church remains a great stumbling block
though perfection outside its assigned task of teaching on faith and morals was never
promised it. These demanding folk, some easily able to see the splinter in another’s eye
while missing the log in their own and as been noted, are known at times to dismiss
believers as hypocrites. They gladly single out the Church for criticism as indeed the
Church should be singled out when it fails to live up to its founder. But Christ left it in
the hands of human beings and though he built on rock and promised it would last to the
end, it has nevertheless been severely shaken at times; the Great Schism and Reformation
come to mind. Even the first rock, Peter of the famous, “Thou art Peter and upon this
rock I will build my Church,” tended to be an impetuous if well intentioned bungler even
denying Christ in the clinch before crucifixion but then sought forgiveness and rallied.
When Peter was killed in Rome others took his place as the foundation rock of the church
and necessarily so for Christ meant the Church to last well beyond the Apostles, indeed
till time ends. Removing the rock with Peter’s death would not serve that purpose. These
succeeding Pope’s, as the Bishops of Rome are called, have been a mixed bag over the
two millennia, some saints, some weak like Peter but overcoming it and some disgraces
but most did the job humanly well. As writer Flannery O’Connor pointed out and it bears
repeating, the Church was promised inerrancy in its assigned work, the teaching of the
faith and morals contained in revelation and not sinlessness. It is a singular institution
making quite singular claims to authority and truth.
Then there are always those seeking newer, better churches and since the
Reformation hundreds of them have sprung up. These divisions have tragically weakened
the appeal of Christianity to the unevangelized parts of the world. The original Church
still founded on the foundation rock of Peter and his successors and uniquely called
Catholic since prior to 100AD strives for a perfection it knows it can only approach but
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never achieve here but it won’t divide the mass of Christians up in competing sects in the
effort to attain it as happened with the Reformation. Christ wanted unity and even prayed
for it in John, 17: 20, “that they all may be one Father as You in me and I in You.” It’s a
prayer the Church always works to fulfill. It is very reluctant to ostracize anybody,
including abortion supporting politicians and other practitioners of the multifarious forms
of hatred toward any segment of the human family though in the past it used the power to
excommunicate more readily. As with Christ its founder forgiveness is always offered to
those with true contrition and willingness to do penance.
Over the long history of the Church penance took many forms from a simple “Hail
Mary” to pilgrimages. It depended on the seriousness of the fault. A civil emergency such
as war or famine could even induce new forms of penance. During the Crusades, the
attempt to halt Islamic incursions into Europe especially at Constantinople, the penance
offer was broadened to meet the encroachment of conquering Islam. Muslims had earlier
sacked St. Peter’s in Rome and were besieging Constantinople. Years later they
conquered it renaming it Istanbul. It was in that critical era, in the spirit of self-defense
and the defense and safety of pilgrims to the already conquered Holy Land as well as the
defense of threatened Constantinople that the Church offered as a penance for sins
confessed and forgiven the joining of the Crusade. As always, true contrition for the sins
committed and confession of them to a priest were required before the Crusade penance
could be given. It was an extraordinary form of penance and could be refused and
replaced with a different one. All penances were supposed to help break the dangerous
and sinful attachment to some earthly thing be it food, drink, drugs, promiscuity,
adultery, anger, envy, hatred, revenge, the list goes on, and to make just satisfaction and
restitution where called for. In other words everything was still required for the
forgiveness the Church was commissioned to give only in this case the penance, for those
who accepted it, was extraordinary. Instead of the more usual prayers, almsgiving,
personal sacrifices to feed the poor, for example, or aiding the sick, helping build a
school or hospital and so forth, it was the going on the Crusade. The sacrifices involved,
sometimes referred to as the temporal or Earthly punishment due in justice for sinful
actions were to be replaced in this case by helping in the battle to halt the advance of
Islam. This type of broadening sometimes went by the name of an indulgence and was
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open to abuse if a sacrificial gift of money became an acceptable substitute penance. This
indeed happened when some wayward popes and preachers later required specific
donations of money in place of other forms of penance for a particular indulgence. In the
most famous instance the money was to be used for the building of a new St. Peter’s in
Rome. Tragically this helped precipitate the Reformation and all the pitiable divisions
flowing from it. This interesting topic, the history of the Church, is covered in the first
part, entitled, “The First Nineteen,” of this six part series. The series itself goes by the
overall title “The Lieswatter.” Copies should be available.
As mentioned, it is no accident that a favorite prayer of the captain, crew and
passengers of the great hospital ship is the “Hail Mary” with its “pray for us sinners now
and at the hour of our death,” and the “ Mea Culpa” that leads off the Mass. Nevertheless,
historically, whenever the Church was strong, its influence felt, the law protected the
lives of everyone including foreigners, Jews, infants, the handicapped, the pre-borns,
slaves even heretics. With regard to the Jews as Jewish historian S.W. Baron points out,
many Popes condemned attacks upon them. Those who took these live into their own
hands broke the law. When the Spanish Inquisition, a favorite target of vociferous critics
of the Church, broke the mold and went after heretics with fire and sword, they being in
the mindset of the time an endangerment to immortal souls, a capital crime akin to
murder today, they included those Jews who were believed to have dishonestly claimed
conversion to the Church and who rightly or wrongly were seen by the Spanish
government as a dangerous fifth column during the struggle to liberate the country from
Moslem domination. These two groups were prosecuted though the prosecution flowed as
much from political urgency as religion and was often far in excess of Rome’s requests
and guidelines. These guidelines were often ignored by the Spanish authorities.
Nevertheless, a Due Process was laid out and to be followed in these cases that was of a
higher standard than common at that time and higher than in many places today. As a
result, more of the accused walked than suffered punishment and the number of deaths
over the Inquisition’s four centuries of existence was far fewer than the fatalities during
the few months of the French Reign of Terror during the “Age of Reason” or the twelve
years of Nazi concentration camps or the seventy years of Soviet Gulags in the Twentieth
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Century. Details of the due process followed under the Inquisition are also found in Part
I, “The First Nineteen.”
If under Christianity the first rules of contemporary Due Process arose to protect
the lives of everyone from precipitous prosecution and punishment including Jews and
heretics whose crime of endangering the salvation of souls was seen as very serious
indeed, with the decline and even in some areas the demise of the Church’s influence,
especially in the 20th Century, things changed and so did the rules. Unfortunately, in
many countries ordinary people adjusted accordingly and those who like Franz
Jaegerstaetter in Germany protested were killed outright or went to the camps without
any due process at all worthy of the name. In the 16th Century it was different for the
Church still had public clout and government had not succeeded in the attempt to shove it
into a closet. Throughout most of the history of Western civilization its voice was heard.
For example, when the Central American Indians suffered at the hands of colonial powers
as they often did, the Church’s Bishops, like Bartholomew Las Casas, and clergy
protested and succeeded at times in winning protective legislation though not always as
effective as intended in that world of primitive communication. By the 20th Century the
clout was greatly reduced. When Bishop Von Galen of Munster, Germany, a close friend
of Pope Pius XII, publicly protested the actions of the Nazi government, it had more
negative than positive effect. Hitler had targeted certain “inferior” groups, first the
handicapped and dissenters and later, on an even more massive scale, Jews and Slavs
especially Poles and Russians. In 1941 word leaked out in Germany of a secret
government program to weed out and exterminate mentally and physically handicapped
fellow citizens, “unproductive national comrades” and “life unworthy of life,” in the Nazi
bureaucratic jargon of the time, but strikingly and sadly similar to a mode of thought
finding acceptance in some circles of American academic life today. Although the
German handicapped were the first such group to be so targeted they were far from the
last. Bishop Von Galen was quick to their defense as Las Casa had been to the Native
Americans. He strenuously protested and because of Nazi press censorship had priests
hand deliver his message to the public. A copy of his letter is available from
LifeSiteNews.com. The protest had little effect; fear and the difficult in spreading the
information can do that. Adding to that fear was the beheading of at least three of the
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priests involved in the distribution much like Jaegerstaetter two years later. Von Galen
escaped their fate because the Nazis did not want a prominent martyr on their hands.
What, when Church influence was powerful had been a violation of civil law now was in
accord with it. Things had changed. After the Nazi state got away with their disposal of
these first victims it was sufficiently emboldened. It next went after other groups of
unworthies in a cleansing frenzy, Jews and Slavs. This is the topic of Part II of the sixpart “Lieswatter,” entitled “Holocaust and War.”
Something similar happened to the pre-born in the U.S. after 1973 Roe Decision
and, as happened previously in Germany, many ordinary people changed with the law. As
the Nazis had targeted the handicapped and later Jews and others in Germany, radical
feminists and their supporters targeted the pre-born in the U.S., considered legally
protected and part of the human family before Roe. After Roe they became sub-human,
life unworthy of life to use the Nazi classification. Human dignity and life was in for
another blow. Sometimes, unfortunately, law is a powerful teacher especially for those
who hold to or have no strong life affirming values. The affirmation of the value of every
human life regardless of condition is uniquely Judeo-Christian, the result of revelation.
As its hold weakens, often on former Christians and Jews or those who call themselves
such, all hell usually breaks loose. Only with tremendous effort from pro-life groups in
the U.S. was even partial birth abortion taken off the table. Sadly, anti-pain legislation
protecting pre-borns is running into stiff opposition from Planned Parenthood and NOW.
Who’s next is a valid question. The victims of Down syndrome are already
disappearing from the scene thanks to ultra sound and hearts unable to stomach sacrifice.
Of course without faith in the dignity of every human, a faith that is waning in spite of
being reason based and strongly supported by Judeo-Christian morality, it’s hard to see
the point of such sacrifice. When the Supreme Court targeted the pre-born at the
insistence of radical feminists and secularists, few except the Catholics, often in the face
of a strong lack of sympathy from a basically “pro-choice” media, protested at the time
though the ranks of the opponents of Roe have swelled as the horror of abortion becomes
clearer. Bottom line, often those with a slight or incomplete grasp of history and who are
often influenced by the media’s superficiality and frequent bias, end up with a very
distorted view not only of history in general but the Church’s role in it in particular.
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Instead of history they often get historical nonsense like The DaVinci Code or the socalled History Channel’s “Kingdom of Heaven” on the Crusades. This is a serious
obstacle to the functioning of the Church and the attracting of people to its message of
life. To see clearly the change, as secularism replaces Christianity in the minds of many,
the start out law of our land, the Declaration of Independence, stated that all men are
created equal. Later some states added and the Supreme Court eventually concurred,
except slaves. That helped bring on our bloodiest war. Now we have the same court
saying, except pre-borns.
As the extremism of Princeton’s Peter Singer’s brand of life threatening secularism
gradually moves center stage replacing the Judeo-Christian life ethic, will the U.S. Courts
permit open war on other vulnerable groups by removing from them too the inalienable
right to life? Will it add to the pre-born such groups as severely deformed and
handicapped infants? Will Down syndrome infants if there are any left, follow Down
syndrome pre-borns? Will seniors with advanced and very expensive dementia or to use
the Nazi term for them all, “life unworthy of life” be mercifully dispatched with the
approval of financially and emotionally drained families? Singer and others are already
calling for it. Will even pubecide, the legal dispatching of troublesome teens deemed
worthless by completely defeated parents and supposedly competent authorities,
guardians and others be added to the list sometime down the road, a road perhaps to hell.
Novelists are already suggesting as much. Life could be made almost painless and very
pleasant for the powerful and healthy. Can they resist the temptation? And it’s all in tune
with evolutionary dogmas of natural selection and survival of the fittest. What has kept
all this away so far is the Judeo-Christian morality that forms a strong basis for much of
our law but as more and more people depart its influence in favor of more pragmatic and
utilitarian creeds, who knows?
Continuing this examination of reasons for alienation from the Church, for
others it might have its source in the demands of the challenging moral standards
associated with Judeo-Christian revelation especially in the sexual area coupled with the
demand to love our neighbor and forgive our enemy. Of this general group there are some
who justify rejection on grounds of independence. This is the “I follow no rules but my
own,” group. They must march to their own drum, and so forth and if they hear a better
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beat they refuse it because it is not of their own making. This is the old deadly pride
obstacle dressed up, what the Classical Greeks called hubris, the central disaster of many
Greek dramas. But there are other rejecters with more substantial reasons.
After surviving a death camp, Elie Weisel left the practice of Judaism behind rather
than even entertaining the thought of forgiving the Nazi who killed his family had he
asked for it. For the Christian even more so the demand to forgive is pressing. Christ had
forgiven those who killed him with his prayer, “Father, forgive them they know not what
they do.” With all respect to Pelagius and Pelagians, many of us need the help of grace to
pull off that kind of forgiveness. Forgive the neighbor who constantly offends us? When
they asked Christ, “Who is our neighbor/” He told the parable of the Good Samaritan
who helped the foreigner and stranger left for dead in the ditch. Christ universalized
neighbor to include all our fellow men and women. This demand to help all and to
forgive those who ask is a great challenge. Sweet revenge or the nursing of unforgiving
hatred must be forgone. But how difficult it can be only the Elie Weisel’s of the world
can really tell us. The turning of the other cheek ethic must reflect pre-Fall perfection and
perhaps is a foretaste of the heavenly ideal where it will never need to be used. A
Catholic friend of Weisel’s, Jean Mouroux, I believe tried to tell him of Christ’s suffering
but the words wouldn’t come. All he could do is cry with him, pray for him and hope
grace will help.
Demands, often in the sexual area, chastity, monogamy, fidelity, especially are
another obstacle for some, maybe many. It affects everybody and is probably especially
challenging to the “I want to be me” and “my way” people. Frequently such people like
to imagine themselves as rebels, gusto grabbers, line crossers, envelope pushers, supreme
independents, renegades, outlaws, anarchy sewers, challengers of all convention, defiers
and deniers of dogma, breakers of all the rules and all the usual popular folderol
including that epitome of manipulative deceptions the 1960s “make love not war,” con.
In effect it usually covers a multitude of mean, selfish, sordid and harmful doings
resulting eventually in fifty-five million dead by abortion, four hundred thousand dead by
AIDS and millions sick with STD not to mention the poverty and damage from millions
of wrecked families, the latter made possible in part by the new no fault divorce laws.
Adherence to the Judeo-Christian moral code would have avoided most of the calamity
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but many in power prefer to spend billions in public tax monies to control bad situations
when some modification of dangerous-behavior would do the trick. They see it
compassionate not to be demanding, not to object to life jeopardizing activities for fear of
stigmatizing people. However they often turn a cold eye on the taxpayer struggling with
his family budget. The reality is, feelings of diversity, toleration and compassion devoid
of a foundation in authentic love and “com-passio” become skewered and dangerous to
the public health and purse. People get hurt, often innocent people. A Planned
Parenthood sex guide called “Healthy, Happy, and Hot,” of all things, promotes the
keeping of one’s HIV/AIDS a secret from one’s sex partner. The Girl Scouts allowed its
distribution! According to this general way of thinking and as illustrated in the BeckerWeisman letter exchange to be examined, it is unrealistic and lacking in compassion to
call for sexual abstinence in the young in spite of the fact that abstinence is sure fire safe.
Better to be compassionate and understanding and call for condom use though it is not
sure fire safe at all and has yet to contain and indeed may encourage, promiscuity.
Rampant promiscuity is a public danger carrying in its train serious threats to life and
health including abortion, STDs and as we shall see, poverty. Such “compassion” can
kill.
In their self-congratulatory world of imagined independence there are those who
want nothing to hold them back from tasting life in the full with no holds barred. Here is
where the ignorance of history can be truly dangerous because it’s been done many times
before and as Barzun has often stressed, has not usually ended nicely or happily. He uses
American writer Hart Crane’s early death as an example. But it’s worth the risk some
claim but the risk is often not only to themselves. They claim to relish chaos except of
course when they themselves have to live in it for some time. Then the charm quickly
dissipates. When the crossed line is the one they drew, when it is their rules and dogmas
that are being broken, when a “my wayer’ puts the envelope to them, ah, how good rules
turn out to be. Admittedly, “my-wayers” may have a certain place in spheres of
innovation and experiment but the concern here deals with social situations like marriage
where “our” way is called for. Frequently in all this it is the innocent and vulnerable,
often the children if there are any and the relatively defenseless who do the suffering at
the hands of these free spirits. Needless to say the type does not relish the Church. The
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oblivious Madonna with her Pied Piper-like advice that “lines are meant to be crossed,” is
a good example The Church is often the only institution that officially frowns on the
dangerous antics.
The vaunted independence from rules came home between 1969 and 1973 when
the legacy of the 1960s with the summers of love and so forth really began to hit homes
and do unprecedented damage to people and families. In those five years the number of
people believing that premarital sex was “not wrong” doubled from 24% to 47% -an
astonishing change in so short a period-and continued rising to 62% by 1982. Warning
flags should have gone up all over the country but most of the churches missed it, the
governments ignored it and the media seemed to like it. As a matter of fact, without the
vast influence of mass media such a change is hard to explain. At the timeMales might
have been falling behind females in advanced academic degrees but here they led the way
often under the guise of chic political radicalism, reform and progress against the stale
standards of yesterday. Madonna loved it. The “make love not war,” sixties slogan
captures the dodge beautifully and of course women often had to pay and the children too
if they weren’t eliminated before birth. Life is too hard for the unwanted of course and
making up your mind to want what you’ve created was asking a bit much. Legalized
abortion was waiting in the wings and about to make its deadly debut. Nothing is free
and as usual the innocent and less powerful paid for this carefree debauch and mindless
discarding of the rules of traditional Judeo-Christian based morality. Not surprisingly,
Madonna wasn’t rushing in to build orphanages so the “unwanted” might have a chance
at life, as the Sisters of Charity and other religious groups had always done. Crossing the
line into the pro-life camp was too much for the great line crosser. She didn’t love life
that much! Soon no orphanages were needed, just lots of little graves and handy
incinerators, pollution be damned. Something had to be done with all the tiny bodies,
hundreds of thousands of them. Life was in for some hard knocks in America! Former
orphanages, now empty were torn down for parking lots or turned into self-storage units
and pet hotels..
The growing popularity of drugs also helped fuel the moral blowout. U.S Senator
Daniel Moynihan’s office documented the chaos. In 1930 out of wedlock births
amounted to less than 3%. In 1960 it was 3.8%. In 1965 with the coming of the Age of
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Aquarius and other horoscopic nonsense (a recent intensive Danish study blasted the
accuracy and reliability of horoscopes) it reached 5%. By 2000 it was almost 33%. And,
child poverty began its in step march to nearly 20% by 2000. Teen sexual activity rose
from about 5% in the 1950s to near 50% by 1990 to become even higher after 2000. This
is not progress. And society’s most important and vulnerable institution, marriage and
family, began to buckle and sag under the weight of the mindless self-centered pursuit of
Eros and self-fulfillment. When “compassionate” opposition to a war becomes so
arbitrary as to support crowds shouting “make love not war” in the frequently patent ploy
to get into the pants, as the popular expression put it, of often sincerely deluded coeds,
disaster is in the works and it arrived shortly. The divorce rate went from 10% in the
1950s to almost 50% in 1990 and it remains near there. The rise of child sexual and
physical abuse was not far behind with randy males often buzzing around a bumper crop
of divorced or single young women frequently with children. This in itself is a recipe for
danger. The best statistics available indicate that approximately 60% of females and 40%
of males under sixteen in this type of situation suffer abuse, hardly ever from the
biological father but rather the “significant other” or the lusty new boy friend. This is not
Camelot. This is a human disaster. Hollywood actresses may glow in the wonders of
single parenthood while the maid watches “boopsie,” but for most single mothers
exhaustion and frequently poverty loom large in their lives.
People were and still are being damaged. Multitudes of lives hurt and families
destroyed not to mention the lives of millions of pre-borns snuffed out before even seeing
the light of day or getting a chance at life became a fact of American life. The fact is the
freewheeling, line-crossing life devoid of tie downs and moral standards is the Typhoid
Mary of healthy societies. With the spread of promiscuity came the spread of abortion
and finally its legalization in the 1973 Roe decision, the most life damaging Supreme
Court decision since Dred Scott and then some. Somebody had to pay for all the
summers of “love.” With abstinence now in ridicule, condoms and pills, not always
without defect and far from totally effective, couldn’t do it all. They are, after all, not fool
proof and the 60s produced a bumper crop of the type, many of them drug riddled and
riding in that lovely Yellow Submarine. It would have been better for thousands if it had
sunk, many lives would likely have been spared the abortion knife and the AIDS ward. A
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society overflowing with line-crossers is in deep trouble. With the breakdown of
authentic love and longstanding sexual restraint outside marriage, the floodgates of
promiscuity were opened and the bodies began to pile up. Statistics document the
murderous damage done to individuals and society beginning in the 1960s. Because of
the seriousness, they bear repeating: Fifth-five million American deaths by abortion with
no due process whatsoever since Roe took care of that. The Supreme Court unlike the
Spanish Inquisition would not allow it. The girl’s parents need not even be told or
consulted much less give permission in most states. Planned Parenthood lobbying saw to
that. According to its dogma the pre-born were mere blobs of cells and part of the
mother’s body instead of a new individual temporarily residing in its first true home, it’s
mother’s womb. The new life was often of a different sex from the mother and always
with its own unique never repeatable DNA right from the start. This is Biology 101 but in
a sex stampede supported by groups like Planned Parenthood and encouraged by its
lobbying against all efforts at abstinence education and parental consent and with a
complicitely hoodwinked Judiciary leading the charge, what chance was there to stem the
destruction?
The calamity wasn’t over. Add almost 400,000 dead from AIDS with about
18,000 more each year in the U.S. alone since 1980. Ironically, the Viet Nam war that
many of the free spirits of the time were protesting ostensibly in order to save lives didn’t
kill nearly as many people as the new sacrifice free mini-morality that was replacing
Judeo-Christian moral standards did. This was especially true of a good number of
college campuses at the time. Abortion referral services became a fixture on many of
them. And if perchance you think that what happens between consenting adults in the
privacy of the bedroom or dorm has no effect outside it, the cost to the taxpayer to try to
remedy and repair the personal and social damage from drugs and promiscuity was
enormous. The nation that had once led the world in industrial might became number one
in porn and abortions with 20.8 per thousand women age 15 to 44. That results, on
average, in more than 1.2 million abortions a year or one out of every four conceptions all
under the rubric of choice. It is a choice that destroys all chance at life with all its choices
for the helpless victims. Only something like abortion could give choice such a bad name.
Choice was translated into dog eat dog survival of the fittest. The value and dignity of
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each human life, a great inheritance from Judeo-Christian revelation, was being severely
damaged. Soon academic voices, Peter Singer of Princeton for one, were urging
infanticide and if it advances can pubicide be far behind? In his defense of abortion
Professor Singer argues, “that the fact that a being is human and alive, does not in itself
tell us whether it is wrong to take that being’s life.” Well, it used to! With Singer and his
growing following, a human life has no intrinsic value. That uniquely Judeo-Christian
concept upon which much of our law is based was to be replaced by a view that life is not
an inalienable right after all but must be earned by possessing minimal capacities such as
being aware or able to value one’s own life. In the view of personhood theory, some
humans, namely all unborn life, infants and people with serious “cognitive disabilities” or
diseases such as late stage Alzheimer’s for example –are human non-persons and hence
possess lesser value than other humans and in the opinion of some, lesser value than
some animals.” It is almost as if life is tied to IQ, The higher it is the more right to life
you get. This sounds a lot like the Nazi’s “life unworthy of life.” The striking irony is
Singer is an Australian of Jewish descent with relatives who died in the Holocaust. He
disdains religion because he thinks it’s the only force in society that upholds the inherent
worth of every individual and in so doing protects “sub-humans.” He is right in that.
To help fuel the deadly debauch, the U.S., with a great assist from the Internet, (at
latest count there were 4.2 million pornographic web sites viewed by 72 million people a
month with porn the most down loaded category of material on the net) became the
world’s number one porn producer with 11,000 new “hot” flicks turned out each year
compared to about 400 mainstream movies annually. Japan recently took first place from
us narrowly, but we’re still a strong second. Don’t count us out yet. We may be about
28th out of the thirty most industrialized nations in educational achievement scores but
when it comes porn, promiscuity and abortion the good ol’ U.S. is always in contention
for first rank.. If we can’t make many really fine movies anymore or for that matter
manufacture steel at reasonable prices and must import most of our autos from abroad
and rely increasingly on highly educated and accomplished talent from abroad too, why
not forge ahead in porn? It’s important to be number one in something. We may be going
“green” ecologically but Porn pollution along with foul mouth smog is a major problem
now. What can be expected from a nation whose young are being steeped in porn and
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promiscuity by an apathetic, adult controlled, profit hungry media with tremendous
influence? Nevertheless, when it comes to education, more than half white students, 80%
Hispanic and 84% African American fall below proficiency in reading skills with math
achievement scores even lower if that can be imagined. What can the future hold?
There are economic ramifications that would be funny but for tragedy. It was
discovered that quite a few at the SEC, instead of watching the economy on their
monitors as it pigged out on bad debt and imploded in 2008, were spending a good part of
the day watching internet porn. Can any of this have anything remotely to do with the
mandatory censoring and banning of the centuries old practice of an opening the public
school day with a short and simple non-denominational prayer by the Supreme Court in
the Engle vs. Vitale decision of 1961? Can forcing religion into the closet effect the
health of a society? Mr. Engle believed the voluntary prayer infringed on his son’s
atheistic rights as protected by the “no establishment clause” of the First Amendment,
now erroneously interpreted to require a wall of separation between Church and state.
The courts interpretation is highly suspect in light of much of what Jefferson and many
other Founders wrote including his letter to Washington dated January 4, 1786 “God who
gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of the nation be secure when we have
removed the conviction that these liberties are the gift of God.”
As alluded to above, soon to follow the Court’s Engle action was the gradual
reduction of much serious educational endeavor in a good many of the nation’s
classrooms. For evidence compare SAT scores before and after the 1960s. “After,” may
not necessarily mean “on account of,” but it does give pause for thought. In truth, and
perhaps connected there was a gradual decline of family and marriage. The rise of media
influence in its place was a major signal of the trouble ahead.
Adding to the pain of all this, what Moynihan and others predicted happened.
There was a rising tide of poverty and loneliness especially among the droves of single
mothers, often heroic women who would not abort and usually were abandoned for their
decision by their “lovers.” These were sometimes known as “significant others, terms like
husband or wife involving too much commitment to authentic love for growing numbers
of mini men. Many of them would pay for an abortion but never the hard choice of life
and support for their child, there too being much sacrifice involved. Often if the women
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choose life she was dumped, it being totally her decision thanks to Roe. What radical
feminists promised would be a key to liberation became a door to anything but for many.
Often too, for those expecting empowerment through the destruction of their offspring,
the farce was played out in the form of emotional problems flowing from guilt or on the
other side, the embrace of callousness toward life that in many cases led to more
abortions. Whoopie Goldberg’s six may not be a record! There were many effects
resulting from Roe that were obviously missed by the radical feminists. That not
everything can be foreseen is an integral justification for the go-slow attitude of
conservatism.
It was astounding how destructive sex under the misnomer of love turned out to
be! In marriage, sex is desirable. Outside it, it is dangerous. Authentic love does no
intentional harm. With promiscuity on the other hand watch out! And if someone is
armed with Planned Parenthood brochures, head for the hills.
Though human pleasure is desirable, the wise know none ever suffices. Incessant
pursuit of ever fleeing satisfaction springs from the troubled and divided depths of our
damaged nature. With all the virtual and real sex available in American society today one
might think it would be a very happy place and from the viewpoint of the inimitable
“Playboy Philosophy,” so it should be. But, it isn’t. It is obvious that we aren’t because
we aren’t merely the pleasure-seeking animals that false philosophy of life portrays. No
one can live by bread alone, the spirit dies. Suicide, drugs, loneliness are more rampant
now than ever. Now, with porn and easy promiscuity ever available, the pressure was off
the male for commitment and marriage. Husband? Father? Rather Playboy! Blessed we
are now in America with truckloads of “Hef’s” kids and though aging, they are forever
children, boys and forever discontented. Meanwhile, the number of unmarried women,
many of them unhappily so, has grown tremendously. It is tough to compete with the
wall-to-wall bimbos bouncing on the beds of the Internet porn stage. Sated in various
forms of easy noncommittal sex, the male is not interested or even capable of the
authentic sacrifice involving love required to make a marriage. Lonely single women
whether a parent or not became a commonplace in a society with a severely reduced
number of quality males ready for authentic love and commitment. It was a loneliness
never imagined by Lennon and the Beatles. Childlessness doesn’t help. Today more than
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20% of American women in their early 40s are childless, up from 10% in 1976. Ten years
ago in 2000 studies reported that 13% of Americans described themselves as lonely; 50
years ago only 3% felt that way. Since 2000 the loneliness percentage has grown and
would be much higher without the distractions of computer and media. If there is no flesh
and blood companionship a machine can do for a spell. This may be one reason why the
incidence of depression has grown by a factor of ten according to researcher Robert
Royal. Since then the trend has continued and all the lonely people have grown in number
but to repeat, they are not exactly the people Lennon and the Beatles imagined them to
be.
Family disintegration, especially families with fatherless children was reflected in
abuse, poverty, social dislocation and school difficulties, part of the harvest of the new
non-morality. Half the people in prison were in on drug related charges at tremendous
cost to the public with the number of the OD’d, in America in the hundreds of thousands.
It is surprising that the legalization of drugs cabal is still heard as if we wanted to
increase the number of dead and make the roads, trains and planes of the country even
more dangerous than they already are. Perhaps a little nod of rueful appreciation to the
rock groups that helped popularize and mainstream drug use in America especially
among their young and impressionable audiences is in order. The damage has been
immense and cost in lives and money staggering. When we put a super tax on the media
and entertainment rich let’s be sure they pay.
Never had the United States so many impoverished women and children paying
the price for the no holds barred “I want to be me and do it my way” mentality of the new
non-morality. The reasons are not hard to discover. In 1930 out of wedlock births stood at
3%. It was 3.8% in 1960 before the debauch got under way. It crept up to 5% in 1965 and
by Woodstock in 1969 the bottom was falling out. We hit 33% in 2000. Now throw into
the mess an almost 50% divorce rate. No two better prescriptions for poverty exist. Most
single parents live near the poverty level. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the
average amount of financial support a single parent receives each year is $4,900. The
“lovers” are not noted for generosity. Swinging is expensive. Most single mothers and
83% of single parents are the mothers, earn an average salary of $28,000 a year. To
contain the catastrophe that always occurs when the people of a nation will not control
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themselves and meet their responsibilities substituting Madonna and Co, line crossing
advise for traditional moral restraints, government looms large and expensive with
multiple programs to try to forestall disaster. In addition to poverty, part of that disaster is
an exhausted parent, neglected emotionally, and as mentioned before, often abused
children. The sad result can be guessed? To repeat, the nation that once relished being
number one and once led the world in areas like auto production, steel production, wheat
and oil production and the graduation of scholars in engineering and the sciences,
America, as was said earlier, is now western world leader in per capita abortions, STDs
and illegitimacy and a close second in porn. Does it get any better though it’s not exactly
what the Founding Fathers envisioned?
Explanations are called for. You do not get record spikes in promiscuity such as
America experienced with the sixties and its aftermath without plenty of entertainment
media help, from the music it puts out to the films and TV it produces. Parade nubile
semi-clothed or unclothed young women, of the MTV type for example, before a healthy
sixteen year old boy and we may as well open up more abortuaries and clear the way for
more single moms. If lucky they will have parents willing to forego retirement and shift
life plans to pick up the slack of the often shiftless swinging father. One generation
unloading responsibility on another generation and walking away is a new phenomenon
for America but line crossing and doing your own thing can do that. If the Grandparents
for whatever reason can’t fill the gap and take up the slack, dust off the welfare rolls and
build more school detention halls; and jail cells. The statistics supporting this dire
scenario are plentiful and irrefutable.
Also consider forced and pressured sex. Imagine the pressure that media hyped
adolescents males put on the reticent girls in the neighborhood and school, girls betrayed
in a sense by their porn performing money-collecting sisters. No help from the media.
There the message more often than not seems to be that everybody’s doing it. Thus media
adds to the peer pressure that it helped create in the first place. Meanwhile the schools
are pulling the rug out from under the girls by giving out condoms with the not too subtle
Weisman-type message that promiscuity is a natural given. All the while the message .of
Judeo-Christian morality, never easy but followed nevertheless by most men and women
in the U.S. prior to the 1960s as the statistics mentioned earlier demonstrate, was now
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deemed too tough, even unnatural, for the new mini-generation spawned by the fully
secularized media. To illustrate, the Weisman-Becker exchange mentioned earlier
appears below. Weisman’s attitude is typical.
Almost every “cool’ rule breaking household of the 1960 and 70s had its “hot”
new Playboy on the coffee table. It was another badge of liberation, real radical chic.
With pornography thus accepted and mainstreamed, the floodgate opened with the
Internet. An early casualty of the spread of porn was the revered traditional reticence of
many women toward sexual advances. It caved in for many under the pressure as the
predatory male began to enter pastures that hadn’t been this green since the rise of
Christianity. The pickings were never easier and the media, including the ubiquity of on
line porn, gleefully oiled the skids. This is confirmed by new research by Mark Regnerus
and Jeremy Uetker laid out in “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet,
Mate and Think about Marriage,” They conclude that “If the sexual script sets a high
price for sex, as it used to do (under traditional Judeo-Christian moral standards prevalent
prior to the 1960s but no longer) a women can demand that her lover be mature and ready
for the commitment she seeks before she gives him the sex he desires. If the script sets a
low price for sex (and it could hardly be lower than now in our completely pornified
society) she cannot demand nearly as much…Men will work for sex but they won’t if
they don’t have to.” It is hard to imagine anything lowering the price more than
ubiquitous porn and a media featuring bed bouncing bimbos on practically every Channel
but Mother Angelica’s. Add on schools featuring condom handouts and abortion referral
services without parental consent thanks to the combined lobbying efforts of Planned
Parenthood with its annual $350 million tax gift from the Federal and several state
governments and other similar “pro-choice” organizations and we have disaster in the
making. In this sense government finances the organization’s lobbying efforts thus
creating a novel version of conflict of interest! Planned Parenthood is America’s number
one abortion corporation at about $400 a “procedure” with over 300 thousand of them or
about 25% of the American annual total.
A young women seeking to refrain from sex for moral reasons or health reasons, and
the research shows that virgins or women in long term relationships such as marriage are
the most emotionally healthy whereas the more promiscuous a women is the greater the
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likelihood of some emotional dissatisfaction, instability and disease, nevertheless she has
few allies in her desire to abstain outside family and Church, especially the Catholic
Church. She certainly can’t look to media or school and most peers are pretty much what
the media turns out. Many must feel very alone and often presumably succumb to
pressure to the delight of the male and sadly, in about 1.3 million cases a year, the
abortion clinic’ds bottom line.
The damage was great. Women became targets. Today 90% of hard-core porn is
violent and 96% of juvenile sex offenders have viewed the stuff. Viewing porn is by no
means the harmless past time its producers and queens like to make out. It’s not the mere
appreciation of beauty that you would get by viewing Niagara Falls, a painting of the
Rockies or the portrait of the Mona Lisa. For the healthy male, the naked female is in a
class apart in the area of stimulation, nice as the Rockies are. It’s more like pouring
gasoline on a fire. Once the clothes are off it’s a new ball game and porn defenders are
simply blowing profit laced smoke about it being harmless. The young especially, after
watching it and if of a predatory bent, often become more predatory and those new to it
often become more demanding and more aggressive with girls. For frequent users
especially middle-aged men, however, the effect can go the other way. Satiated after a
while, it often becomes the end of Eros or at least it’s dulling and the wives frequently
suffer. But for many younger males, after viewing, they frequently can’t wait to get their
hands on the real thing and that is precisely what women become to many of them,
things, mere objects of opportunity in the vast one night stand arena called hooking up.
So, where are the enraged feminists who often get apoplexy at the merest pro-life
sentiment? Unfortunately, even women outside that category often hesitate to protest for
fear of appearing moralistic, even religious. For the young, the worst sin is to be deemed
uncool, out of it, a goodie two shoes, to use a fine old term, by their peers. The pressure
on women to play the game even though it involves the danger of disease and abuse, in
other words to be there or be square, is immense and only the ones with great self worth
and a dignity often rooted in revealed moral standards are able or even willing and
wanting to stand their ground. Traditional Christianity provided strong motivation in the
form of the high self-worth, esteem and dignity inculcated in every human being
regardless of any external category or condition including gender. But traditional religion
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became passé with many young in the post 60s with songsters and singers even urging us
to imagine what a wonderful world it would be with “no religion.” Well, as it turned out,
it is anything but. Conned women opined that if males can play the bed bouncing game
so can they and played right into the hands of the predatory worst. Promiscuity soared as
did abandonment, single motherhood, fatherless children, abortion, STDs and though
there is evidence of a lower rape rate that some attribute to the ubiquity of porn, others
contend it is still up there, the drop being due to underreporting. Still others see a
complex combination of women victims desensitized by a swinging pop media along
with the peer pressure it helps generate and promote along with the decline among them
of traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethics. The result is often more acquiescence and
less resistance especially among a primary target, young women who crave popularity. It
was consensual to use the legal term and thus does not rate a rape rating. But was it
really? Aided and abetted by a porn polluted atmosphere with the media as a prime
accomplice can we doubt that most women in such a situation are really victims?
The idea that enough titillation and porn saturation eventually blunts individual Eros
is not new. A little of the stuff might stimulate but plenitude deadens after a while and
with it interest and ability but until that point is reached the damage can be great. Novelty
is often sought and experimentation that sometimes leads to a pseudo-homosexuality.
Jacques Barzun long ago maintained that “desire has to be dammed up to be powerful
and longlasting.”A brook or stream, to prevent dissipation and remain strong, must be
hemmed in. Suffuse means loss of power. In the past, a great deal of that restraint was
motivated by Christian morality, or that lacking, the fear of pregnancy outside marriage
but with the pill and decline of religion those restraints are greatly weakened and Eros
overflows. For a good number, with the passage of time interest and strength dissipates
into boredom and escape through experimentation and abberration. Roman Polanski once
remarked, “Normal love isn’t interesting. I assure you it is incredibly boring.” And why
not when you are drowning in it? This experimentation into aberration for escape,
sometimes considered liberation, along with the Homosexual life that is sometimes
adopted for the same reason by any number of individuals, often receives media
encouragement. PBS, for example, the organization that deigned to run Elmer Gantry on
Christmas day 2010 as if to show how out of tune it is with the spirit of the day it was, is
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right in tune with the homosexual movement even running a series called “In the Life,” to
seemingly elevate that life-style and demonstrate its alleged normality. But in fact,
dissipation is frequently a part of the “In the Life” life style with multiple partners; some
statistics show an average of 50, the rule. In addition, almost none of the first same-sex
“marriages” contracted, mostly in Massachusetts, lasted. The situation is ripe for the
bazaar, what was once considered abnormal, in the mad search for novelty. Hart Crane
was perhaps its first victim from the American literary scene many years ago. Often too,
a pseudo-homosexuality develops to take its place beside the genuine article especially
when the sex style becomes chic. It wouldn’t be the first time. During the Italian
Renaissance “Greek love” became all the rage among the intelligentsia in emulation of
the pederasty practices common in later classical Greek culture. In the United States it
helped bring out a disease by the early 1980s that has and still does kill thousands.
In the search for escape from satiation and boredom and into novelty, drugs too
became a growing influence with still more problems for many people and society
generally. As it turned out, together with the sexual revolution, the drug revolution
spawned during the 1960s brought down its devotees by the hundreds of thousands. We
had declared war on ourselves and combined with legalized abortion announced open
season on our own progeny. It’s not a pretty picture. Doing your own thing, loving that
line crossing, throwing out the challenging morality that had served us well for
generations, turned out to be awfully costly in life, treasure and human dignity.
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XXX MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS
As we “amuse ourselves to death.” to borrow the title from Neil Postman’s new
book, and doing it over the lives of literally millions of pre-borns and hundreds of
thousands of homosexuals and hard drug users not to mention the illnesses, some new
and some old, effecting millions of carriers of STDs, we still have to face a child poverty
problem of unheard of extent as well as other problems too. Marriage and family life
have taken serious body blows and when that happens the whole society suffers and
declines. For one thing, people are not marrying like they used to. The number of
marriages per 1000 women 15 and older plunged from 76.5% in 1970 to 36% in 2000.
The old farmer adage crude as it may be has some truth in it. “If the cow gives away the
milk why buy it?” The “grazing male,” to use an African term, who has wall to wall porn
and plentiful promiscuity to keep him entertained and with abortion to take care of slips,
has small incentive to marry. Far from liberating, abortion has been a bane to many
women.
Helping greatly in the ongoing cheapening of the worth of sex is, of course, the
media. If in these pages it appears to be a favorite target, it is richly deserved. It is by no
means a scapegoat for the ills that have been discussed here. Indeed it is more a Judas
goat, a veritable Typhoid Mary in their spread. It would not be so if the sexual looseness
and rampant promiscuity it so often promotes with it programming was harmless but we
have ample evidence it is far from it. We are not even talking about the flood of internet
porn or the blatant crassness of popular types of TV programming from MTV and the
obscenity laced “South Park,” to the man-obsessed concerns of “Sex in the City,” and
such, all showing a weariness with the good life appropriate for a period of decline, but
rather the general obsession with violence of the blood and gore type both verbal and
physical, pervading much of the industry and rubbing off on society. Currently unpopular
but tried and true traditions from respect in language, stylish modesty of dress and a
robust abstinence from sex outside of marriage have been chucked out and the society
reflects it even in its styles. As far from the colorful 50s as one can get, the ‘in’ dress
color for today is black, in language vulgar blue is preferred and the red light districts of
old are in every home that has a TV. There, often enough, the hooker, a formerly rather
obscure word and occupation, for most is now known by nearly every grade schooler and
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seems more common in scripts than “mom.” The brightness of a civilization once
believed to be on the up swing is now dulled and slowed by the myriad self-inflicted
problems that have been partly discussed here but need more examination.. Even
something as simple and innocuous as a dancing with stars type program is turned into a
hoochie coochie show, to use a colorful old term. If in economics, bad money drives out
the good, in media land it seems lowest denominator programming drives out the higher.
Indeed, in trendy media land, in one of the greatest disappearing acts in history, the
happily married person with family has been made as extinct as the dinosaur. The tribe of
cool detectives, swinging female cops and similar “cool” types that festoon the tube and
screen are almost never married and if they are, they are divorced or going through one
but usually have loads of bimbos ready to bounce on call and keep them amused. And
divorce, as it grows more common, has to be saccharinized. It is always the marriage that
failed never the people, never their failure to love authentically and faithfully. Whenever
a public figure, often politicians and show business types, do something especially
degrading or despicable it is illness never moral failure that is involved and a few weeks
of expensive rehab will take care of it. Of course, children are hardly ever in the new
picture. Somebody else must be having them. This is media “reality.” By its lights it is a
complete mystery how the American population ever got to where it’s at. Our heroes had
no hand in it for they are almost always childless. Left to them, not posterity but possible
depopulation is America’s future
Is it a wonder the American family is hurting? Generations are growing up
watching this stuff by the hour while mom and dad have to work or even more
deleterious just mom with no dad around. TV has replaced parents as the primary
learning tool in many families. It has become for many the prime dispenser of
perceptions of right and wrong often erasing the distinction between the two. It seems as
if the whole industry has been taken over by the generation of Boomers and its emulators
who in their narcissism are open to no reform in spite of all the evidence of the damage
being done to millions of Americans, often children. It’s a real tragedy because it wasn’t
always so. In the past when realizing it was creating a problem, the media industry has
reversed itself when the damage became evident. In the 1930s and 40’s, movies and
media helped make smoking “cool.” Now it isn’t thanks to its potent influence. If it
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wished, and there is plenty of evidence to support doing so, some of which has been laid
out in these essays, it performed a similar reversal and service with promiscuity and
instead of promoting it promoted a sane and safe approach to sex, instead one replacing
condom driven promiscuity with tried and true abstinence, an abstinence that always was
and still is possible in spite of all the Dr. Weismans, the well being of our society would
be served again. But if it went after promiscuity with the same zeal it went after smoking
and began pushing for abstinence, it would have to turn on the very liberal establishment
of which it is largely a part. It is not about to declare its independence. It was easier to go
after a distant tobacco corporation even though a loss of some advertising income may
have been involved than to turn on that of which you are part. As deadly to human life
and health as promiscuous sex is, it was far easier to ignore promiscuity with its deadly
concomitant of abortion and AIDS while continuing the crusade against cigarettes.
Abstinence is too “churchy” for the secularist establishment to which media is beholden
with NOW, Planned Parenthood and the gay machine integral constituents. They stake
everything on condoms but putting all eggs in one basket is always risky, especially this
basket. This magical trust in condoms is a puzzle to the objective observer. They haven’t
stopped HIV/AIDS whereas abstinence or strict monogamous fidelity would stop it in its
tracks.. There are still about 18, 000 new AIDS infections a year in the U.S. and though
the U.N. and the U.S. have helped flood Africa with condoms, the death rate there is still
tremendously high except where the stress on abstinence has reduced heterosexual
“grazing,” the main disease spreader there. And of course abortion and STDs are a plague
in our own land. Yet, no anti-smoking type effort for abstinence is likely to come from a
complicit media.
Abstinence, always 100% effective is called for but only the Church does the
calling and it is often castigated as insensitive, impractical, unkind and worse as if sex
was addictive behavior instead of one freely chosen. The church will never lower sex, a
good from the Father for pleasure and procreation, to a mere uncontrolled animal act.
Which is precisely what the media and secular establishment considers it, as succinctly
expressed by Dr. Weisman. But there is hope. Indeed, the Family Research Council
reports that abstinence programs reduced teen pregnancies by 67% and that accomplished
with little Federal and no media help. Now if the media would cooperate… who knows?
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Sadly, there is no evidence of any about face. Instead it is now on the “gay”
bandwagon, not supporting marriage but supporting instead its further deconstruction
with no thought to future eventualities. When, with heavy support from the New York
Times and most of the media, abortion became legal it was in the hope and promise that it
would become “safe and rare.” Today it is anything but rare and often not safe. For many
it is birth control and the low value put on each new human being has fallen to new
depths. In 2000 there were more than 140,000 second and third trimester abortions and
the number keeps rising. Only narrowly was partial birth abortion, semi-infanticide, made
illegal. Not only that but many abortions were seconds and thirds though hopefully there
are few six-timers like Whoopie Goldberg.
Now, with same sex marriage advancing, again the N.Y. Times playing pied
piper, Tom and Dick can legally marry in N.Y. but why not Tom, Dick and Harry? And,
with its vociferous help the deconstruction of society’s premier institution for its future
well being is further deconstructed to the point of meaningless. Why not Tom, Dick,
Harry and Bertha, or Bertha, Mabel, Muriel and Fido, or Ahab with his harem? On top of
it, something the media’s selective sensitivity and overweening political correctness
never mentions, homosexual unions are notoriously unstable. In Massachusetts none of
the first ones performed there a few years back have lasted. The lessons of the recent past
often go unnoticed in media land. With the encouragement of homosexuality came the
deadly AIDS epidemic although it is almost taboo in the land of the free to allude to the
causal connection. But, again, what the media does to society it can help undo. That is the
lesson of the past but seemingly a forlorn hope for the future, for now.
Is it a surprise the American family is not what it once was? It is dwindling in
several ways, one of them size. Even the married are not much help in this. At one time
four or more children per family were common. In 2009 the birth rate in the U.S. fell to
its lowest level in history. The number of babies born dropped 2.6%. Now, according to
the Associated Press, “the average American home has more TV sets than children. The
typical American Household has 2.55 people including kids and 2.73 televisions.” Just
replacement level reproduction requires 2.1 births per family. Obviously we are not
replacing ourselves so obsessed with self are we. It is not unusual for sets and pets to
outnumber kids. The American Pets Products Association reports 2/3 of American homes
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include pets upon which 43 billion was spent in 2010. But we can’t afford kids. It’s a way
to beat loneliness when kids are few, non existent or grown and the Internet and media
are not enough. People living alone or with non-relatives make up about one-third of all
American households. The unwanted kids who were destroyed in the womb because
America, it seems, would not alleviate the “tough neglected lives” they would have had
to face if allowed to live, would envy the dog’s life.
It’s a challenge to maintain a prosperous society with such a birth dearth. Like
Rome under Augustine, Spain and other countries faced with depopulation are offering
money incentives to families with more than two children. Spain provides each newborn
with 2,500 Euros (about $3,938), more for families with three or more children. It didn’t
work for Rome and it isn’t working for Spain. Evidently money isn’t everything. What is
needed is authentic love. When that’s lacking nothing can take its place. For the U.S., we
are fortunate in that we have a solution in immigration. It is making up for our own birth
dearth, Prior to this recession the United States created 1.5 to 2 million jobs every year.
Without immigrants we’d have a hard time filling all those jobs. Should economic health
return and the attitude toward marriage and family remain unchanged we will need them
again.
The poverty endemic to broken families and single parent households, about 7%
of all American households are headed by single women with children, and because
many stressed out or strung out women can’t handle the financial and emotional strain of
raising children alone, the result is 4 million children, nearly 6% of those under 18 live in
their grandparent’s homes. The penchant for drugs, promiscuity and the “my way” life in
one generation affects the previous generation. Remember one of the sillier 60s slogan,
“don’t trust anyone over 30?” Well many of those of that time and after trust them now,
big time. The poverty problem, and the Census Bureau’s 2011 report shows a rise in child
poverty to 22% of all children in the U.S., an all time high, has been examined earlier.
It can be overcome by the lone heroic parent in individual cases but only with exhausting
and all consuming effort. The odds are awfully high against it happening without
something doing the father part, in particular the financial support role, be it government,
a decent significant other or grandma and grandpa.
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The economic problems hitting the American family started long before the 2008
slump. Indeed, it dates to the moral debacle led off by the 1960s. The economy began its
decline about then according to the most socially important measuring stick of all; the
family. Though most families were larger than they are now, nevertheless through the
1950s it was perfectly possible for most families to make it on one income. After that
time however it became increasingly difficult what with taxes and inflation generally
outstripping income. The problem was compounded by an ever-increasing list of
absolute, advertising induced, needs usually electronic and mechanical in nature plus the
craving for larger houses for smaller families. Before long both parents were being
forced into the job market in order to make ends meet.. In a short time priorities changed
and in many instances children became secondary to things. In time it led to fewer
children to help ease the crunch and to meet the new needs and wants. In a sense the new
wants and advertising induced needs began increasingly to replace children. The family
shrunk as larger homes crammed with stuff grew.
Outside the two parents family things were much worse with poverty always in
the wings there being no two incomes. For many of the heroic women who decided
against destroying the new life they carried and were often abandoned as a result, facing a
sometimes long loneliness and living on the edge of poverty on meagerly child support
and bottom-paying jobs, lay ahead. Years of single parenthood not only means poverty
for many but for the children, more often than not, life without father with all the set
backs that can entail. Interminable research on poverty agrees that, as Washington Post
writer David S, Broder concluded, “The best anti-poverty program is a stable, intact
family,” and it would take a big hunk out of the budget of every county, state and the
Federal government’s most of all. Consider this, according to researcher Kay S.
Hymowitz, in her book,” Marriage and Caste in America,” 80% of children in families in
or near poverty level live with one parent but 92% of children living with two parents are
in families with incomes of $75,000 or more. Money is not everything of course but it
releaves poverty and frees up time for family and the better things of life. The evidence is
overwhelming, children are much better off if brought up by a mother and father who are
married. The challenge is to get young men to accept responsibility for their children,
which means marriage. To repeat the words of Father Hesberg, “the best thing a father
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can do for his children is to love their mother,” and authentic love means marriage. In a
sense this is the reinvention of the wheel. It is precisely the Judeo-Christian marriage
ethic that was abandoned in the 1960s.
If rates of promiscuity skyrocketed in America, it affected marriage. The divorce
rate rose to near 50% with infidelity the major factor. Evidently, promiscuity’s affects rub
off but divorce’s might even outweigh promiscuity’s. From divorce often spins a vicious
cycle of depleted resources, both emotional and financial. Less money and less time often
equate in practical applications to less love and neglect often becomes a way of life. And
a blithely overconfident culture with more faith in condoms than Popes put in God, fail to
absorb the constant lesson that contraceptive mistakes are a fact and condoms cannot
compare for safety with good, old-fashioned abstinence. But abstinence is almost a
forbidden word, banned from schools and conferences where its very mention is
sometimes greeted with boos as Bill Gates discovered at a meeting of sex educators in
Canada last year. In TV land sex is always fun and consequence free but it fact it often
produces tiny new human beings with a lot of wants and needs. In the nation’s capital a
third of households are headed by women and four out of five single mothers have
incomes below $50,000, many of them far below. Regarding loneliness, there is plenty of
it mostly of the kind not envisioned by the Beatles. * The overall result was often
personal and social catastrophe with great public expense for the necessary aid and
remediation. One path death, the other hardship and both avoidable if upfront there had
been the marriage quality love still taught by the Church, especially on the part of the
irresponsible, often self-absorbed fathers with little room in their lives for anyone but
themselves. This is the self-realization; self-expression and self-assertion drilled into
them by a decaying and bloated educational system, badly detached from all the evident
consequences of failure and wrecking lives. Marriage would help avoid much of this
disaster but many males today deem it a superfluity or actually fear it. As the song says:
“no one should be tied down by the ink dried up on some line.” The male who was once
upon a time so enamored by what the object of his desires had and was willing to learn
love and commit to get it from a women wise enough not to give it away, a wisdom that
benefited all including the children, was now replaced by the predator of the grab all the
gusto school. There would be none of the sacrifices that go into the “forsaking all others”
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that makes for a good and lasting marriage for him. Marriage was not in the game for the
male who could get what he wanted without commitment or learning to love. Easy
gratification to the point of satiation eliminates the fire within that in the past was a
motivation to marry. Porned to the gills, abetted by many females conned into giving
away for a song or less what was once a pearl of great price, the male lacks the incentive
for the ancient chase and courting that once led to commitment, marriage and family and
that had the effect of enhancing the natural power of women. I think it was Dr. Johnson
who laughed at the idea that women needed more laws to bolster their position in society,
with the thought that nature had already supplied them with so much power that such
laws would be superfluous. He may have added, “if they play the powerful hand nature
dealt them right” The thought is quaint and very politically incorrect now but reflects a
reality too often ignored today especially by women. To drag out the old farmers again,
they put the same point differently. Not always known for their sensitivity, they
expressed it, “if the cow gives away the milk why buy it?” What sounds cold and clinical
was in its day usually assuaged with the presence and growth of real love. Today so many
women have bought into the great con of the disastrous new morality that often poverty
and loneliness are now in the cards for more of them than ever before in America
especially those who have no traditional family to fall back on.
One thing about marriage though, it is no panacea to paradise. In many ways it is a
challenge and a great learning to love experience. For many it is the first real and serious
attempt at it and now that it is often avoided if not demeaned, many never get that
learning experience. Campus “relationships” seldom lead to it. Like abstinence, marriage
too is considered very difficult and difficult things are to be avoided. Without it though,
ultimately promiscuous sex, often euphemistically referred to as “sleeping with” or by the
misnomer “love” and always minus commitment, demeans and downgrades women in
the short run and everyone ultimately. Nothing promotes this disastrous downgrading
more than porn and nothing promotes porn more than pop media and the net. There, if
they have their clothes on, women are often portrayed as down and dirty tough and
vulgar, usually cops, detectives or lawyers just like the men heroes but a tad smarter.
They can talk the gutter talk with the best of the males and this is considered liberation;
women becoming more like the bottom feeding variety of males. If they have their
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clothes off, those men and women, the bozos and bimbos, to use the more colorful and
less vulgar language of an earlier time, involved in the great new triumph of American
industry, the 13 billion dollars a year porn gusher, are complicit in this great
deconstruction of true feminism and the bimbos involved in it are in reality betraying
their own sex. As Barzun and many others point out and what Dr. Johnson and the old
farmer were alluding to, the strength of women is precisely that they are not men. They
hold the powerful trump card that men don’t have but badly want. Many women of this
generation have been conned like no generation in the past, into giving it away with no
marriage, children and family involved. The resultant time freed up and the loneliness it
leads to can be depressing, If the women is educated with career or has a decent job or
family support it can help as can community involvements or pursuit of the various arts
but on the larger scale,no posterity means no future.
The co-eds of the 1960s and early 70s are a case in point. Professor Robert George of
Princeton University observed the scene and wrote, “Me generation men persuade young
women into sexual liaisons allegedly as a means of making a political statement, covering
up lust with a patina of significance.” Soon many a university, bastions of so much
nonsense and politically correct intolerance, were right there with co-ed dorms and
condoms galore. Going right along too were the media corps, Hollywood, and
organizations like Planned Parenthood often using tax funds and telling all who would
listen that it’s all perfectly normal as it sold condoms by the ton and abortions at $350 or
more a “procedure.” Again, procreationless sex is a dead end for the individual and if
widespread for the society and no institution should try to popularize it if it wants a
future.
On the other side with single parenthood, men usually win and women and
children lose. The epidemic of unattached but sexually active women many of them with
temporary involvements, a good number wishing for marriage but seeing a crop of men
hardly worth the effort or the men themselves not willing to make the effort has produced
the several million single parents with no choice but to work and frequently living in or
near poverty. Result? In 2011 child poverty in America hit 22%, almost one in four! Of
course, as much of the pop media stimulates, titillates and follows along making lots of
profits, it always repeats the old song and dance that it doesn’t create reality or its
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problems just reflects it. But in fact, it does both and while rallying to the support of
endangered species from whales and abused pets to flying reindeer, the media encourage
little resistance to this objectification and downgrading of women in their present plight
and in fact seem more abjectly fearful of talking seriously about abstinence, fidelity and
marriage than passing a derogatory remark about Mohammed. And the many prime time
cop programs think they are doing women a favor by often portraying them tough,
insensitive, single, promiscuous and vulgar like the type of men they seem to hold up for
admiration but they are wrong. Women are different and often more admirable. But the
happily married man or women on the job, solving crime, working in the office,
defending the law, is nearly an extinct species in prime time TV land where they are
often being chased off the set by the innumerable cool, swinging, unattached macho men
or seductive and often easy to bed women with marriage not in the script. About the only
marriages mentioned are the ones ending in divorce and when the subject of children
rarely arises it is usually in association with abortion. If this is reality it is hellish. A
society staying that course is going nowhere, literally.
Only the Church, it seems, has the courage to speak, to strike a discordant note. In
going against the current, leading the new rebellion, it is the only rebel the “rebels” don’t
seem to support or relish. No surprise there! In some cases media programming and often
certain lyrics to popular songs, far from giving women encouragement in their plight and
standing up for real independence and dignity, side with the perpetrators. The lone voice
crying in the wilderness is the Church and its call for abstinence outside of marriage is, if
not ignored, actually ridiculed as an impractical dream. A good example of this, as we
saw, is the Weisman-Becker exchange of letters. What we have when abstinence is called
impractical if not impossible is a case of historical amnesia for, as we know and the
statistics show, abstinence was once widely and successfully practiced before marriage
and after marriage infidelity and divorce were much rarer. The statistics also show the
nation’s children in a far healthier state in the generations before the 60s decline.
Related to the problem of pill and condom-encouraged promiscuity before
marriage if a marriage should occur is the great increase of infidelity in marriage.
Marriage usually does not change a sow’s ear into a silk purse at least not overnight.
Much of the tremendous increase in divorce is attributable to the unwillingness to
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measure up to the challenge of fidelity in marriage. Self –control and sexual continence,
unpracticed for years before marriage, is not easily established after marriage. Marriage
thus weakened and on the ropes at the hands of promiscuous and unfaithful heterosexuals
is now being opened to further attack from those advocating same-sex marriage. The
issue is addressed in Addendum #2. The institution of marriage came about because
people have children and they usually fare far better when in the care of their natural
parents. With same sex marriage, expect demands for multi-partner marriage to soon
follow and even person-pet marriage as happened in Israel a few years ago. Marriage,
every society’s most vital and basic institution for its future well-being will advance
toward meaninglessness and eventually a dissolution even more widespread than it is
now experiencing with repercussions not hard to imagine, more poverty for one as
marriage loses its connection to procreation and is increasingly seen as meaningless and
dispensable.
The growth of poverty is not hard to imagine either. That repercussion is already
with us. Before 1960 less than 5% of children were born out of wedlock. According to
W. Bradford Wilcox in “When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America,” nearly
50% of women fifteen to forty four who have dropped out of high school or graduated
with technical training, in other words the struggling middle class, who gave birth after
2000 were unmarried. The result is that instead of 5% now 35% of American children are
born out of wedlock more often than not with a father who has departed from the scene.
This social and moral collapse is a major factor in poverty in general and child poverty in
particular because the male, foot loose and free of silly old obligations like marriage and
support as understood traditionally, very frequently dances away with his own money
jingling in his pocket. The woman is left to work it out often turning to family or the
taxpayer for help. The economic penalty for widespread nationwide promiscuity is its
contribution to badly balanced national and state budgets, rising public debt and
inevitably the call for higher taxes. Countries like France with much lower out of
wedlock births than the U.S., know marriage and family are the first line of defense
against poverty and against government being forced in at great expense and much less
success to try to remedy the mess. Such governments know too that sex education based
almost solely on the condom is ineffective. Family centered sex education with
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prominence given to abstinence is preferred and statistically much more effective. In the
U.S. however with no one pushing in that direction but the Church, and with the media
signed, sealed and delivered into hands that are far from sympathetic to the abstinence
cause cause, we wallow in costly dysfunction.
What Betty Freidan, a bored, educated, middle class housewife with strong leftist
leanings and terribly out of touch with any reality but her own and her own circle’s,
disparagingly called a “comfortable concentration camp” referring to the intact homes of
the 1950s, is now something to die for. It is on the bucket list of many women but good
old-fashioned love and marriage with family and all the joys and challenges it brings is a
fading dream. Hef’s American playboy is not up to it. And with the decline of marriage,
for vast numbers of single or divorced mothers, other options are gone too. She no longer
may opt to go to work pre-60s style to help the family buy that second family car or get
Junior his braces, now she has no choice. She has to go. Often she has no choice but to go
to work just to survive with her child. The era of choice has reduced choices. Choice has
been greatly diminished in the land of “choice.” Promiscuity and infidelity, two jewels in
the crown of “choice” can do that and they are hard at work. This is the typical as
opposed to Hollywood actress mode of single parenthood. The new morality is a
blessing…more often than not for the male and rich female and for more and more
women, Freidan’s comfortable concentration camp is a dream not to come true.
Out of these single parent homes and homes broken by divorce come a large
segment of today’s students who are not only failing at education but at moral sense too.
One English teacher reported that many of them are openly perplexed in class by
Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter.” What’s the big deal about Hester and
Rev.Dimmesdale “getting it on” anyway they like to know. Since the Sixties and the
coming of the Age of TV and Computer many have been thoroughly educated and
indoctrinated in debasement, most especially those with no strong parental influence to
counteract the media and sadly too, those who see their family disintegrating under the
hammer blows of infidelity and divorce. Writing long before the present, Thomas Paine
observed “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of
being right.” What’s wrong with Hester and Dimmesdale indeed, these kids see it all the
time. It all trickles down until you get indecency descending into dullness, satiety and
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then boredom but for the young not yet down that path, can there be hope? For them the
titillation is often of short order. Exposed from an early age, there is nothing like
modern sex education to dismiss the charm, mystery and uniqueness of the subject by
submerging it into the utilitarian and commonplace. The final result for many of them is
that the assault of the commonplace does not wait for middle or old age to set in. It comes
on strong and early. No wonder the multitude of Roman Polanskies find normal sex
“incredibly boring.” No doubt a great present and future investment idea is viagra type
drugs of increasingly potency. A generation that adores nature and the “natural” doesn’t
seem to mind cramming itself with chemicals when nature is sated and reduced to an
impotency flowing from the boredom of the commonplace. An unsurprising result of the
inundation of sex in the lives of everyone including the young is titillation of shorter and
shorter duration. It’s a terrible and destructive deception that only wise education and
religion can penetrate. Without that, boredom and its spin off, aberration, become the
norm in very many lives.
The downspin is reflected often in language and humor frequently to the point of
being tongue tied and humorless when decency of language and subtleness of wit is
called for. With vulgar gangster thugs normalized into mainstream prime time popular
entertainment along with the obscenity of a George Carlin and even the specter of
misguided suburban librarians insisting on the right of patrons to view pornography, what
may we expect next from our envelop pushing, a term it likes a lot, media? What Agnes
Repplier wrote about the rakish and obscene audiences during the English Restoration
could easily apply to our situation with audiences that relished the slangy and often gross
routines of Carlin, Lenny Bruce and multitudes of carbon copies. She wrote that, “They
began by tolerating indecency for the sake of wit, and ended by tolerating dullness for the
sake of indecency.” De Sade made the point that obscene entertainments and activities
are “important and popular to a time with a taste for aberration which it sees as a norm
previously obscured by prejudice.” However what is mistaken for prejudice in such jaded
societies is often not prejudice at all but just good sense built on sound moral guidelines
flowing from centuries of historical experience. Such good sense continues to save many
people wise enough not to throw it away in the debacle of the present time.
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No one had ever heard of AIDS until 1981. Perhaps the ultimate aberration will
be the death of us. The long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial
appearance of being right indeed! A society already contracepted and aborted to below
replacement level and as a follow up brings on homosexuality and same-sex marriage as
if mainstream and normal is flirting with depopulation. Eliminating replacement potential
bears ill for the future economic health and even survival of a civilization. As mentioned,
without immigration the danger would be much more apparent even now. Whole urban
school districts would be bereft of students and the need for schools and teachers though
the myopic teacher unions, as part of the secular coalition, raise nary a peep of objection
to deadly “choice.” It remains to be seen if, and it’s a big if but worth thinking about, a
nation with an academia saturated by anti-life political correctness often to the flight of
history and common sense and with the backing of misguided government programs such
as support of legalizing same-sex marriage and abortion on demand along with the
additional propaganda power of a dutifully lined up mass media, can stave off what it
seems to be asking for, depopulation. It remains to be seen if it can resist the well
organized heavily financed and propagandized media establishment often parading samesex couples as perfectly normal and of no important difference from the heterosexual
sexual union. It remains to be seen if perchance it can defy odds by opting for sanity by
not doing what in more balanced times would have been deemed unthinkable, namely the
glamorizing of homosexuality to the point of it becoming the in thing, chic and “cool,”
then there is a chance for a healthy rebound. But in a society as susceptible to media
influence as ours is and filled with impressionable people who consider “trending”
important, then there is great danger. We hear that nature is bendable and that gender is
not biological but optional. And where do we hear it most loudly? College campuses
across the nation are a brim with “Transgender Awareness Weeks” and some feature
LUG dorms, “Lesbian Until Graduation.” If perversion is indeed spreadable to the
impressionable then extinction is possible or if not extinction, severe decline. Already
some nations are well down that path and desperately trying to slow the skid. Spain was
already mentioned. According to population expert Austin Ruse, “Almost half the
world’s nations now face demographic winter because their birthrates have fallen so low
that their populations are aging rapidly. ”The economic ramifications are clear. Vastly
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increased numbers of retirees living off vastly decreased numbers of people in the
workforce and putting into the system brings the whole system to the verge of collapse. It
looks very much like the generations that were sold on abortion will have to pass off
retirement or at least seriously delay it. What’s to be expected when over 30% of each
post Roe generation goes under the abortion knife, a very shrunken economy at least?
Who really gets the short end of the stick? It will be those of traditional moral standards
who married and raised families. Many of the childless single swingers will end up living
off their children.
Belying all the happy promiscuous bed bouncing, (a term as old as Classical
Greece), by the bozos and bimbos on TV and in the movies are the ghastly statistics that
set this essay off in the first place. In 2009 N.Y.C reported 12,395 abortions among
married women, and a whopping 72, 962 among those not married, mostly teens and
college age women. These are the often hapless but complicit victims of the new media
generated morality along with their destroyed offspring. The new morality is ever so
supportative of male irresponsibility, the very thing the Founding Mothers, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and company warned about many years ago. Condoms
don’t always work and if they don’t there are always the abortion mills with Planned
Parenthood, carnage incorporated, leading the way with more than 300,000 abortions
annually and charging on average $451 a “procedure.” It made 85 million dollars from
abortions in 2009 but on top of that the government, mostly Federal, forced the taxpayers
to dish out 350 million more to it for its “services.” Such “services” a hurting nation can
do without but abortions remain tragically high, well over a million a year total compared
to 50 to 75,000 a year at most before 1973. And, all this destruction of life takes place in
spite of years of more sex education and more condom distribution. Roe’s promise,
picked up by politicians of the pro-choice stripe and Catholics of the “personally opposed
but…” school, that with legalization abortion would be safe and rare was false. We can
chalk up much of this nightmare destruction of new human life to that Tweedle Dee and
Tweedle Dum of death, destruction and disease, the deadly one-two punch of porn
promoted promiscuity, Before the 1960s with abstinence mostly in place, marriages more
plentiful, loneliness rarer and many spouses really learning love, more marriages held
together, fewer children were dead or floating about fatherless than in our present age of
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happy promiscuity. Despite the purposely-exaggerated coat hanger myth, the number of
pre-Roe abortions was comparatively small, estimated, as mentioned, at about 50,000 a
year most of them in doctor’s offices as compared to today’s annual average of
1,200,000, many of them in dubious neighborhood clinics; religion to the rescue? Can
lockheart be successful without it?
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XXXI THE HARD ART OF LOCKHEART
Children are safest; do best in education and life generally, when in intact
families with both biological parents. This traditional family situation statistically though
not invariably supplies the most loving child nurturing environment and healthiest
preparation for life that there is. On this all studies concur. So, what’s so difficult about
marriage? It’s probably for the most part the “forsaking all others” of the old wedding
vow. This is often the burr under the saddle and the itch that doesn’t always take seven
years to develop. The objection that monogamous marriage is deadening or boring is an
old one but shouldn’t be taken too seriously because, as we know, just about everything
is after a while including a steady diet of promiscuity. Roman Polanski and many others
have stated as much. Eschewing monogamy, Polanski remarked from experience that all
“normal” sex, apparently meaning not only monogamy but also promiscuous
heterosexual activity, becomes in his words, “incredibly boring.” Without reading too
much into it, escape provided by aberrational sex seems implied. But, it too is no lasting
escape from boredom and is often fraught with physical and psychological danger.
Overindulgence in anything can turn it into a bore or as the child with too much ice
cream in him knows, a real pain. If the overindulgence involves certain forms of sexual
activity, rampant promiscuity and especially homosexual activity, it can even be deadly
dangerous. All these highly temporary, desperate and often destructive struggles against
boredom including the married person’s forays into dalliances, infidelities, promiscuities
and such may provide a very temporary respite but often at awful personal cost and loss.
There are other and better ways to escape boredom with much fewer negatives
involved. It should also be mentioned in this matter that no study has ever shown or
observation ever verified a greater degree of general happiness among the promiscuous,
including the proverbial “swinging single,” than among those who have successfully built
a life and family on the love of one person. On the other hand, many studies show the
loneliness gage much higher among the former group.
There are other serious concerns. When the aberrational sex is the homosexual variety
the recent push for legalization of same sex marriage takes on farcical light considering
how extremely promiscuous the lifestyle is. Many studies have shown this. A recent one
reported 72% of homosexual men having multiple partners, fifty or more not being
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unusual. Even in places where same sex marriage has been recognized, fidelity between
partners is rare and permanence equally so. A study in Massachusetts, one of the first
states to recognize same sex marriage, involving156 same sex couples showed that after
five years none had been able to maintain sexual fidelity. Frequently the homosexual life
style results in dissipation and premature death. Damaging as it evidently is, the media
fails to stress the danger and sometimes, along with many colleges, seems even to
encourage it.
Studies show the active homosexual losing about six years of life on average, about
the same as the average active smoker. Of course, predictably the media says nothing
about the one and much about the other. In its stated goal to print all the news that’s fit to
print, this vital information doesn’t make the pages. The N.Y. Times is a good example
of the dangerous media bias. It denied almost all letters opposing same sex marriage
access to its opinion pages during the debate on the subject in N.Y. State where it was
eventually legalized. By so doing it thinks it is acting justly and compassionately but it is
in fact performing no public service indeed quite the opposite. Going again to the
research, physical and psychological disorders are much more prevalent among
homosexual men than heterosexual men. Attempted suicide rates, even in countries that
are homosexual-friendly, are three to four times as high for homosexuals. Psychiatrist
Jeffrey Satinover has shown that no studies support the frequent assertion by activists that
the high levels of this internal distress in homosexual populations are caused by social
disapproval. The problem is evidently internal to the way of life. Making such a
dangerous way of life a normal and acceptable choice for the young is not compassion
rather it is doing them a great and dangerous disservice.
The ancient race to find excitement, escape boredom and the restlessness within
goes on and on and with restraint discarded in the chase, the pursuit hastens until
dissipation, addiction and the usual descent into, you guessed it, boredom returns. That is
if the trip is survived at all with physical and mental health still intact. American writer
Hart Crane took the trip many years ago and didn’t survive. He has had a multitude of
unsuspecting imitators. In spite of what many of these so called “bon vivants” imagined
about embracing life to the fullest, tasting everything there is to taste and all that
advertising type lingo that takes the place of thought for many, it is hardly a life at all but
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actually a dangerous and desperate avoidance of the real thing. It is in actuality the
fleeing from the real nuts and bolts that make a good life as well as the ordinary people
that help make it so, even with all its troubles. And it doesn’t work. It is not the way to
contentment and never has been. Anyone who knows our restless nature knows this to be
true and many echo Augustine, “our souls are restless and will not rest until they rest in
Thee.” The Father created us out of love and only his love can fulfill us.
Meanwhile, the married have learned, if they are open to the lesson, that marriages
are not made in heaven. They are made right here on Earth with an effort resting on
authentic love. Marriages never fail. They always work as long as the two, motivated by
that authentic love, work at it. Marriage is sustained by the determination to give love and
in rough times love is often sustained by marriage. It is indeed the great love learning
institution for most people. What a life education is missed when it is purposely avoided!
The work involved comes with a bonus. It opens us up to the limited happiness available
to us here. But to make it work the bridges must be burned, the boats scuttled. To wax
poetic, that desert island for two, that old dream must be willed to reality for husband and
wife even as the tides of passion begin to recede. That is no time for abandonment but
rededication to love “until death do us part.” It is magnificent. Life is no better embraced
for the mass of us, or love learned. Marriage is one of mankind’s greatest
accomplishments and as close to authentic love as most of us ever get here. As Barzun
alluded, sex is dissipated into boredom and often impotency with multiple expressions
and the persistent pursuit of variety but by truly concentrating on the one, and the one’s
happy fulfillment, it is in a sense dammed and kept strong and on course. The passion for
another must be forgone. The forgoing is love in action and it is not always easy. But in
marriage a major difference, often confused, between sex and love is highlighted: the
surrender to infidelity is sex, the refusal to surrender is love. The distinction is great. In
marriage love and passion must be kept one. But in no way is boredom completely
banished no matter what the path. That is the fact of life. But, in marriage authentic love
is nourished and that after all is what we’re here for.
The boredom everybody fears comes to us all after a while no matter what novelty
is pursued and attained. To understand that is to understand our nature and its eternal
restless longing and lack, until ultimate fulfillment in the Father’s house. Polanski
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himself came to realize a part of the lesson when he settled down to make a marriage. It’s
the path to take for many reasons, health, safety, sanity, the continuance of the race to
name a few; fulfillment, satisfaction in a worthy endeavor, earthly happiness , the defeat
of loneliness, to name a few others.
All this is likely to be foreign territory for the mind bent by media exposure.
Marriage, especially challenging for the generations of our era, growing up as they do
often under the media’s debilitating influence hardly ever learn to utter that smallest,
most difficult but important and necessary word “no” when drives and passions are acting
up. Going with the flow rather than resistance is considered the more “natural” course.
Parenthetically, our politicians often have the same problem in the realm of spending, as
the nation, weighed down with immense debt, is beginning to find out. On the personal
level, enslaving yens, passions, drives, addictions, be them for food, drugs, sweets,
tobacco, drink, sex, money, revenge, envy, violence of all sorts including against life, in
other words all the old reliables, all the ancient usual suspects, are still with us and often
on our backs with hooks in deep. The evidence points to drug abuse and promiscuous sex
being at present the leading contenders for the crown of destruction with smoking
becoming less so and obesity moving up in the standing. Campaigns against drugs and
smoking have had some rather notable success. Promiscuity, considered by many the
greatest of dangers now, is left untouched though it fuels diseases some of them deadly as
well as abortions by the millions and family disintegration of unprecedented extent. The
wave of “my wayers” flowing over our staggering, sagging, restraining institutions or
what’s left of them, are especially busy battering marriage out of all recognition. Its
essential permanence is out the window for many of them. Sometimes these Lotharios,
blind or not caring about the grief they sow and often confusing sex with love, consider
themselves great lovers with more love to offer than any women can handle. With little or
no practice applying the “no,” word to themselves, “my-wayers” often find faithful
monogamous love, good marriage’s heart blood, more than they can handle. Loyalty is a
demanding virtue, the backbone of fidelity, but loyalty becomes a vice in a world in
which “I” takes precedence over “we.” If abstention from sex before marriage is ruled too
much of a challenge by the many Dr. Weismans, imagine years of fidelity to the same
spouse especially as age transforms the Gary Cooper you married into a Billy Booper or a
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Sophia Loren into a Sophie Tucker. But the growth of love makes many difficult things
possible and even pleasurable as the beloved, often far past prime, flourishes in its
warming sun. As physical beauty and passion naturally wane with age, burned away with
time, what remains is not ashes but gold, symbol of the stuff of lasting love.
It is in the family first and foremost that love is best learned and only authentic
love can pull off marriage. For many reasons that kind of love seems to be in shorter
supply now than in the past. One telling factor, the learning of love is made difficult as
growing numbers of children grow up without one or both parents. The primary school is
not there. In this vicious cycle divorce is learned but not authentic love, as the almost
50% divorce rate amply demonstrates. An underlying factor in these developments is a
decline of faith in and love of God. It has been replaced in many lives with massive doses
of love of self and a dedication to achieving self’s desires regardless of cost. Often the
experts are of little help in any of this. Like Dr. Weisman and organizations such as
Planned Parenthood, they often pronounce abstinence and by extension, fidelity,
unrealistic, too difficult for the young and even unnatural if you reckon our nature not
essentially different from the beasts. With abstinence so categorized where does that
leave marriage fidelity? Is not cheating “natural?” These false and dangerous nostrums
are proclaimed truth in spite of the pre-1960s statistics showing the success of abstinence
and fidelity and in spite of the hardy protestations of the Beckers and the Church.
The words “natural” and “unnatural” are sometimes used without precision in these
matters and can mislead. For some, everything difficult is unnatural and if easy it’s
natural. By such thinking most of the great accomplishments of humanity would fall into
the unnatural category because almost all of them required great personal sacrifice and
often hardship. Henry Sidgwick once wrote, “give a specific precision to the meaning of
“natural,” since in a sense… any impulse is natural…” Impulses flowing from divided
natures such as ours might well be good like George Bailey’s when he took the plunge
into icy water to save Clarence or bad as the thirst for revenge that drives many terrorists.
That is why Sidgwig added, “…but it is manifestly idle to bid us to follow nature in this
(latter) sense,” idle to say he least, extremely dangerous. Ethics would then become
applied Darwinian natural selection with its brutal concomitant survival of the fittest by
which theft and murder may be as natural as love and compassion or more so. The natural
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that we seek to cultivate is the one working to achieve and realize the part of our nature
still in harmony with and reflective of our origins in the creative will of the Father and
before that original harmony which prevailed was disrupted.
Nothing could be more estranged from the ethic of evolution than the Sermon on the
Mount. In it Jesus states the loftiest standard ever raised for love on Earth: to love
enemies and offer no resistance to wrongdoers. In the words of Professor Emilio Chavez,
we are to “to overcome the natural, tribal self-protective instincts of evolution, natural
selection and survival of the fittest and allow God’s grace to transform our unbelieving
selfishness into a new creation…” This new creation with its high ethic is reflective of
the time prior to the primal moral collapse and the triumph of destructive pride. “You
shall be as gods” was the come on presented in Genesis that was not rejected by our
ancestors. Well, as a result we became something other than gods though there are those
who haven’t got the word. The obvious word is that the fall from grace weakened our
natures and left them prone to evil. It is a weakness that often makes the good more
difficult than the evil or to paraphrase St Paul again: the good I will I don’t and that
which I don’t will I do. Why is that? Why are we so conflicted? Because the weakened
nature we have inherited finds the evil often more in accord with it and the good more of
a challenge to it. Even goods not involving moral issues are often a difficulty. What great
accomplishment, invention, work of art, is brought off by submission to dominating
passions and yens rather than keeping them in their place, holding them off to make room
for the dedication, labor, effort and sacrifice required to bring the superlative off. In the
moral sphere, faithful married monogamy between a husband and wife is the great work
of art for most of us but it too requires sacrifice, work and dedication, in a word, love.
Because of this wounded nature handed down to us, it is often much more of a challenge
than dalliance and infidelity for the run of the mill male. But then, how often this
unreliable, untrustworthy, some Calvinists would go so far as to say utterly miserable and
corrupt, nature of ours throws a monkey wrench into our lives if we go too easily along
with it! Consistently overindulge in anything and flirt with disaster. The parade of
evidence presented in many of these pages should be proof enough of that.. The same
evidence suggests that a faithful, loving, monogamous marriage is not only better for the
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physical and psychological health of the individuals but also far better for the children
and society in general than any of the easier alternatives. Isn’t it always the way!
We well know how prone to destructive and enslaving vices our severely weakened
and damaged human nature is. It is clear that it must be subdued and controlled if we are
to accomplish the good and avoid the evil especially that worst of all slaveries, slavery to
our own weaknesses, passions, drives and vices. That kind of enslavement, the obsession
of so many to on line porn for example,, an estimated 75million view it daily, is a current
for many a marriage and a provocation to promiscuity with all its dangers to health and
even life. It leaves little room for more beneficial recreations and has become another
factor in the decline of marriage. Affecting more and more of them, the wife becomes
marginalized, neglected and resentful. Slavery to ones own weakness and vices is the
worst slavery of all because it robs us of our own freedom and even destroys our selfrespect. For the many who have never mastered that little word, “no,” the going can be
very rough indeed. We see people all the time who are forced to say it or sicken and die
of any number of things, smoking, alcohol, sugar, drugs, AIDS though that last group has
relied heavily on public funded searches for a cure to make the “no” word unnecessary.
How many of us would like to say with that old song, “Maggie” that those lines on
our face are “a well written page and time alone was the pen,” but many of us well know
that time alone was not the pen. With many of us other things were at work etching our
face and wrecking our bodies. For many of us over indulgence of one kind or another,
abuse and even outright vice had a hand. The unprecedented amount of sexually
transmitted diseases loose in America, some permanent, some causing sterility, some
deadly affirms what Senator Moynihan wrote back in 1993 of the growing amount of
sexual deviancy in the country and the country’s knack of ignoring it by, in his words
“defining deviancy down.” This trend recently culminated in some states defining
marriage down.
It was this penchant for self-slavery, in a word, “the slavery to sin,” that the Church
first took aim at with the liberation of all people from its mastery as the goal. With the
mastery of sin, as far as it can be accomplished, all other slaveries would decline
including human slavery and to a great extent it did. As Christianity spread,. Europe
edged itself away from the vast human slavery edifice of the classical pagan era. With
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the Gospel’s persistent influence the Church gradually freed itself and civil society from
its sway and by 1000 AD Europe become the one place on the planet where slavery was
almost completely extinguished. Unfortunately, the wars against Islamic military
expansion and the discovery of the New World breathed some new life into the old
carcass and it took another three hundred or more years before Christians in Europe and
America finally took the lead and killed it dead. But it persisted in many other places
where that influence was not yet felt and still does in various forms. Even in the West as
the hold of Christianity weakness, it is making a rebound in the form of human
trafficking for sex. Coincidentally, this very motivator was a factor in the original
expansion of Islam. The harems of the lusty young warriors had to be filled and mothernature only provided a 50/50b male-female split. This meant conquest. As one wag put it,
Islamic expansion, motivated by religion and economics had also the aspect of a babe
hunt. Indeed in India as it was conquered by Islamic armies,the women had to be hidden.
Explaining purdah, the Maharaja of Banaras remarked in a National Geographic article,
“The Ganges River of Faith,” in 1971 that “”Hindus always showed restraint in
exhibiting their women but the system became more rigid after the Moslem invasions.
Hindus had to protect their women from the conquerors…”
It was mentioned, the Christian dogma most readily observable is original sin. The
detritus of our damaged nature is all around us and sometimes as close as our mirror.
Freeing us from its affects and the slaveries it engenders has been the Church’s most
challenging and unending assignment. Challenging too because the weakness has
affected the Church itself at times as wrong actions and non-teaching policies have been
on occasion pursued in eras past. The illness on board the great ship sometimes affected
captain and crew.
Amid all the vagaries of history and life, a good marriage then is the work of art
most available to us, and worthy of our effort and talent. Like all great endeavors it
requires sacrifice, sacrifice made possible by love and more joyful with more love.
Instead of imagining no religion as some1960s tunesters suggested, imagine widespread
chastity before marriage and fidelity in marriage; they have to be reestablished and taken
seriously if we are to dig ourselves out of the calamitous problems hitting so many in our
troubled society. The rise of single parenthood and a nearly 50% divorce rate are two
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good examples. When marriages break and families sink into poverty and disruption so
does the society and the glitz of media land will not be able to sugar it over. What is hard
to imagine is such a reversal happening without religion and the spread of its influence.
Statistically in more than half of marital and family breakups the influence of infidelity
was a factor. At the risk of again waxing poetic, Tess Trueheart and Tom Lockheart, so
adept at uttering the essential “no” word, where are you when we need you?
Though faithlessness is more a Tom Lockheart than a Tess Trueheart problem, the
female is not exempt. For neither sex do attractions dangerous and threatening to
marriage entirely abate after the “I do.” But for the many, though by no means all, those
who were promiscuous before marriage, handling fidelity in marriage can be especially
galling. Seeing sex as little more than self-gratification, they often see no reason to
practice abstinence and while practice doesn’t always make perfect it helps greatly in
preparation for the successful married state. But, the challenge of fidelity be it to
marriage vows or celibacy vows, a struggle for many, becomes ever more so with a
popular media pumping all kinds of sex, though rarely the married variety, into an
already saturated society. At times most married men find women other than their wives
attractive. Lines have to be drawn, sacrifices made, Madonna tossed in the can, to guard
the vows voluntarily taken. Thus the innocent are protected, specifically the spouses to
whom love and fidelity were first pledged and the children deserving nurturing that is
best provided by both parents. At those times the art of lockheart comes in. Locking
one’s heart to the other is called for, often not pleasant or easy and certainly unnatural by
the yens flowing from the present weakened state of our human nature. This is one of
those “unnatural” things that is absolutely needed and good. It is an essential for marriage
and its flourishing A future of bright promise and accomplishment depends upon it.
But the challenges are there and growing. For example, in today’s work place with
men and women increasingly mixing on equal terms and where the “work-spouse,” a
term used in a recent “USA Today” piece for a co-worker of the opposite sex who is a
particularly close friend, is an increasingly common phenomena. The guarding of the
heart and the uttering of a personal “no” to crossing that line is what fidelity is about.
With our split nature, it is often not easy at all but it need not be entirely negative if done
with humor, style and intelligence the way Tom Lockheart always did it. To pull out the
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poetic again, every married man must be a Tom Lockheart and every wife a Tess
Trueheart. These two, by the way, were the names often given to admirable stock
characters of the silent film era when hissing the villain in black and cheering the hero in
white were the rage. Of course, in our much more sophisticated age such cheering is
reserved for stripped to the waste, tattooed to the ears, sweaty pounding rock groups.
To reiterate, in a society saturated with virtual and real promiscuity and the
declining influence of faith and religion, an influence often replaced by a media diet of
heavily suggestive song and dance, sex and violence type programming, the restraint
required for abstinence out of marriage and fidelity in is more difficult than ever. Add a
nature sorely weakened and easily tempted even among the strongest and best motivated
and the problem looms all the larger. It is no good to say as some do that it is only natural
and nothing to fuss about. The problem with the “only natural” ploy is it drops everything
optional, difficult and discomforting into the unnatural category. In fact, our thoughts,
reflections, desires and emotions, the unique and priceless components of our spirit and
obviously not material in essence, are sorely inclined to evil and the struggle against that
evil is not unnatural but essential for our survival. Inclined though we may be, we are not
doomed to doing the wrong as if totally corrupted. The battle against our disordering
tendencies and passions is essential lest they run rampant sewing destruction as they go.
Individual virtue is a form of self-rule, the greatest sovereignty of all, a declaration of
independence from demeaning and destructive addictions and vices. On the other side,
the “do your own thing” fling is tantamount to being ruled by, indeed enslaved to our
often out of control drives and desires.
The call for the kind of good living urged here, an art and like all art difficult and
a work in progress, is what is called for but we don’t hear it coming from the Dr.
Weismans, the media or the society celebrity elite. It seems only the church is calling
loudly for it. The media is often sounding a different call.
It is a mistake to identify these desires with human nature instead of a fallen and
weakened human nature. And kow-towing to drives and passions that often flow from
and envelop this nature, as most of the mature know, is no guarantee of happiness. Quite
the contrary, as the piles of problems of human making now surrounding us amply
demonstrate. As an aside, in that most central area of sexuality, there is no evidence of
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appreciably enhanced male happiness in polygamous societies. As one humorous
observer put it, monogamous Christian Europe strongly resisted the military conquest of
Islam because it carried with it polygamy and “no man can serve two (four or more)
masters.” (For information on the European resistance to the spread of Islam and
polygamy go to Vol. I, Cha.5&6 of this 6 Vol. work.) By the way, for what it’s worth, the
art of stand up comedy, indeed most comedy, is not known to be more highly developed
or even very widespread for that matter in non-monogamous societies.
Love is really blinded when illicit passion takes over and when blindness like that
is in the driver’s seat many innocents are run over. The saddened and often broken lives
of the victims to whom fidelity had been pledged that litter the centuries from Henry
VIII’s good and faithful wife Catherine to the latest headlines is the living proof. As said,
the challenge is great but is met successfully by millions even now who remain faithfully
married. The key to that success is usually the authentic love that has been described
albeit falteringly in these essays. Marriage, we saw, is one of love’s great learning
centers. In its classroom, a school of emotional hard knocks sometimes, the human being
can learn what love is, internalize it, and reflect in a dim but courageous way the love that
motivated God to create. For most of us marriage is the best crucible in the world for
learning about the kind of love that put us here in the first place. It is the reason for being.
The missing motive that revelation provided for creation. The why there is something
rather than nothing other than God alone. The why the necessary eternal being who must
be because we and all else exist, brought it all forth with a bang. For all that, love is the
project most worth working at, protecting, preserving, and making work no matter the
odds and challenges.
In the face of all comers, diversions, and temptations no matter how comely,
charming, attractive in person or personality, that little word “no” must be uttered and in
this way love is protected and the spread of more pain and grief prevented. Lockheart to
the rescue! The “no” sayer must often carry some of that pain that would have with a
“yes” been inflicted instead on spouse and children. It’s called sacrifice and there is no
authentic love without it or the willingness to embrace it. It is part of the lesson of Christ
on his cross. No one has gone on record claiming love and marriage are easy but it is
ordinary man and women’s greatest achievement, their personal work of art.
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XXXII
OF MARRIAGE, PAIRRAGE AND POPULATION
Infidelity is a great threat to marriage no doubt but there are others that threaten
serious derailment. By 2010 massive out of wedlock births of almost 50% to women with
high school educations or less as well as the spike in illegitimacy that Moynihan had
predicted in the general population materialized. All told out of wedlock births went from
6% in 1965 when things were beginning to unravel to 33% by 2008. Co-habitation
became common and these innovations courtesy of the new non-morality were taking a
toll both on marriage and society in general. The cost of following one’s bliss, doing your
own thing, following your heart wherever it may temporarily lead regardless of the
damage left behind, in other words freeing the authentic self from the stifling chains of
convention and the “hypocrisy” of the old morality, what is essentially the whole
collection of bad counsel sounding from almost every advice column and educational
rostrum in the country was a veritable recipe for disaster. It shouldn’t have taken a master
of extrapolation to see what was coming and who was going to pay. And, ironically it
seldom produced the happiness hoped for, far from it as those who have tread that path
are often the first to tell. It is valuable to remember the gentleman who said, “I don’t
know what is in the heart of evil men but I know something of ordinary men and women
and it terrifies me.” In other words, for the vast majority of us floundering human beings
caution is called for. All the popular good sounding advice fits perfect beings, which we
clearly are not. The woman who drowned her children was following her bliss in the form
of a “devoted” lover who soon disappeared. Self-mastery over drives, passions and bliss’
is freedom and true self-determination. It is even productive of a happiness that
unfettered pursuit of self-fulfillment never is. That path is the usual way often leading to
self-enslavement, misery, self-destruction, despair with very little true happiness to show
for it. And, it can be costly to contain the damage to people and society that frequently
results. The blossoming social services budgets of every level of government, Federal,
state and local, with the taxes to support them testify to that.
Helping the problems grow is modern value free sex education as found in most of
our schools. It seems to have quickly filled the values vacuum created symbolically and
apparently effectively too with the banning of any reference to God that was achieved the
Engle school prayer decision. It has been there right along with the growing debacle. No
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one had ever died, got sick or lost their creative, intellectual or athletic powers as a result
of abstaining from sex but now for educational purposes abstinence was deemed, by the
experts who eventually decided that homosexuality was natural, to be unnatural and even
worse, a “religious” value. In this expert mindset, since sex, almost of any kind, was
natural abstaining must be unnatural additionally so because it was difficult. The thought
that abstinence had been practiced successfully by most people through the centuries, as
studies and statistics will show, made nary a dent in their thinking. The age of the
condom was ushered in and the abortion and single parent numbers are glaring testimony
to the ineffectiveness of years of this condom centered sex education. Unfortunately in
many regions it was about the only sex education being implemented during those years.
A 2002 study by Dr. David Paton of Nottingham University found no evidence that
Planned Parenthood type of family planning with condoms the centerpiece reduced either
underage conception or abortion rates among teenage girls under sixteen. Since the study
teen pregnancy has continued to rise. A more recent study by the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine suggests that an abstinence only program was in fact
more successful than safe sex only education centered primarily on condom usage. The
study found that those attending an eight- hour program emphasizing abstinence were
33% more likely to abstain from sexual activity for a two-year period than children in the
safe sex condom program. The multitude of experts of the Dr.Weisman stripe would be
puzzled by the success of such self-control among teenagers thought to be totally unable
to control sexual urges, however those with knowledge of pre-1960s social and sexual
history wouldn’t be. Bottom line, where abstinence was the centerpiece of the approach,
the results were generally better. That approach, however, was often scoffed at by a sexeducation establishment dominated by the Weisman types. It was labeled unrealistic,
moralistic and worst still, religious.. But the evidence is there for all to see. The relying
exclusively on condoms is dangerous when compared to abstinence. Contraceptive
manufacturers concede a failure rate of about 15% for married couples and a good deal
higher for teens and according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, “there is no clear
evidence that condoms reduce the risk of most sexually transmitted diseases including
gonorrhea and chlamydia.” Thirty-five percent of all sexually transmitted diseases are
incurable. The same organization estimated condom efficiency against HIV infection at
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87% and that a deadly disease! Misleading young people by implying that they will have
sex and that condoms will protect them is a dangerous con. The only thing condoms are
safer than is nothing but promiscuity with condoms is tantamount to playing Russian
roulette with your health and life.
Leaving school with a sex education like that and with pockets full of condoms,
marriage was going to be in for some rough sledding. It turned out that many in the
generations of love, peace and music possessed insufficient authentic marriage quality
love to either abstain before marriage or remain faithful afterward. Not only that but they
often preferred co-habitation, shacking up in the earlier more descriptive term, with the
inimitable “significant other” as a warm up for the big commitment. But more often than
not the insignificant other faded rather fast from the scene often leaving a mom and child
holding the proverbial bag. Statistically, those co-habitating before marriage, despite the
conventional wisdom, divorce at higher rates than those who didn’t. Apparently those
who don’t shack up have a higher regard for love, sex and marriage and the partner than
those who do.
Now add in some economic ripples. A morass of poverty came on strong and
overwhelmed great numbers, especially the young women of the high school or less
category, many of them single mothers, and their children. Many were left in dire
straights. The idea that having children out of wedlock as a viable alternative to marriage
spread and was even lauded in some misguided circles. Silly actresses with no financial
worries paraded their single motherhood around thus influencing the easily influenced.
They not only helped speed along the deterioration of marriage but also helped sink many
women and children below or close to the poverty line. Single parenthood for most is not
what the well-heeled media and movie establishment portrays. Especially hard hit has
been the African American community, a community that before the disastrous 1960s
had a higher legitimacy rate than Whites. Among many of them the influence of media
and music replaced church and gospel with disastrous results.
Illegitimacy along with divorce is the great traditional enemy of marriage, civilized
progress and is a great promoter of poverty and decline. Marriage did not develop in
every culture and clime on a whim but for good reasons based on human experience and
learned through history and pre-history’s hard knocks. The male-female bond answers to
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the longings of the human heart for true intimacy. There is nothing like faithful
monogamy, challenging as it is, for that. Marriage is mankind’s most ancient social
institution. It has always been society’s foundation. Nearly all societies whatever
exceptions they allow for divorce and separation, invest the union with the promise of
permanence, a permanence weakened in the West by the new churches born in the
Reformation of the 1500s. Anglicanism, for example, was born of divorce. The irony is
that today, the hard won lessons of mankind’s cultural history are often being blindly
discarded by those who have no clue as to what stands behind the great institution. One
writer summed up that background thusly: It arose from a world of brute force where
women were often considered man’s possession and polygamy was the rule more often
than not. It took intelligence, grace and much human history to advance to the highly
civilized state of one man lovingly and freely committing himself to one women and she
freely returning the commitment in a protected family state. The arrangement provided
intimacy for the partners, stability and protection for women, particularly when pregnant
and helped to ensure that the children would receive the nurturing, love and guidance of
two people fully interested in their welfare.
Marriage helps nail down footloose males to face responsibility, support dependents
and learn love. In addition, there was the practical concern of many peoples to continue
the group or tribe or culture in the best possible way. Monogamy best facilitates the
interpersonal bonding that frequently aids the disposition and development of authentic
love between an intimate pair and though it goes against the disruptive grazing propensity
of many males, a propensity to which most of the world’s Eastern religions including
Islam condescend, it is by far the premier form of marriage for the close nurturing of
children and for the equality of the sexes. The Judeo-Christian tradition especially as
enshrined in Catholicism stands strongest in this support for this greatest form of human
love and dedication, faithful monogamy. Without its impact, especially as Catholicism
carried it to many peoples, how else could men in a man dominated world be induced to
surrender their ancient sexual prerogatives in favor of chastity, monogamy and fidelity? It
is this difference among others that made the West different. These male sexual
prerogatives, to use the term loosely, are again being taken up in our time thanks to an
historically oblivious media’s constant representation of swinging, to use the current term
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for promiscuity, playing the field, shacking up, grazing around, polyamory etc., as the
“cool” and harmless. Catholicism has long experience in opposition to these damaging
primarily male pursuits. It held fast when Islam almost conquered Europe. Under Islam it
was a man’s world again. It propagated among other things a male dominated religion
featuring polygamy and easy male divorce. Under the influence of the Gospel however
the men of Europe resisted Islam and all its blandishments including that of religiously
sanctioned polygamy. Mohammed, the religion’s founder, had nine wives. A few kings of
Europe were tempted at times to shed wife for the harem but dared not the Church’s
sanction of excommunication and interdict. The story is found in Part I, “The First
Nineteen” of this six part series. Indeed, Henry VIII after leaving his wife for Anne
Boleyn, took England out of the Church on the related issue of divorce. But the Church
would not back down as it does not on the issue today and the even more important issue
of life and abortion. Abortion takes many more females worldwide where the male is
preferred, than males. Women have had no better friend in history than the Church.
Tinkering with an institution that has served women, children and civilization so well
and has forced the male to pull in his horns is dangerous enough as the rise in
promiscuity, divorce, single parenthood and poverty all hardest on women, testify but
when a misguided government decides that marriage is so unimportant as to be in
indifferent to the sex of the spouses as it does when approving same-sex marriage, it must
also commit itself to the belief that that most vital of tasks, the rearing of children, is also
indifferent to the sex of the parents. But such is not actually the case. For long the
Chinese have rightly understood that as the twig is bent so grows the tree. Having
homosexual parents appears to increase the risk of incest by a factor of about 50%.
According to a study of homosexual parents by P. Cameron and K. Cameron, 29% of
adult children of homosexual partners had been specifically subject to sexual molestation
by a homosexual parent compared to 0.6 % of adult children of heterosexual parents. If
this wasn’t bad enough, encouraging homosexual activity also bodes ill for the future of a
nation barely able to maintain the 2.1child per couple birthrate necessary just for
replacement. Once a depopulation slide begins it is terribly difficult to stop.
Unpleasant as it is to continue this litany of errors there is the problem of infidelity.
Again, this is a prime cause of marriage’s decline. Heterosexuals since the 1960s have
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taken a large hand in this development but adding homosexuals, a group no more
qualified for marriage with its essential potential for life than the completely and
permanently impotent or the prepubescent child, is fraught with further damage for
marriage because of the well documented homosexual propensity for promiscuity. In the
Goodrich vs. the Massachusetts Department of Public Health case, of 156 same-sex
couples studied none had maintained sexual fidelity after five years. Many subsequently
broke up. This is precisely the kind the instability and danger marriage evolved to combat
with the good of mother and child in mind. Remove that, the potential for life and
motherhood, and what is left, whatever it is, is not marriage.
The important connection of the permanent marriage environment to health,
sexuality and population maintenance is demonstrated in numerous studies including a
Danish one involving two million men and women. Its conclusions show that sexual
orientation is heavily influenced by family environment. For example, intact parents with
multiple children of both sexes increase the probability of heterosexual pairings in their
children. A Canadian study adds the disputed observation that apparently the more older
brothers there are increases the chances of homosexuality in the youngest brother. The
across the board indication is that family matters and that the intact family with mother
and father present encourages heterosexuality, the sole relationship guaranteeing a future.
That family and social factors function to help shape adult sexual orientation is strongly
suggested in the study but it is no surprise. Freud speculated a century ago that
overprotective mothers and distant fathers helped make boys homosexual. Since then no
special “gay” gene has been detected on any scientific screen there is however
observational evidence of very early sexual orientation, a case of genetically identical
twin boys in the same post-birth environment going in different directions very early on
with cause yet to be nailed down. One guess speculates that the homosexually orientated
boy who was born a pound lighter than his brother was somehow pre-natally stressed at a
point when the brain is really developing. Orientation set so early is leading some
researchers to look at hormones in the mother’s blood. But the research showing
environmental influences stands very strong. Devoid of an intact family situation,
children who experience parental divorce, for example, are less likely to marry
heterosexually than children reared in intact families. With a divorce rate fluctuating
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between 40% and 50% this bodes ill for the essential heterosexual connection needed for
continuance. For each additional year parents stayed married the probability of
heterosexual marriage in the children increased by 1.6% among the sons and 1.0% among
the daughters while the rate of homosexual unions decreased for every year of intact
parental marriage. This most extensive of studies was published in “Archives of Sexual
Behavior” in 2006 and concluded that environmental and biological factors centered on
the family noticeably influence sexual attractions and behavior. Obviously heterosexual
marriage is essential for survival. It has a tremendous influence on sexual orientation
with intact marriage a factor engendering the kind of sexuality necessary for the very
existence of a future.
When it comes to physical health, heterosexuality is also a key factor in that it is
much less promiscuous, temporary and disease spreading than homosexual unions.
Governments should be encouraging traditional heterosexual marriage not redefining,
defining down and deconstructing it. If the care of human life and not its destruction is as
essential to good government as Jefferson says it is, no encouragement to homosexuality
should be forth coming. According to the “Omega Journal of Death and Dying”
homosexuals on average have a 3 to 6 year shorter lifespan than heterosexuals with the
median age of AIDS victims at thirty-nine. Even fiscally AIDS, a discretionary affliction,
is a disaster costing the country $13 billion annually. But the elected representatives in
democratic governments and the judges they appoint or approve are very susceptible to
well financed, highly concentrated and organized, media backed pressure groups. Relying
on the inattention and short retention span of a media inundated populace awash in
distracting trivia as well as good old fashioned lack of interest, they have given us samesex marriage as earlier they gave us abortion on demand with nary a single referendum of
the people approving either including California where same-sex marriage was voted
down by the people only to see the people’s decision overridden by a Federal Judge. This
is very low-grade democracy working for a very dangerous cause. But, there is hope. As
the years go by the populace sometimes wakes to the horror of what has been perpetrated
while so many were distracted. The rising pro-life movement is testimony to that.
The decline of marriage at the hands of heterosexuals and its deconstruction and
redefining by influential homosexual pressure groups has hurt across the board but the
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African American community especially. The disaster to family life is deepened by that
community’s very high rate of abortion, a ghastly 60% in N.Y. City. Overall about 72%
of births in the black community are to unmarried women. For the nation as a whole in
2008 a record 41% of births in the U.S. were to unmarried women, up from 28% in 1990
and about 5% in the 1950s. Modern sex education has been a great success! The sexperts
of today would find it scarcely credible that 17th Century Europe, a society where people
usually married in their late twenties, a degree of chastity was practiced that kept the
illegitimacy rate-without contraceptives- as low as 2 % or 3 %. This is to a good degree
religiously encouraged self-mastery. The achievement generally continued during the
1950s 5% and then came the breakdown. Artificial birth control methods including the
pill stepped in with massive educational and media support, self-mastery was discouraged
and the result is before us. The pathologies that Moynihan had foreseen four decades ago
rising in the Black community are now widespread and growing in the whole community.
Now, with marriage in such disarray mostly at the hands of heterosexuals, the samesex marriage issue enters in. Appendix one attached takes a look. Changing the definition
of the millennia old institution should cause a thoughtful pause for reflection and
consideration of consequences but not among the same sex zealots. Theirs is a socialpolitical movement with very different goals and agendas regarding marriage. They
certainly do not view the begetting and nurturing of children in a loving family state and
consequently the forming of a new and healthy generation as a weighty consideration.
Marriage was established for that reason but no matter, marriage is a political statement
of equality for most of them. They think it is overdue for redefinition. That it is every
society’s premier institution for present health and future survival and tampering with it
fraught with danger causes no hesitation. New social experiments, arrangements and
relationships totally closed by their very definition from beginning to end to any chance
of procreation are not in reality and never have been considered marriage. For the new
phenomenon at hand, namely the declaring of a fruitless and sterile relationship between
same sex people to be marriage, it may be more appropriate for clarity sake to coin a new
term, “pairrage” for example, so that the two entities not be confused. The new word
might help combat the popular confusion engendered in these important matters by a
media establishment and an academic elite very supportative, under the guise of equality
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or freedom or privacy, of almost all rights newly manufactures by the courts including
abortion and same sex marriage. This they consider trend setting and rule breaking strides
toward equality instead of the actual shrinkage of the most important right of all, life and
the dismantling of society’s most indispensable and ancient institution for its creation and
nurturing. The heterosexual relationship with its potential for procreation should be
honored and guarded as unique and essential, rather than diluted by lumping with
inherently sterile and unstable relationships.
But, in fact, equality is not the issue here. One may be button cute and still not
make it in Hollywood, sharp as a tack and still not get into MIT, sing like a bird and be
turned down at the Met, have an arm like a rifle and be shot down by the Yankees. As
with marriage all these are matters involve qualification not equality and making equality
the issue is tantamount to demanding open admission to just about everything with results
likely disastrous. Hollywood, MIT, the Met, the Yankees would be destroyed under such
“openness” and so will marriage, an institution far more important to society than any of
the others. Yet, the very politicians who are unable to do basics such as creating
intelligent budgets, under pressure from a tiny but vocal minority undertake to tamper
with marriage. Mindless media encouraged support even glorifying homosexuality,same
sex marriage and raising AIDS victims to modern martyr status similar to Martin Luther
King should be rejected. The child infected with AIDS through the parent excepted of
course, more often than not those sick with HIV are so through their own dangerous
behavior. Indeed it is a vogue among some gay men to seek out partners who have HIV.
Tammy Bruce in her book, “The Death of Right and Wrong,” cites one such man who
said “When you get with someone who has HIV, it’s like being with someone greater
than you are.” In a society where victims are glorified, of course it is. Is it dangerous? Of
course it is. Is it costly in life and treasure? Of course it is. Should it be encouraged? Of
course not! Should understanding and aid be afforded with remedial education where it
may help? Of course it should.
The crusade for same sex marriage creates other problems. It increases a danger
already present in many Western nations, of deep population plunges and even eventual
depopulation in contradiction to the usual overpopulation rhetoric. A dash of reality
helps. In the thankfully unlikely event that homosexuality will ever became the norm, it
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should be realized that if it did the human race would be extinct in short order. That’s
how radically abnormal, to use that unpopular term, homosexuality is. Practiced enough,
it brings us to the brink of the very extinction that sex is there to forestall and overcome.
Depopulation is a coming problem. Spain’s has been mentioned but it is not unique.
It is facing a 10% population decline by 2050 but so are Belgium, Germany, Austria, the
Czech Republic, Greece and Sweden. A shrinkage of over 20% is projected for Italy,
Russia and most of the former Eastern Block nations except Poland and Romania.
Russia’s population is shrinking so fast it offers $11, 500 for the second child. The
Ukraine will lose half its population in fifty years and Germany will have shrunk by 98%
in 200 years if things don’t reverse soon. Who says wealth equals happiness? Existence
in this most affluent of ages must be so painful many people don’t want to pass it on.
Either that or so pleasant they don’t want the bother of raising and sharing it with their
progeny. Affluence and selfishness seem to go hand in hand and indeed it does if recent
studies are valid. The love of money spawns not children but desires for things other than
children. Sometimes there are children later on as a missed experience essentially in the
same kind of category as an adventuresome afterthought. Grabbing all that gusto is hard
work even without the hindrance of marriage, family and children. The degree of
selfishness that is involved, the contracepting and aborting of one’s own so that they
don’t get in the way, brings it to a new level under the sun.
In America the white majority is already below the 2.1 replacement level with
minorities especially African Americans getting close partly due to a very high rate of
abortion. If it weren’t for the Hispanic Americans and immigration the U.S. would be
facing population decline similar to some of the nations mentioned earlier. Hispanics
have an average of 2.9 children per women compared to 1.8 for non-Hispanic whites. The
million immigrants a year who receive permanent resident status contribute to 82% of
U.S. population growth that will reach 400 million as early as 2040. First and second
generation Americans will be a third of our citizenry in fifteen years. If we legally
admitted just 300,000 instead of a million people a year by 2060 the population of the
U.S. would be 80 million less than it’s likely to be on current course. Though our Social
Security system is far from fiscally healthy it is in better shape than the nations that are
graying at a faster rate than we are. All the near or below zero growth nations will be
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saddled with an even greater elderly-dependency ratio in the years ahead forcing today’s
shriveled younger generations to pick up the costs mostly through higher taxes and
deferred retirements. The irony will be that many childless grays, including homosexuals
will end up living at least to some degree off other people’s children. As we live longer
we draw out more than we put into the system and without the children to eventually put
into the system, the crunch will come. That could become a thorny political and social
problem once the media lets the information through. The retiring baby boomers haven’t
set the best example for compassion and altruism. No group was stronger for legalizing
abortion. Would it be a surprise if the rationing of their aid and benefits came along? Is
the fire bell in the night the voice of the embittered high schooler to the effect that the
older generation gave them abortion, destroying a quarter of their generation, and that
they will give back euthanasia, beginning to ring? Already we hear tinklings. In 2010
Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu argued that some people could be euthanized “at
least partly to ensure that their organs could be donated.” If to save organs why not to
save money? The first known case of harvesting was a woman in Belgium in 2008.
Thankfully, not all are as embittered over generational slaughter as the young woman just
quoted or inhumanly utilitarian as the biosthicist but there is no doubt that legalizing
abortion has led to a growing callousness toward life in general and its dignity and
inviolability. How could it be otherwise with 50 million destroyed lives in the U.S. alone
since 1973? Life is getting cheaper, never a good development for the weak, vulnerable
and dispensable. In 2000 18% of abortions were third abortions. Now that’s cheap life!
The promise was that legalization would make abortion rarer instead it made it more
common and life more disposable. People learn from the law and a human dignity built
up through centuries of Christianity was severely damaged by Roe. Multiple abortions
are plentiful. Whoopie’s six is bad enough but a woman in India has had thirty!
Repercussions often unforeseen and unplanned are not unusual. It seems inevitable that
as the nation becomes more killing friendly more than the pre-born will be at risk. Mother
Theresa’s fear should also be kept in mind. She predicted that as people become more
dispensable, wars will become more plausible. As the angry young women mentioned
earlier might put it, the twenty-year old killed in action had a one in four chance of being
killed in the womb. The carelessness about life, especially of the dependent, less
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fortunate and advantaged life and the selfish unconcern for any future but one’s own is
something that is always lurking in the wings but has never taken center stage among
masses of people as it has since the 1960s. It is far removed from the stated objective of
the nation’s founders that their efforts in establishing the nation were not just to benefit
themselves but also their posterity. But what happens to a society whose heterosexuals
avoid marriage and children all the while encouraging homosexual pursuits as normal and
even chic? The only group that can reproduce won’t and the rest can’t with the result, no
posterity, or at least not enough to keep going. Immigration has obscured and delayed
what the current U.S. birth trend is pointing to, demographic decline with economic
problems hardly fully realized. Surprises are coming if attitudinal change doesn’t come
first.
Science tells us that the urge to reproduce is perhaps “the fundamental imperative
of natural selection.” If there is anything to it then many women are ignoring the urgings
of their genes. Thirty percent of German women are childless and many other nations are
right there with her. Despite all the self-serving rhetoric of sex education, the fact is
reproduction and even sex itself are not addictions. We still have free will. We can be
chaste. We can practice abstinence. We can be childless if we want to. Unlike creatures
of a lower order we are free to deny certain commands of our genes, as we are the
commands of our Creator. This is a valuable lesson for the hordes of misguided sex
educators and counselors who deny the possibility of propagating and promoting
abstinence education. It has been done and can be done.
It is a fact though that in certain ways the evolutionary aspects of nature can be
foreboding and even brutal. Nature abhorrers sterility and rewards it with extinction.
Survival in nature depends on the heterosexual connection. For that reason that singular
relationship has been and should be protected, encouraged and enshrined by every
society. The danger of overpopulation is over if it ever really existed. Concern should be
looking in the opposite direction for once the depopulation slide begins it is very difficult
to put the brakes on it. The prophets of doom and gloom waited for a population bomb
that never came. It was a dud. There are seven billion of us now and still plenty in Earth’s
bounty and space. In fact, as our numbers have climbed so has our well-being. In 1800
with one billion people, per-capita income was about $100. By 1900 with almost two
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billion it reached $500. Currently with seven billion it is over $5,000. Before 2100 when
we hit almost eight billion and the slide begins in earnest it will reach around $30,000 in
current dollars. Driving the so-called population explosion has been a real explosion in
wealth, health and longevity sadly slowed by the primarily self-imposed disease of AIDS
and the rebound of malaria and TB. The population of the world has doubled since 1960
and in the developing world so has income according to the World Bank along with great
gains in caloric intake. Where there is hunger the real problem is not scarcity but the
misdistribution of the goods of the world often due to political unrest, greed, poor
planning and economic experimentation. Doctors trying to help the hungry of Africa
sometimes complain that aid trucks often carry more condoms than food or water. With
the population of the world peaking at eight billion the decline will set in and fast. Under
population will become the problem straining the economies of graying nations. Some
declare that this will spare the Earth and its environment but good planning could do as
much without economic disruption. Even now eighty countries representing well over
half the world’s population have or will soon have below replacement fertility defined as
2.1 children per women. Already the populations of the developed nations are static or
declining, as the U.S.’s would be without immigration. In 2009 the birth rate in the U.S.
fell to its lowest level in history according to the National Center for Health Statistics. To
repeat, it looks like many on the road to Social Security retirement will be living at least
partly off other people’s children. To the hordes of voluntarily barren American urbanites
many of whom depended on IRAs and such for comfortable retirement, the reduced
number of children being born means less support. This should come at no surprise to
those generations who didn’t replace themselves before leaving the workplace. The 52.3
million abortions since Roe doesn’t brighten the picture. These destroyed contributors
never lived to help support the generation that threw them under the bus. The Movement
for a Better America estimates the economic impact of these lost lives is $38.5 trillion in
U.S. Gross Domestic Product since 1970. The number is far greater than what they would
have consumed and without immigrants taking up the slack its impact would be felt much
more. Abortion and contraception dropped U.S. fertility rates from 3.4 children per
female in 1963 to 1.8 by 1975, a tremendous drop for a country having so much fun.
Obviously, children were not part of the mass amusement. Now, with fewer workers
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paying into the system and huge numbers of boomers retiring, Social Security’s ponzistyle financing won’t hold. The latest Social Security Trustees’ report makes it clear that
costs will exceed tax revenues in 2016. 2037 is the date when all Social Security assets
will be exhausted. People living longer, fewer people being born and a bad economy with
10% unemployment are the three tolling bells at the funeral. To silence them, people will
have to work longer, pay more in taxes and retire later. Taxes somewhere will likely go
up either in a regressive payroll tax or the general income taxes. The alternative is a
government with the will and intelligence to get the nation out from under oppressive tax
devouring debt through judicious, fair and serious spending cuts. The government is
under a crushing debt that it created by its unwillingness to say the all-important word,
“no.” Flirting with default has consequences hard to imagine.
A pro-natal tax policy might help preserve the tottering system for our
grandchildren by encouraging Americans to have more children. This could be
accomplished by reducing payroll taxes for workers with three or more offspring and by
reducing benefits for those having fewer than three children; after all, no children, no
future. We can’t keep borrowing from abroad to help support ourselves. The debt
becomes crushing and budget consuming. Meanwhile, what some call the “nanny state”
keeps getting larger, especially with the passage of the new health care bill whose costs
can hardly be accurately estimated especially as the population keeps getting older and
grayer. How will the truncated generations who inherit the national debt take care of the
elderly population that so vastly outnumbers them especially with so many of their
brothers and sisters eliminated by abortion? Children learn from their elders but it’s not a
lesson of selfless concern for others that they will be getting. Will hastened death through
rationing of care and various forms of euthanasia eventually become treatment options?
Involuntary terminations have already euthanized some in extremis in Holland where the
Dutch Medical Association conceded in 1999 that 25% of Dutch physicians admitted to
ending patients’ lives without the patient’s consent. Start with withdrawing protection
from the pre-born and all sorts of doors open. Is it a surprise that the terminally ill would
soon join them? As for Down Syndrome children, they are already fast disappearing. The
list gets longer, life gets cheaper and we are right back to that survival of the fittest that
the love taught in revelation has held in check for a long time. But, the murderous
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philosophy of utilitarianism that measures life by its usefulness to society has grown
stronger since preached by J.S.Mill and Jeremy Bentham many years ago and is carried
on by today’s secularists. The Church fights back with the Gospel in hand. In it
utilitarianism has no part for every individual holds great valus for everyone is a child of
the loving Creator. The U.S. Government use to think so. “All men are created equal and
endowed by their Creator…” but now we have presidents and powers busy tinkering.
They must be carefully watched and confronted.
If the depopulation implosion continues, by 2050 Russia will have shrunk by 25
million people, Japan with a mere 1.2 children per couple by 21 million, Italy by 16
million, and Germany and Spain by 9 million each. All of Europe and Japan will lose half
their population by 2100. Countries below replacement rate fertility will eventually die
out. It’s just a matter of time and its called self-extinction. Only a handful of countries
have fertility rates above 3.0 percent. Nevertheless there are still dinosaurs that believe
people are the problem and that each new child adds to it. There are even fanatics who
will not have children because of their “carbon footprint.” To many of these people the
planet is god and people the problem. Many practice sterile, often out of wedlock sex and
think they are helping. The present administration is caught up in this thinking. USAID
sent out over 755 million male condoms mostly to Africa at over three cents each in
2010. The aim is to reduce population but more urgently attack the AIDS epidemic that
has already taken about 25 million lives there. There are several problems with this
approach. Countries encouraged to put sole reliance on condoms in accord with U.S and
UN policy do not fare as well in the AIDS struggle as nations making abstinence, the
elimination of “grazing,” the center piece of their program. As mentioned, by
misallocating resources in an area in need of food, water and medicine, especially antimalarial aids by flooding it with condoms instead lives are lost. The condom fetish is
indeed dangerous. For many impoverished areas it is not too many people that is the
problem it is this misallocation of resources. Many doctors on the scene there assert that
poor nutrition and water sources are the basic nightmare in Africa. One was quoted as
saying, “Our most effective vaccine is a glass of clean water. The billions of dollars being
spent on HIV and AIDS vaccine development would be much better spent basic food and
water.”
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For all countries the economic fallout from the coming demographic winter will be
serious. By 2050, according to Steve Mosher of the Population Research Institute,
persons aged 65 and older will be almost twice as numerous as children 15 and younger.
This will lead to the closing of schools with attendant unemployment, declining stock
markets and moribund economies. More education is usually accompanied by smaller
families but less than two children is by no means a given and must be avoided. The
monogamous heterosexual who is capable of having twenty children can easily avoid that
without him becoming a latex lover or without her crowding chemicals into her body.
Education opens up family limitation by simply observing and respecting nature’s ways.
Natural family planning which must certainly appeal at a time like ours when what is
natural is highly valued, is even more fool proof now than total reliance on condoms.
From nature’s point of view, fully contracepted and abortion addicted heterosexuality is
as much a dead end as homosexuality. It is almost literally the amusing of ourselves to
death. In that light, encouraging fruitful marriage and discouraging trendy homosexuality
often of a fashionably pseudo variety, far from offending equality or being an example of
homophobia is just good sense. And regarding the encouragement of marriage and the
nurturing of future generations, even that cause is not served well by massive distribution
of condoms among the young. There is plentiful evidence that encouraging sexual
activity among teens as condom distribution to them inevitably does also encourages
divorce in later life. Studies show sexually active teenagers are twice as likely to divorce
later in life than the abstinent. It’s another reason why abstinence education in important..
Nature is not forgiving and cannot practice the mercy of the Creator. It prizes
prodigious procreation, fabulous fecundity, in other words, life, because it too, as we
have observed, is split in upon itself. It, like us, and the rest of the natural world confronts
death with life. It is divided against itself. There is so much in nature going against life,
from diseases to natural disasters, all without mankind’s help. But nature also provides
the winning weapon, fertile sex, by which the triumph of death and extinction can be
defeated. Fecundity through healthy heterosexuality is our best weapon against
annihilation and the ultimate enemy of all life on Earth, extinction. Procreation makes
possible the triumph of life and the continuation of human love and intelligence by which
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we are to make our way against the forces of dissolution but again if those who can won’t
and the rest are of no help because they can’t we are in a serious pickle.
Especially in the West the three gurneys upon which the human race is being wheeled
toward painful decline even demise among some groups and nations is sterile,
contracepted marital sex producing few children, abortion and the promotion of
homosexual activity. The latter can be successfully advanced especially among the
impressionable, vulnerable and malleable young who are susceptible to media hype and
who in growing numbers come from those very types of homes that studies show increase
the chances of homosexual orientation. Toleration must be protected and can be sustained
even as concern rightly grows and corrective solutions are sought. A turn around is
possible with proper education and proper tax schedule inducements. Raising children is
extremely expensive especially for those eschewing the often failing public schools. In
reality this growing group faces double taxation for exercising their parental choice
regarding education. Little tolerance for their exercise of choice comes forth from the
government and indeed they are penalized for it even though they and all parents deserve
more than just tolerance. They deserve help and encouragement. They form the future.
That they got the respect and praise often dished out to the gays. Not so in media land
important as they are. Yet tolerance of the homosexual community can never be a buy in
or an acceptance of any life denying or life destroying way of life nor the swallowing of
the line that homosexuality is the natural equivalent to heterosexuality. That line is almost
as destructive as the one that purports abortion to be simply the other side of the birth
coin.
To avoid a population implosion without reliance on immigration the U.S. needs a
birth rate of at least an average of 2.1 children per women and that just for maintenance.
Women may make wonderful cops, scientists, magazine editors and bankers but men can
do that stuff too. The woman, of the two sexes, is the most important in the most
important work of all, procreation. Only she can give birth. She is the key. All depends
on her. She must be willing. She forms and is the center of the family upon which the
future health and even existence of any society rests. By not giving herself away, by not
being an easy mark for the male, she enhances her innate value and dignity
immeasurably. She has been badly abused not the least by the sexual revolution and the
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feminist movement. Expecting liberation at last, they in fact got a society in which
women almost have to work and men can get what they want from women, sex-without
responsibility or commitment. In short, tragically with “liberation” came disaster for
multitudes. At the same time the evidence mounts of spreading discontent. Few people in
this most affluent of ages, seem happy. Numerous studies, government reports and polls
reveal abysmal numbers in suffering depression. Prescriptions for anti-depressant
medications have gone up 40% in four years. For one thing, women are increasingly
frustrated in their desire for home and children. All the lonely people the Beatles sang
about have increased tremendously and are not who the Beatles imagined. But, women
can have great power to make the man attend, be a serious partner rather than a grazer.
He must be induced to grow up and she can do it. In other words, he must cease being
Hef’s Playboy and become the man he was intended to be and must be if we are to
survive in descent shape or at all. Then the two, women and men can love and work
together in a stable married state. Its nice work too, though it is truly work bringing about
the happy result of humanity’s continuation in generally sound and contented condition.
Like the old “Dixie Cup” song said, “We’re going to the chapel and we’re going to get
married, and we won’t be lonely anymore.” Loneliness is a major contributor to
unhappiness and depression. Marriage is a great anti-dote. Humanity was created to
survive and thrive, to overcome and to be the natural world’s wise custodian. It’s the
message of revelation. If you are against life, your own excepted of course, with no
concern for posterity, you are against humanity, its future and its very continuance. You
are a dead end.
By far that condition, the survival and thriving of humanity, is best achieved within
marriage. In marriage the equal personal dignity of men and women is achieved when
they give themselves with a love that is total and therefore unique and exclusive. Many
studies show that that exclusiveness is more often than not lacking in the homosexual
scene. If same sex couples want to live together its their decision of course but the
situation should not be confused with marriage for several reasons especially because,
unlike marriage, it is a relationship totally closed to procreation whereas the male-female
relationship isn’t. In brief, without homosexuality the world would go on just fine.
Without heterosexuality it wouldn’t go on at all. The two things are vastly different hence
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the two sets of terms, hetero and homo, marriage and pairrage. It is important that words
have accurate definitions. Hence we distinguish two different sports, baseball and
softball, for example, rather than baseball for both because they are not the same and
have different rules and different tools. So too we need two terms to highlight the
important difference in marriage, one word for traditional life producing marriage and
another for the recently promoted but sterile same-sex union. So as not to confuse the
two, as suggested, a different terminology should be adopted with “pairrage” appropriate
for the new legal category. The homosexual union is not on the same plain and should not
go by the same name. They are essentially different with pairrage capturing the prevailing
temporary nature of homosexual relationships. Although marriage has been greatly
abused by heterosexuals with Henry VIII kicking off the new path toward deterioration in
the West. No doubt they were all following their hearts in ditching spouses for new
models. Bliss can be fickle. Probably there is hardly a man or women among us who
could not have done something similar. Why they didn’t is part of what authentic love is
about, sacrifice. But desire is not love and as such often extends beyond the bounds of
marriage. Unchecked by the art of lockheart with grace in support, it can destroy
marriage and family. But there is no need to be enslaved by unchecked desire. It can be
checked. We are free beings and can, by working at authentic love, forego enticing but
destructive desire for the sake of the rightly beloved that includes spouse, child, and
family.
With homosexual desire it is different. As said, it is a sterile and often destructive
form of sexual desire that, in itself, provides motivation for escape. As Andrew Sullivan
made clear, promiscuity is almost a given in the homosexual life style but even there
evidently with effort and will, remediation and redirection is possible. The evidence for
change is plentiful for those wishing out of the life and there is much to motivate such a
desire. A heightened will to change sometimes moved by grace has done it for many as.
in like manner a heightened desire to be faithful helped by grace for the asking, has saved
innumerable marriages and families. It is needless to tell anyone that any of this is easy, it
isn’t and never has been. With porn now in the air we breathe it is more of a challenge
than ever. A 2011 report by sociologists at the University of Buffalo found that popular
media are increasing their “pornified images of women,” which negatively affects both
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men and women. Resisting this negative onslaught can be difficult and for many
sexologists difficult is tantamount to abnormal and though the media parades these sex
experts out for interview at the drop of a hat, their information much like Kinsey’s
research is often bogus. It is the Church again that calls for resistance because of what
authentic love is and because revelation explains how love should be practiced and how it
was intended to be lived. If, sadly, that message floats fewer boats than before, how
about the basic default position that faithful love leads to the reduction of heartbreak,
depression and betrayal in a world increasingly full of it? Or, perhaps the avoidance of a
dead end and often disease filled sexuality in favor of one with a future would induce
change. I must follow my heart is often the hollow retort but desire has to be
distinguished from love. They are not the same. We are called to a life of love not desire.
Love one another is not desire one another. Desire hits randomly and often without the
asking but love has to be cultivated. If desire is random love is aimed. If it is kicked off
by desire it is targeted at a permanence and exclusiveness that raises it above the random
desires and infatuations that buffet us. The world depends on love and if it seems to
border on the impossible and without faith it increasingly seems that way for many
therein lies a big part of the decline we are in. Marriage quality love is faithful love, the
greatest gift children can get, as the statistics from innumerable studies demonstrate. As
the state has redefined life freezing out a whole segment of it in the Roe decision it now
attempts redefinition of love and marriage. When this happens the law changes but not
the reality. Society is thrown into turmoil and division because of the violence committed
against science and truth through legal redefinitions adopted under lobby pressures that
defy both. Hence human life no longer begins at conception though before Roe it did and
scientifically still does for as Walker Percy put it, “all other points are completely
arbitrary.” So too with marriage, it no longer involves only male and female but a same
sex variety though scientifically it is still only the heterosexual relationship that has the
potential for producing the new life that is part of the defining reason for marriage in the
first place. If Roe created division and social tensions that seem to grow rather than heal,
will not this most recent legal redefinition do the same?
There is great danger in all this. It creates division and weakens the necessary
consensus of thought and outlook on the important things that keeps a society up and
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going. This does not a call for lockstep legions marching in mind numbing conformity
but a basic core consensus on the vital matters upon which a society rests. Things like the
value and rights associated with each individual life and the best way to form and nurture
that life for its and everybody’s good. When widespread basic agreement or consensus is
lost that which makes for a vibrant and healthy society is lost. Line crossing is a mere
ornamental pursuit of questionable value though usually tolerable to a degree but that
vital core consensus must be in place. It is that which forestalls descent into the chaos and
confusion that is sometimes a prelude to gradual dissolution through loss of heart. Loss of
heart means loss of the vibrancy and faith that keeps inertia at bay. For every society a
descent into impotent, aimless second rate-ness is always in the wings especially if the
things conducive to it are given center stage and the originating, motivating and creative
consensus is derided. We have already witnessed a President and others altering the
documents upon which that consensus was built. When that happens, when the bold
Madonna like tinkerers with their contingent of happy line crossing devotees are in the
driver’s seat, things begin to unravel and the first to feel the solid ground slipping away
are usually the society’s most “useless” and vulnerable members because the happy line
crossers are usually avid utilitarians. Abortion, euthanasia, cloning, infanticide, same sex
marriage, pedophilia, bigamy, polygamy, even incest, you name it, for once lines are
sufficiently crossed they soon become obliterated. The old male games from promiscuity
to polygamy complete with gaggles of bimbos or houses full of “bunnies” and such,
which the Church has always stoutly frowned upon, can now be dusted off and given new
life along with much else. Shortly it should be expected that the media will jump on
many of these causes. It is adept at selling stuff from underwear and cars to abortion and
homosexual marriage, why not polygamy? Playboy was highly successful in selling porn
and promiscuity. Sadly, as the communication-entertainment industry becomes more
amazingly sophisticated, the stuff it communicates as entertainment becomes more banal,
violent, vulgar and tasteless. We end up with playboy mansions, runways with prancing
screen queens and eventually moral and mental decrepitude. Don’t hold your breath for a
glowing special on those unsung, and thanks to media land, unknown women who would
not play ball with Hef and his centerfolds! That’s one reality show that will never see the
screen. The media doesn’t exactly raise them up for praise. For all its posturing about
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cutting edge it usually avoids the real boat rockers especially when its their boat being
rocked. Hence it idolizes a Bette Davis who had an abortion for career sake but does
nothing remotely similar for Loretta Young who didn’t. Breakthroughs in adult stem cell
usage gets little mention compared to embryonic stem cell research that involves the
destruction of new life. Even parades are filtered. Four hundred thousand can march in
Washington protesting abortion with hardly a notice while five hundred protesting Wall
Street or war get full exposure. The media shouldn’t fear censorship, it’s well practiced at
it itself.
Marriage it seems is in for similar and intensified legal beating with media help,
this time with the polygamy hammer. But the Church will always be there to fight the old
fight for human dignity, male and female, and will always stand by marriage in its
original and essential meaning, trendy alterations notwithstanding. It cherishes the man
and women who, sometimes out of blazing lust as a starter, marry and with patience,
work, and with fidelity make it into authentic marriage quality love and devotion. By so
doing they transform the world simply by keeping it going with children capable of right
living, problem solving instead of making, and who will give more than they take. The
other way around sinks the boat of state as the bulging debt of many nations testify.
Marriage is much more than a social custom or malleable convenience but the bedrock
upon which a healthy society thrives. Marriage, in spite of the abuses of pairrage,
cohabitation, no fault divorce, single parenthood and such still has that ancient and
glorious permanence to it that it is supposed to have in defiance of all that drags it and us
down. It will always have that in Catholic teaching.
An item in the Los Angeles Times a while back attempted to equate opposition to
homosexual marriage with opposition to inter-racial marriage as enshrined in the laws of
some American states prior to the Civil Rights movement. Those laws reflected a very
regional prejudice during a very specific moment in history and were never universally
accepted. In fact inter-racial marriage was common in South and Central America and
has always been recognized in the Church’s Canon Law going back to the its beginning.
In other words the American anti-miscegenation laws reflected a particular and aberrant
culture in a particular time and were never universally accepted whereas heterosexual
marriage is a universal and all-important institution. Same-sex marriage advocates with
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their close connection to the media especially PBS channels are trying to hijack the Civil
Rights movement, a movement led by Christian clergy, by equating homosexuality with
race and ethnicity. Even scientifically, the comparison is bogus. Race and ethnicity are
genetically set as is one’s sex. Much homosexuality, as was examined, is to a far more
extensive degree than at first realized, sensitive to environmental factors. Race, of course,
is not. This dishonest ploy has nothing to do with equality or civil rights and everything
to do with 2% of the nation’s population trying to remake marriage in its image. Colin
Powell, himself African American said it best. “Skin color is a benign non-behavioral
characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral
characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.”
The laws opposing inter-racial marriage were recent in origin and biased in
motivation. The laws making marriage exclusively heterosexual pre-date written history
and go to the very purpose of marriage, namely love, sex and the potential for children.
These objectives have nothing to do with bias and everything to do with survival.
The environmental factor associated with homosexual orientation and practice
presents another social concern, the danger of the spread of a pseudo-homosexuality
similar to campus LUGs, the homosexuality of the incarcerated and that of the
impressionable emulating what they consider trendy and “cool.” Historically,
homosexual activity has come to exceed its usual 2%-3% of the population under certain
very specific circumstances usually where women were secluded and isolated from
general social contact. In societies where this happens and women are basically
quarantined before their usually arranged marriages and afterwards out of reach through
isolation and purdah type seclusion, males pretty much associate with males exclusively
for a good part of their lives and attachments are formed. This situation existed in
Classical Greece where women were severely isolated and removed from society leaving
males mixing and mingling almost exclusively from adolescence on with males. In such
an all male society man-boy love became widespread. In the later Roman period, this
sort of thing was emulated by many Roman admirers of Greek culture. They called it
“Greek love” and apparently the Emperor Hadrian who was so devoted to things Greek
that his nickname was “Greekling,” dabbled in it. Juvenal took a rather bleak view of
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Rome’s ubiquitous and corrupt homosexual scene writing disparagingly of “buggering
old men…”
A similar situation developed in polygamous Islamic society where the Caliphs,
often satiated with women, would turn to homosexuality for a change. It was a sentiment
that was echoed centuries later by Roman Polanski. At the same time in the lower strata
of Islamic society strict purdah would create an environment for homosexuality and a
motivation for conquest and acquisition of women from conquered societies. We saw the
Indian experience as an example. Ottoman Turkey, another Islamic society, was almost
exclusively male since there was no permitted association of men and women outside the
home. According to Durant, “the Moslem found companionship in homosexual
relationships, Platonic or physical.” Lesbianism flourished in the Harem even though the
punishment was beheading. Under Islam a class of homosexual “mukhannath’” arose
who imitated women in costume and conduct with long nails and perfume and
specialized in obscene dancing. After some resistance, homosexuality made rapid
progress and became prevalent in Harun’s court. In brief, according to Durant, “the
Moslem male was separated from women before marriage by Purdah and surfeited with
them after marriage by harem,” Filling the harems was motivation for conquest since
nature doesn’t cooperate. It inconveniently provided a basically meager one to one malefemale match thus providing motivation for expansion. The military bent of the religion
and the desire for loot also played a part. It is hardly surprising that in the societies being
described, many fell into irregular relations. Social environment was key here in
spreading homosexual connections among people who were essentially heterosexual.
Apparently environment can push some people in one or the other sexual direction. It is
important and this fact should raise concerns now with our media seemingly adamant
about pressing homosexuality into the spotlight as just another form of sexuality
equivalent to heterosexuality.
The most basic law of nature according to John Locke is “the preservation of
mankind.” Homosexuality does not accomplish that and as if acknowledging that fact
exclusive homosexuality was quite rare in preliterate societies where survival was a
pressing consideration. It evidently rises in circumstances like the ones described above
or when leisure and wealth accumulate along with boredom. It was ironic that the
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European Renaissance, shortly before Islamic Persia experienced a severe decline in
population that was observed by a European traveler there at the time, Chardin, who
attributed it to the “unhappy inclination which Persians have to homosexuality,” with
widespread abortion an additional factor, began breathing new life into the moribund
practice of homosexuality. It was stimulated by new contact with classical Greek culture
and with the Islamic East. The Renaissance worshipped everything Greek and “Greek
love” became an obligatory part of the Greek revival. According to Durant, “the
Humanists wrote about it with almost scholarly affection.” As it was explained to Robert,
Bishop of Aquino at the time by an observant penitent, “Fornication is no sin. Chastity is
old fashioned and virginity is on the wan.” Ariosto judged they (the cultural elite) were
all addicted to Greek love. In all these historical eras environmental and social factors
played a major influential role in pushing homosexual activity and practice into segments
of the population far above the usual 2% to 3% with a more or less strong homosexual
inclination. This is the same type of pseudo-homosexuality that we see the very trendy
media and campus scenes today drawing many of the impressionable. It is considered
“cool;” high praise indeed in some circles! In cases like the Renaissance and today’s
scene where women were not secluded, the factor at work is sometimes satiation with the
normal mentioned by Polanski but also is sometimes the adoption of a style that is
considered brave, novel, line crossing, convention defying, attention getting, social
raising, even a reaching out to a group perceived as a persecuted underdog. There is no
denying that the current milieu with media replacing religion in the lives of many has a
lot to do with what some people do.
Thankfully, what milieu and environment does can sometimes be undone. If we take
the present American scene with a very homosexual friendly media, the PBS series “In
the Life,” comes to mind, playing the influential role that the image of Classical Greece
held in the Renaissance, the result will pretty much be parallel. The many easily
influenced will be influenced. But what is presented is, as so much media information,
tilted. Although it is a back street topic forced into the famous closet vacated by
homosexuals, there are indeed many who by changing environment, both mental and
physical, have left the homosexual life. And why wouldn’t they? The Royal College of
Psychiatrists in Britain released a study several years ago demonstrating that
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homosexuals and lesbians suffer higher rates of emotional and mental health problems
and are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than heterosexuals. As acceptance of
homosexuality as mainstream and “normal” has successfully been pushed these problems
have not gone away. The authors of the study conclude that”…gay men and lesbians may
have lifestyles that make them vulnerable to psychological disorder.” Not only that but
AIDS and 65% of syphilis cases effect homosexuals. With problems like that plus an
almost six year shorter life span on average than heterosexuals, many consider seeking
help to change their sexual orientation. The clinical success rate approximately matches
the success rates associated with the abandoning similar types of dangerous tendencies
from depression and alcoholism to kleptomania and drug addiction. Adding to the
incentive for escape are depression and suicide rates among gay people. They are high
even in homosexual-friendly countries. This life regardless of media hype is not gay for
great numbers and so often change is sought. Twenty four percent of the men in one
study, 15 out of 63 and 14%, 2 out of 14 women succeeded in the effort; this, in spite of
the insistence of some homosexual activists that they cannot change. At least some can
and in time maybe more could. Indeed the cannot change claim was attacked by Gareth
Kirby a homosexual activist and managing editor of “Xtra West.” In an editorial entitled
“No Need to Lie, he decried for one thing the 10% propaganda and the “born that way”
explanation for homosexuality. That last argument, he claimed, sounded like a plea for
pity. He wrote that he choose to be homosexual after a number of relationships with
women implying that many others did too.
”Psychologists Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse of Wheaton College argue that
homosexuality is quite changeable and claim success rates in the 33% to 50% range. The
topic is covered in at least two books: “Homosexual No More” by William Consiglio and
“Coming Out of Homosexuality” by Bob Davies. Needless to say the media mostly
ignores them and if mentioned it is with derision.
In reality, the whole same sex marriage program, call it pairrage, call it anything but
for accuracy sake don’t call it marriage, is fraught with danger. The rationale for same
sex marriage would equally support group marriage, bigamy, polygamy, incest, pederasty
or any other imaginable sexual arrangement including even human and animal, as long as
the other is “loved,” of course. Marriage is a good thing and a fine remedy to much that
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ails out society. Many studies show married people to be happier, more adjusted and
leading more fulfilling lives but marriage is built on fidelity and redefining it to fit new
likes and trends that often place little value on fidelity does not spread happiness. Rather
it further weakens the vital institution. Redefine marriage, dedefine love, and roses
become tulips, meaning becomes meaningless, and words themselves cease to reflect
reality. The great strides toward sexual equality in the world have occurred in the West
because it has the only world religion that has always opposed the things that hurt
women, including concubinage, prostitution and easy male divorce. In Islam by contrast,
a divorce is effected when the husband intones four times, “you are dismissed.”
Christianity’s opposition to polygamy and all infanticide which in fact fell heaviest on
female infants and still does were additional factors in the advance of women.. An
interesting point was made in the musical “The King and I” when the King of Burma
sends a women as a gift to the King of Siam destroying her relationship with the man she
loved. This kind of extremely demeaning use of women for barter and negotiation was
common all over the non-Christian world including pre-Columbian America and the
religions of those people offered no serious objection. It has been the Christian concept of
marriage that was the great bulwark against this sort of thing. Nevertheless, it is under
widespread attack most recently the drive for same-sex marriage. But again, let Tom and
Dick “marry,” or Lulu and Rose then why not Tom, Dick and Harry or Lulu, Rose, and
Bill? If equality devoid of requirements and rules of qualification is the aim, Harry must
not be discriminated against. To take it a step further into absurdity, Sharon Tiedler loved
her pet dolphin and wanted to marry it so she did in Israel three years ago. Making
marriage indefinable and therefore meaningless is possibly the greatest damage that can
be inflicted on a society and its greatest resource, family and children. With state laws
against same-sex marriage going, what logical line in this march of defineless freedom is
there against the rest of the formerly illegal bag of tricks from incest, bigamy and
polygamy to mixed group marriage and bestiality? Many lines need to be drawn and
deserve not to be crossed. Without discipline, lines, limits, the West’s great gifts to the
world, flowing from its formative religion, Christianity, namely individual dignity, with
its inalienable freedom and rights, can quickly go to seed and in their place we get
privacy and diversity as defining values. Diversity is a two edged sword. Trendy
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academics made almost all colleges co-ed some decades ago under its banner with the
result there now is less diversity in academia. Equality is too. Under its banner the
Church is being forced out of one of its ancient ministries, adoption services, because it
refuses to place children with same-sex couples thus leaving the Church and the children
it wanted to place second-class citizens. Being able to see future effects of often
misguided but well-intentioned moves is a challenge. How much abuse, for example, can
marriage take before it descends to a private preference of no great thought or import
since any permanence about it has long since been eroded away? Care to extrapolate?
Marriage is tough and tough is not today. Help is needed to walk the walk but don’t
look to the media for it. Every female character in TV land is out doing everything that
men can do which is fine but they are not doing what only they can do, have children and
nurture them as only mothers can do. Again, Chesterton’s observation may be
exaggerated but it has a kernel of truth, a very big one. “A child is only sent to school
when it is too late to teach him anything. .The real thing has been done already, usually
by a woman. Every man is womanized by being born.” Outside TV land where being
almost any occupation is superior to being a wife and mother, women sadly watch the
median age for marriage pass them by and worry more and more about the declining
numbers of marriageable men and their own disappearing fertility. The sated male has
little incentive to marry and the U.S. birthrate continues below replacement. We have the
dangerous situation where those who can won’t and the rest can’t. As mentioned, if not
for immigration our economic pickle would be more bitter than it is. Progeny? The
founders of the nation evidently made a false assumption. They assumed people would
want some. They assumed that the selflessness founded on strong religious beliefs would
not be displaced by the happy housewives of New Jersey and swinging Sex in the City.
John Adams wrote that the Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious people.
It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It sure isn’t up to a remedy for
what is ailing our nation now. Anyway you cut it, creeping depopulation does not make
for a healthy economy or and happy society. Add in some perversity and sex is turned
into a major death dealer and our vaunted freedom into a breeding ground for
unhappiness. Social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has concluded from her study
that “today’s young women, in particular, are discontented with their love
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lives…Romantic disappointment has emerged as a generational theme.” We remember
what the old farmer said. Too bad they didn’t. The predatory male still has a field day.
Fueling the whole fiasco is a media flooded with childless attachment-less females
solving crimes and winning court cases, males on the make and scoring almost at will and
same-sex marriage accepted as being as normal as the accompanying canned laugher.
Easily forgotten in media amusement world are the hard won lessons of human history
and evolutionary biology that point to the unique and vital necessity to human success on
Earth of heterosexual pair bonding focused on reproduction and child rearing. The
Church says the same thing more romantically and poetically, “to have and to hold till
death do us part.” All else is tantamount to sexual buffoonery surrounded by protestations
of love but laced with high degrees of infidelity and promiscuity. This puts us on the path
to “an evolutionary dead end” according to Ronald Immerman of Case Western Reserve
University in “The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology.” He presents marriage as
important but we can almost bet that when humanity agrees on the importance of
something be it marriage, the intact family or sexual abstinence among the young, as
Chesterton said, “some sort of humanitarian will want to destroy it.” In the present
media-gay mindset with polygamy biting at the bit in the wings all marching under the
misleading banners of freedom, equality and compassion, marriage is in for a continued
rough time with its fate in doubt.
It is the church that is marriage’s champion and often vilified for its efforts when
those efforts necessarily include criticism of projects to radically change marriage into
something it isn’t. The successfully married know it takes some true grit at times, at times
the art of lockheart, and truth be told at times some prayer for the help to get through the
rough spots and there will always be those spots. That poses a problem for those people
who are into a lot of things, prayer not being one of them. The infidelity issue deserves
attention because it is a factor in so many marriage breakups and of course a milieu in
which premarital infidelity is rampant and media glorified, doesn’t help. Nor does samesex marriage, which is far more prone to infidelity. A leading spokesman for the
homosexual movement, Columnist Andrew Sullivan is to the point. “Gay men have a
need for extra-marital outlets.” And that propensity for promiscuity has led to the
expenditure of vast sums of tax monies to control diseases that self-control would gave
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prevented at much less cost. So the public subsidizes the “need” of gay men! But the
Church is blind to the differences between gay and straight.needs. It rejects promiscuity
totally whether hetero or homosexual. It might be termed in this regard an equal
opportunity condemner. But in media land it is quite different. It welcomes all
promiscuity. What media or movie hero is happily and faithfully married these days
rather than a “cool” promiscuous swinger? This is not helpful in many ways, national
health being just one. The condom-health fixation has been a flop. For decades literally
tens of millions of condoms have been distributed all over N.Y. City including schools
yet the rate of sexually transmitted diseases continue to skyrocket. If sex education was
approached like the smoking-health problem was, in other words abstinence, a
breakthrough might be had. That’s the kind of envelope pushing our cutting edge media
and progressive politicians are just not up to. Not only that but their reflexive promotion
of homosexual rights and same sex marriage should give them pause. Even a superficial
and cursory look around should tell them that a form of sex that produces more disease
and death than life is not exactly what nature intended nor what law should encourage.
Far from homophobia this is simply good sense based on observable fact.
The importance of marriage extends out in many directions and infidelity is not the
only threat. Not only are good marriages essential for the future of a healthy society but
also personal health is involved. Marriage is productive of health and happiness for so
many as numerous studies testify. Research statistics have married people on average
happier and healthier than the unmarried. The sexual alternatives to married life out there,
the ones incessantly paraded through the media without the health downside or the fact
that that downside is often contained by resorting to deep plunges into the public wallet,
are not conducive to either health and happiness. In addition to divorce, loneliness and a
plethora of kids with disestablished and blasted lives often in or near poverty, we also
have the shadow of death beclouding what was once productive of joy and life, namely
sex rightly used rather than blighted by abortion. On top of the massive use of artificial
contraceptives and pills ironically in an age that relishes the natural and deplores the
artificial, especially the cramming of the body with chemical concoctions, we have a
national abortion rate that destroys over 25 % of new life in the nation though much
higher in New York, turning the womb into a tomb for million. That’s not natural either.
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There are serious economic repercussions too. Many families have few children but,
oddly enough, are often living in larger houses. These Mac Mansions so called are houses
fit for the larger families of the past and with larger mortgages to show for it. Those
mortgages by the millions were a key link in the economy’s recent economic bubble and
recessional bust but the overall situation poses another problem in the long haul. As we
have seen, to support the growing number of oldsters in their Social Security years we
have a proportionally dwindling number of working age people in active employment
kicking into the system. Social Security must do painful adjustments to head off
bankruptcies. Higher taxes, later retirement and even the scepter of rationed medical care
for the elderly are all hanging out there to make life more dismal. There is even the
increased threat of more legalized “mercy” killing for the handy removal of those costly
sick and burdensome. That regimen already exists in some states and foreign countries. It
is one area where one need not look for altruism. In the Netherlands for example the line
between the voluntary and involuntary dispatch of the elderly has been blurring, as was
pointed out, for quite some time.
Again, there’s the disease problem. Sex by its nature life giving has been turned into
a disease spreader and death dealer. About one in six teenagers has a sexually transmitted
disease. Prior to the 1960s practically no one had. Then there is AIDS with over 400,000
dead here so far and about 18,000 new cases each year. The numbers bear repeating.
Picture a Viet Nam type memorial over five times longer. In the U.S. homosexual
intercourse and drug activity account for 85% of AIDS cases. According to Brian Scully
of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University,” It is likely that a
sexually active HIV infected person who uses condoms will infect partners at some point
whether after, 5, 10 or 100 acts of intercourse.” The HIV virus is 1/450 the size of the
human sperm. But nobody lobbies for virginity, abstinence or a lifetime of sex with one
mutually faithful, uninfected partner except the Church. Too boring! But condoms just
don’t hack it and we should stop kidding ourselves. We’re not laughing all the way to the
bank anymore. All these escapes from boredom cost society dearly. Behind a lot of the
debauch is a culture saturated with porn almost to the point of inescapability. It is no
great feather in our national cap that Japan has recently overtaken the U.S. as the world’s
number one porn producer dropping us to number two. Nor is it consoling that Africa has
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the AIDS epidemic worse than we do. Heterosexual promiscuity is the deadly engine
over there with homosexual activity comparatively rare. There, many millions have died
with the awful specter of millions of orphans living in poverty. While the churches rush
in to help, foreign governments and the UN often rush in with truck loads of condoms
sometimes in lieu of more essential supplies, food, water and medicine in the erroneous
belief that condoms can stem the tide though there is little evidence that it can or has
after years of trying. Abstinence and fidelity programs have been more effective where
implemented and allowed to work. In Africa the epidemic is spread by the usual suspect,
promiscuity or as the Africans phrase it, “grazing,” mostly, as mentioned, of a
heterosexual kind. The push there to reduce grazing for health sake has been effective. In
the U.S. on the other hand, the promiscuity spreading the disease is mostly homosexual, a
lifestyle excessively prone to rampant promiscuity or grazing. To reemphasize, as of now
over 400,000 have died here with about 18,000 new deaths annually according to the
AIDS Related Community Services of Dutchess County. To try to contain this calamity
and help the suffering victims, the generous heart of the country has poured forth billions
of dollars of taxpayer funds without so much as asking, not to mention demanding, some
consideration be given to lifestyle change. Our courageous media, so effective in the
crusade to curtail smoking, drop the hot sword of change on this one and utters nary a
peep for sexual restraint. That unpopular but vital task goes to the Church though some
non-Catholic churches have given up or even joined the promiscuity parade. As novelist
Walker Percy wrote upon becoming a Catholic, “Take away Rome, and what we’re left
with is Berkeley.”
Taking into account an already below replacement birthrate, the psychological and
the disease spreading problems, the encouraging of homosexuality under the cry of
equality is deadly dangerous as the numerous studies show. Also, it has already been
shown that studies reveal the environmental-social-family combination as an important
factor in sexual proclivities more so in the absence of any discoverable “gay” gene.
Nevertheless, deep-seated tendencies appear at very young ages in some children to
which no one theory is entirely satisfactory. Research shows that the sexes form bonds
from infancy with those nearest them. Frequent contact increases attraction, which is a
reason why arranged marriages often worked in ages past and sometimes prisoners fall in
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love with their captors. This is a theme in the popular film, “The Searchers.” It is also a
factor in so called office romances. There is a subtle bonding factor at work and for that
reason homosexual adoption should be carefully looked at but of course the media
neglects to do that. Instead it hopped quickly on that questionable cause too, again as
usual, under the banner of non-discrimination and equality. Doctor Judith Stacey, a
sociologist at the University of Southern California and sympathetic to the gay marriage
cause admitted on ABC’s “Primetime Thursday” that research shows children raised by
homosexual couples were more likely to have “either considered or had one same sex
experience” than children raised by heterosexuals. . In another study by Fiona Tasker and
Susan Golombok printed in the “American Journal of Orthopsychiatry “ found that 24%
of children raised by lesbian mothers had “been involved in a same gender sexual
relationship.” This is about eight times the rate of the general population. Exposing
children to all the attending problems obvious in an environment that fosters homosexual
activity must be considered by rational legislators as extremely dangerous to the health of
the children. Not only that but the future impact of the effect of environmentally
encouraged homosexuality on a faltering population should be taken into account.
There is some good news however. While the crudification of the culture steadily
advances, it is meeting resistance. Not everyone is happy with the public parading of
indecorum. Generation Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) seem to prefer monogamy to
divorce it we can go by the declining rate of divorce and many of the better educated
even frown on pre-marital sex to a greater degree, 21% up from 15%. Many of them were
evidently badly bruised as children by the 1970s divorce and promiscuity boom. Large
numbers in the “make love not war” gang apparently turned and made war on their own
offspring. After all, legalized abortion came in 1973. And, to give family another body
blow, no fault divorce was right there on the scene. California was the first in 1969 to
legislate it, the Hollywood lobby machine must have been at work, and it quickly swept
the nation. Evidently the “make love not war” crowd in this regard didn’t have real
permanent love in mind. With all this heady freedom the little ones were largely
forgotten. Again, researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead summed up the situation thusly,
“The truth is that divorce involves a radical redistribution of hardship, from adults to
children.” Perceptive teachers became adept at predicting divorce in the family. The
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student’s grades would begin to plummet. Apparently the kids suffered but learned. The
number of divorces per thousand married women peaked at 22.6 in 1980 to 16.4 in 2009.
The average couple marrying for the first time now has a lifetime probability of divorce
closer to 40% than the old 50%, still too high but an improvement. Studies show the
likelihood of divorce declines the higher the education level and the practice of religion.
What happiness promoters and tax relievers that fabulous combination is!
For one illustrative story of how “non compos mentis” many in America are today
here’s a little slice of the zeitgeist and a recipe for improvement: “There are too many
problems to list. There are so many, I don’t want to gravitate to just one.” So said Mick
Cornett, the Mayor of Oklahoma City, probably with the above discussed facts and
information partly in mind, when he refused to allow the “Lingerie Football League” to
use a public field in the city. The LFL is comprised of ten women’s teams playing in very
skimpy underwear. The lineup of bimbos in America and the bozos willing to make a
buck on them seems unending. Typical of the media mentality that loves nothing more
than to go on in depth about freedom and choice was chief bozo and league president
Mitchell Mortaza who complained that the Mayor was taking away the freedom of
individuals to choose what sporting events to attend! Who said there is no
underestimating the taste of the American public or some of its loudest spokesmen?
Should we add common sense too? If promiscuity is the chief culprit in the spread of a
dangerous disease we may not legally be able to shut down the bathhouses or get the porn
out the computers but do we want to encourage it with semi-nude Victoria Secret type
bimbos pushing football tickets and footballs in their underwear on public lots in the
middle of our cities? One wonders if people would get the point if the game were played
on the High School field during lunch recess. Lock up the coeds when school gets out!
Ah! The courage to draw lines! If the media lacks it, surprisingly some politicians do not.
The Mayor put himself on the line and should be admired for that. If the people of
Oklahoma City don’t like what he did they can get a new Mayor on Election Day. Such is
democracy. In the meantime, in a democracy we must live with what we elect except
when the body politic is stressed by non-elected judges overruling the electorate. The
next election out there should be interesting. We can only hope that sense and taste isn’t
all that dead and that the continued trashification of America can be slowed.
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The Mayor wouldn’t be facing the possibility of election defeat if Christianity ‘s
influence was as strong as it once was though the mayor demonstrates it still has clout. In
the parts of the world where Christianity’s touch has been light or almost non-existent
other problems have affected marriage. As was mentioned, only Christianity refused to
kow tow to male propensities such as concubinage, polygamy, bigamy and easy male
divorce. It demanded and taught faithful monogamy in marriage for both the male and
female as well as chastity before marriage as the epitome of love. From it derived a once
thriving social order in which kids were welcomed and nurtured by the two people who
love them most. Never had the playing field of the sexes been so leveled nor the
problems flowing from the low status of the female in so many places been better
alleviated. Not only does polygamy rate the women lower than the man it skewers the
population leaving many men without a spouse. If one man gets many some men get
none and women as usual fall far shy of equal standing. Nasty nature provides only an
approximately fifty/fifty split, male and female as was mentioned. The implication is an
essential equality between the sexes. Nothing fits that scheme better than monogamy. On
the other hand, polygamy and homosexuality disturb it. They damage the balance the
further they are spread other damage follows. Brown University’s Rose McDermott
writing in the Wall Street Journal explained it this way. “Women in communities…where
one male has more than one wife –get married younger, have more children, higher rates
of HIV…sustain more domestic violence, succumb to more female genital mutilation and
sex trafficking, and are more likely to die in childbirth. Their life expectancy is shorter
than their monogamous sisters.” She describes the cultures this way. “Where a few men
possess all the women roughly half of the boys must leave the community before
adulthood. Such societies also spend more money on weapons and display fewer social
and political freedoms than do monogamous ones. When small numbers of men control
large numbers of women, the remaining men are likely to be willing to take greater risks
and engage in more violence…in order to increase their own wealth and status in hopes
of gaining access to women.”
An aspect of the latter was part of the fuel motivating the dramatic military
expansion of Islam for centuries. We have been spared much of what McDermott
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describes by Christianity’s high regard for women as fully equal to men in dignity and as
children of the loving Father
Likewise, large numbers of homosexuals of necessity leave many loving women
without prospective husbands the way polygamy leaves many men in an analogous
position and the problems spread with their increased acceptance. Again, polygamy
essentially means some men have multiple wives and others no wives. This can lead to
aggressive behavior and sometimes social destabilization. We saw that history indicates
that this did indeed happen. It is reasonable to think the hunt to fill harems was an
important factor in the history of the aggressive expansion of Islam early on. A feature of
Islam’s rapid military expansion was, to put it crudely, the babe hunting aspect.
Mohammed had nine wives. Adding to the imbalance created by polygamy are nations
like India. It is losing 600,000 girls a year by sex selection abortion and even infanticide.
This too we had been spared thanks to Christianity until the fairly recent resurgence of a
pagan like morality under the advance of modern secularism. They were non-problems in
the Christian West till then. Abortion and female infanticide were common in the Roman
Empire before the rise of Christianity to the point that the avoidance of having children
led to a birth dearth, a problem that eventually contributed to the decline of the Roman
state. The Emperor Augustus like the heads of state in the growing number of nations
experiencing similar problems today offered tax incentives and such usually with less
than hoped for results. Horace, that most admired Roman poet wrote a song for the great
Roman festival of 17 BC praying, “O gods! To our youth swift to learn grant ways of
righteousness…and increase of sons…” It didn’t happen.
The earliest Christians worked to change the world, lift it up, in part by not killing
baby girls as the pagans did, because they saw the world differently than the pagans. In
the world that the Christians were trying to build everyone, male, female, rich, poor was
equally a child of God with all the dignity that went with it. Where the influence of
Christianity wanes the problems under discussion return and where it has not reached,
still exist. India now has only 914 girls six and under for every 1,000 boys. Soon there
will be ten million missing women, missing wives. Marriage is damaged and to find
mates, eschewing violence and the use of prostitutes, many will be forced to emigrate to
other parts of the world where more women are available and marriage possible.
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Also giving marriage a black eye is the practice of child marriage in parts of the
world. One of Mohammed’s wives was nine when he consummated the marriage and as a
result the practice is sometimes excused or ignored. Rampant promiscuity, cohabitation,
divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, the push for same sex marriage and the flirting with
polygamy especially as the West repudiates its Christian roots and, in the East, polygamy,
female infanticide and abortion, child marriages, indicate clearly that in both the East and
West faithful monogamous marriage is under siege and with it the equality and dignity of
every individual not to mention the very inviolability and dignity of every human life.
Only Christianity stands at the gate and in many instances that means Catholicism.
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XXXIII
THE COMFORTABLE CONSENTRATION CAMP
“It is embarrassing to live in the most materially comfortable time in history and
not be happy.” So wrote Federal Judge and author John Noonan on observing post 1960s
America. Loneliness and boredom made excessive by the decline of marriage and family
are little alleviated by the tedious titillation offered as a substitute by a media weighed
down by a steep decline in originality and artistic talent beyond the presentation of sexual
promiscuity and computerized violence. For many the decline of the family and the rise
in its place of an excruciatingly repetitious, banal, and violent entertainment media in
desperate need of quality and variety but largely lacking in the talent to produce either,
were major contributors to the unhappy situation. To make matters worse this ubiquitous
media conglomerate, because of the growing lack of innovative talent increasingly fell
back on lurid sex as a substitute in order to draw and hold an audience that was then set
up as pigeons for horrid minutes of vacuous advertising. Increasingly, there was little
produced that was uplifting above the noisy often sweaty rock concert level and nothing
remotely approaching the challenges, fulfillment and happiness that comes from living in
a family that has not been broken or dissolved. But the years following the 60s, far from
building up family life, helped put it on the skids. For one thing, easy no fault divorce
was a brainchild of the times. One effect was to transfer happiness from the children to at
least one of the parents. Robbed of an intact family with sustaining, value imparting love
and beliefs as so many were, exterior influences especially from mass media were quick
to rush in as a substitute, often a damaging one. The hands on lessons families impart
because of their importance for life together such as working and sacrificing for others
that are productive of real satisfaction and happiness were gone. Other values dished out
in much TV fare were often damaging instead of enhancing. Indeed, the value of serving
others even at personal sacrifice, a value confirmed throughout history as conducive to
real happiness and demanded by Western religious tradition, is not part of the picture for
large numbers of people because it is not part of the picture on the tube. There the remedy
to hardship is more often quick divorce, the “moving on” often sung about, rather than
sacrifice. The damaging change that overtook America had multiple causes not all of
them easy to trace but one at least was, a severely decayed and corrupting media.
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Betty Friedan was one unhappy and seriously bored lady back in the 50s and in
1963 she kicked off the serious siege of marriage in America with her book, “The
Feminine Mystique.” She herself was well off, well educated, a married at home mother
with children but discontented with the weariness of an affluent domestic routine that left
her unfulfilled. Her home was her “comfortable concentration camp.” That she of Jewish
descent could put the two words together is indicative of a seriously weak grasp of
reality. She had come from a dysfunctional family background and became involved in
Marxist politics before marriage. Instead of examining herself and her background to get
at the malaise she was experiencing, in true Marxist fashion she blamed society. She went
outside herself and targeted the American culture at the time. That’s where the problem
was. And again in typical Marxist fashion she saw it as one of class struggle though not
entirely economic. The scenario was a female underclass against a patriarchal society. In
reality her thesis was a long stretch for the suppression of women in America comparable
to the oppression of African Americans before the Civil War or the removal of the Native
American to reservations and even the discrimination some immigrant groups
experienced, did not exist. However rather than challenging her personal problems in
order to develop the skills with which to overcome them, she, like a good Marxist, put
her focus outward and aimed to revolutionize the society. It would be a revolution that
would get women out of the concentration camp and into careers just like men. This
would achieve the missing fulfillment and self-actualization. But there was a problem. At
the time most women did not share her feeling of unfulfillment and discontent. They
were busy finding plenty of work and fulfillment in raising families often with three or
more children and in some cases working outside the home to bring in extra or needed
cash. Divorce was relatively rare and families far more intact than now. Still, the book
succeeded in influencing a class of women similar to Freidan in culture and background
who took up the cause and with the help of a media always thirsty for novelty succeeded
in spreading the discontent. They did it better than they ever knew. Today, as many
studies show, discontent is at levels undreamed of in the 1950s and ironically many of
Freidan’s remedies contributed to the disasterous change especially the denigration of
traditional marriage as being one one of the creators of the concentration camp. Their
solution, no fault divorce, has hurt many more women and children than men. It was a
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solution made in heaven for the male and in hell for the female and made things worse.
Solutions and revolutions often do that because ramifications are not well thought out and
the value of what exists and is being attacked not well understood.
All the targets of their discontent however were not unworthy. There existed a
disparity of pay between men and women for the same tasks that was left over from the
days of immigration and labor strife. The solution, equal pay for equal work was a good
and obvious one but the revolution wanted more. Freidan and company saw a traditional
old boy network blocking careers for women as in some cases it certainly did but not
content to fix what was broken they deduced that women were also hindered by the
traditional roles of women involving marriage and children. So, along with easy divorce
abortion became part of the cause. Instead of the old view of children as a blessing, they
now became an anchor and obstacle to the advancement of the new women on the go.
Though the revolution succeeded in doing some good, in the process great damage was
done to family life by divorce and abortion on demand that was followed by a severe
decline in personal sexual ethics. And still the original objective eluded them, female
fulfillment. The fact is today so many more women report themselves as being unfilled
and discontented that it might be said that the revolutions greatest and most tragic success
was making discontent and unhappiness more universal than it had ever been before. The
revolution, as many of them tend to do, backfired. In an article, “The Paradox of
Declining Female Happiness,” appearing in the “American Economic Journal,”
researchers reported that while the lives of women have improved by many objective
measures, “yet we show that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and
relative to men.” It seems that as women have gained the objectives set up by Freidan and
the feminist revolution they have become less happy. What is the problem? Why was
more ground in essentials lost than gained? One possible answer involved the mindset of
Freidan and her supporters. Because of it the revolt was poorly aimed. It neglected the
natural strengths of women assuming fulfillment for most would be found outside the
home. It was a wrong assumption. It ended up destroying too much of the good, replacing
it with the less good or worse. For most married women in 1950s America work outside
the home was optional. However, in short order with the revolution it became a necessity
for most. Unfortunately, the revolution played into a 1960s and 70s economy plagued by
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a growing inflation stimulated by a government that had taken on too much, a war
overseas and a war against poverty at home. War is inflationary and two wars at the same
time doubly so. In addition, during the 1970s U.S. manufacturing ran afoul of foreign
competition abetted by poor management at home. Unions demanded and management
gave extravagant wage packages, in a sense severely crippling the golden goose’s ability
to compete with foreign goods. We were also importing more oil and OPEC held the
spigot. With double digit inflation and wages not keeping pace families now needed two
incomes so the women, some happily many unhappily, marched into the marketplace
never again to attain the freedom of economic choice they had enjoyed in the 50s. Now
they had to work. As the years went by for many of them the “concentration” camp began
to look awfully good but tragically less attainable. The birth control pill gave the green
light to promiscuity for many and marriage became less necessary for sexual satisfaction.
Then came the flood of electronic porn. All this led to a crusade for legalized abortion,
evidently pill and condom were not enough, and widespread single parenthood with the
tremendous growth of women and children living in poverty. An unheard of 22% of
American children were living in poverty by 2010. Another unheard of 25% of the newly
conceived were destroyed by abortion. Well over a million a year since 1973. The new
morality means death or poverty for many.
\Most families prior to the 60s didn’t need two incomes to make ends meet and
there were far fewer single parent families flirting with poverty. For many poverty went
hand and glove with promiscuity. Yet incessant TV advertising jacked up not needs but
wants while an inflationary economy turned work into a necessity for great numbers of
married women. As mentioned, the comfortable concentration camp began to look pretty
good. It was often viewed with longing eyes through the rear view mirror as women
along with men piled out to work in the morning. For other women the feminist message
of sexual liberation turned the job into an end in itself, a path to independence while the
rise in sex outside of marriage and the decline of marriage itself played its part in forcing
the vast number of unmarried women into the job market to support themselves. These
developments did serious damage to family life. It became common for many mothers to
farm out the care and nurturing of children to strangers who were usually in it for money.
Daycare became a necessary industry. The economy was now one far less family friendly
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for the standard of living had slipped to the point that most families needed two incomes
to make it or, and this was a factor, believed they did. A combination of economic
necessity generated by inflation plus the new desires and demands for attractive but
unnecessary things generated by a TV in every home, acting as a conduit for constant
advertising, combined to make more work rather than less necessary. The dream and
promise that machines and computers would free up more leisure time was gone and
feminism even made career work for women a good to be strived for. All contributed to
driving women out of the home and into the arms of the economy, not known for its
warmth and caring. As the years advanced, widespread loneliness, discontent and
unhappiness registered in all the polls and studies. Ironically, instead of an increase of
freedom and options for women the revolution produced a decrease by removing the
greatest option of all for many, a home and family. And to boot, the new feminism was a
blatant betrayal of the old feminism in that it made abortion a do or die component of the
movement. The founders of the original feminist movement saw abortion as a great male
convenience to the detriment of women and that’s precisely what it turned out to be. It
also betrayed today’s women by disparaging the real power that women had always
possessed. With legalized abortion, often now the male walked away if the female
refused to abort. “Her decision, her child.” Women’s liberation was a great success in
liberating the male.
Before the rise of modern feminism of the Freidan type, women usually held the
upper hand in most families. They made most of the household decisions, freely spending
the husband’s paycheck to run the home and had the laws of fifty stated behind them.
Each state required a man to provide financial support for his wife and children. As
Durant, Barzun and so many others have pointed out women turned marriage into an
education for men, a school for learning the most important thing of all, the meaning of
love. Provided by nature and nature’s God, women had something men wanted and
needed and everyone especially women knew it. Only a fool would forfeit it and few
women then were fools. One of the great changes the new feminism brought about was to
produce a bumper crop of vulnerable females for easy male pickings under the guise of
sexual equality defined as equal opportunity promiscuity. In essence feminism
encouraged women to imitate the worst of men but most couldn’t do it well and were
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damaged in the attempt because women really are different, in many ways more
perceptive, more feeling and more vulnerable to hurt. Ignore these mores and elements in
the female psyche as Freidan did and welcome disaster. And sure enough, it soon arrived
in the form of millions of divorces usually hurting the women and children, millions of
abortions and millions of single parents, needless to say of what sex. Pre-feminist women
equated sex with love and it had to be seriously pledged because the man knew he
couldn’t have what he wanted and needed, sex and eventually family, without the
women’s consent. There were other benefits. Boys quickly became men instead, as often
happens today, remaining boys through their 20s and 30s while being “cool,” “partying,”
often indulging in casual sex, or watching porn, playing video games…and frequently
still living with mom and dad. Men became better human beings and society was better
for it. George Gilder author of “Men and Marriage,” put it this way: The crucial process
of civilization is the subordination:
of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term
horizons of female sexuality. In creating civilization
females transform lust into love; channel wanderlust into
jobs, homes and families; link men to specific children;
rear children into citizens. The prime fact of life
is the sexual superiority of women.
According to the happiness gage it even produced more real happiness across he board
than the footloose and free, career driven life. Of course, Gilder was named “Male
Chauvinist Pig” of the year by NOW, the National Organization of Women.
Betty Friedan in fact was a founder of NOW. Its most vociferous cause at present is
the defense of abortion on demand for any reason at taxpayer expense. It fought tooth and
nail to keep even partial birth abortion legal. It’s glorification of careers over marriage,
work over family and motherhood has won over TV land and is reflected in many of the
popular series and movies that, whether reflective of realities or not, often love to portray
unmarried frequently sexually active women as happily empowered, often staffing and
running police departments, detective and investigative units, law firms and so forth
while relegating motherhood, the very life’s blood of the future to an unimportant
accessory of life rather than a full-fledged, worthwhile and vital calling. Nick and Nora
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Charles where are you now? As Terrell wrote in his essay “Camouflage-The Feminist
Mistake,” “NOW…is clueless about the soul of womanhood, especially when it comes
to motherhood.” It sloughs off motherhood and the grit and glory of the mother while
elevating careers to the end all of female life. It is perhaps the worse case of
shortchanging is recent history.
This then is what NOW and the radical feminist movement birthed by Freidan’s
book has reduced women to. Women in the past had legitimate grievances. To take one
example, they got paid less for the same work. This problem has been much though not
completely alleviated thanks to feminism. But, throughout our history there were other
problems that needed addressing and this was done without great collateral damage.
They were successfully handled without damaging society the way feminism has. At one
time children often faced child labor in factory and mine in place of school, men at hard
labor worked twelve-hour days or more six days a week, farmers were at the mercy of
railroads. The problems of the past should not be forgotten and the solutions looked at
and studied. Doing that reveals the weakness of the radical feminist approach. The
downgrading of motherhood and promotion of the promiscuous life under the guise of
freedom and equality as NOW is still prone to do has been especially damaging. Part of
this collection of “pearls” has tried to illustrate that bitter pill. NOWs main achievement
has been to replace problems with greater ones.
Today women grieve about balancing work and home, about exhaustion, about
loneliness. All the new career opportunities available to women in education and career
work can be a very good thing. Women are indeed multi- talented, no surprise there, but
for the good of society and evidently the happiness of women themselves, marriage,
motherhood, home and family must not be removed from their ancient and central
position as is done by organizations like NOW and its faithful lackey, the media, and they
must never be denigrated. If the women of the past had legitimate grievances as they did
although they were not entirely what Freidan imagined, the revolution did not come
through for the majority of them. They evidently still have grievances and the falling
happiness gage clearly indicates it. All the career chasing doesn’t seem to be doing it for
many women. Though more may be running police forces, banks, schools and law firms
we see fewer and fewer running homes and families. These tasks brought great worry and
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great happiness to the masses of women in the past and were much more essential to the
healthy future of the race than catching bad guys. Today’s woman is often split between
work and family and much more often is on her own in caring for family and children
than ever before thanks to the sexual revolution that Freidan and her feminist followers
helped bring about.
The revolution was early in championing the new birth control pill, legalized
abortion and unfettered sexual expression. All were to produce a new plateau of feminine
liberation and contentment. They were even supposed to lead to an actual decrease in
abortion and illegitimacy. Both have since skyrocketed. Who are the net losers? Not men.
Women have suffered the most by far and Black women more than most. Seventy percent
of African-American births are out of wedlock and half of all young Black women have
Herpes along with record numbers of whites. Poverty among women and children is
more widespread than ever.before. Joining the women as losers are the children.
According to the Children’s Defense Fund, 43% of Black children, 35% of Latino
children are living in poverty, This is part of the price of promiscuity and especially male
irresponsibility. Indeed while children make up 24% of the country’s population, they
compose 35% of those living in poverty. Promiscuity, divorce and family breakdown are
surefire poverty spreaders. However, whoever it hurt, the revolution did liberate
homosexuals. It was another unforeseen consequence.
The sad fact is, before liberation homosexuals were a relatively healthy segment of
the community but now an unprecedented number, also beneficiaries of the new sexual
liberation, were sick or dead. And the plague continues, killing rather than liberating its
practitioners. Unbelievably, a new wave of promiscuity among Homosexuals has lead to
an increase in sexually transmitted diseases since 2009. A June 2011 report by the NYC
Department of Health stated, “We are going backwards on preventing sexually
transmitted diseases among gays.” Homosexuals account for 60% of all newly diagnosed
HIV infections, this after distributing 40 million free condoms annually in the city at
taxpayer expense. The icing on the crumbling cake of the sexual revolution is that
everyone still has grievances only they are more grievous than Freidan’s genteel feeling
of discontent and boredom in her comfortable concentration. The revolution she helped
initiate with her book in 1963 was very successful in empowering women to be like men,
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work like them, get paid like them, be sexually irresponsible like the worst of them with a
tidal wave of discontent, loneliness and unhappiness resulting because in reality they are
not like them in essential ways…thankfully.. All this has led a well- documented surge of
depression among young women. Never have so many anti-depressants been sold in
America since liberation. The reasons are not hard to find. For many, having no option
but to work along with the shrinking prospect for marriage and if with children often
raising them alone without the support of that family structure so disparaged and
underestimated by the propagators of the revolution, is no panacea. However the
depression is even more acute with those who bought into the “hook up” culture
encouraged by the revolution. This the revolution hyped as true sexual freedom. If the
bottom feeding species of male had been promiscuous before, now it was the women’s
turn. But the revolution overlooked the most basic fact of all, that the sexes are different..
The swinging predators among the males, the ones liberation held up for emulation, do
not seem depressed much at all by this happy turn of events. They march to the “Playboy
Philosophy,” not those old obsolete Commandments of faded memory. Their nightly
prayer of thanks is to Freidan and company for providing them so well.
The interesting question is, could all this have been predicted and avoided? Were the
miserable consequences foreseeable? There were those who could see and cared but the
tribe of Freidans had nothing but derision for them. They were largely ignored. For one,
Pope Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” was very clear and forward looking
regarding the damage to marriage, family life, and their great benefits to individuals and
society that a new promiscuous contracepted morality would bring, even seeing the
coming onslaught of divorce and abortion. Many Catholics joined the howl of protest
against the encyclical’s continuation of the Church’s ban on artificial, mechanical and
chemical methods of birth prevention when the Pope declared that the conjugal act must
remain open to at least the possibility of transferring new life. Completely shutting out
that possibility would do extreme damage to marriage leading to its decline. That decline,
with all the attending problems that have been discussed here, arrived on the scene rather
quickly and is still with us. Governments now run to contain the damage while budgets
and taxes swell with negligible results. Abortion, abuse, child poverty, educational failure
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has never been more widespread in America. Nothing, really nothing, takes the place of
functioning families for a healthy society.
Freidan and company would have better foreseen the consequences of what they
called for if they had a better handle on male/female psychology and had paid more
attention to history and the consequences good and bad of moral revolutions in the past.
If they had had a conception of the great benefits to the West of the Christian moral
revolution and compared it to the situation of women in the rest of the world they may
have had enough sense to hesitate but to a great extent in this regard ignorance blinded
them. They were absorbed with their own piques and nothing else seemed to matter. The
drive for liberation, come what may, was more their attitude and it blinded them to many
consequences that the clear seeing feared. It is the women who are buying the antidepressants in record amounts today not the men. As William A. Donohue wrote in the
July 2011 “Catalyst,” the sexual revolution savaged our society, coarsened our culture,
and left many for dead,” and many more desiring an anti--revolution. Therein lies the
crux of the problem. Needed reform is going to be difficult without widespread media
support similar to its crusade against smoking. We look vainly for it. And sadly the
sexual revolution has even savaged the Church, the old hospital ship, with 3% of its
clergy accused of sexual misconduct. The force of its protesting voice has been weakened
but nevertheless it still can be heard. It is sorely needed now..
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XXXIV IMAGINE: ROLE OF RELIGION VS SECULARISM
Like Mayor Cornett, religion too is a pretty good line drawer but not quite the kind
Madonna had in mind. This is why the Madonna types who detest the Mayor’s action
(see previous “pearl” XXXII) also despise the Church even to the point of resisting the
needed changes it calls for. One wonders, for example, whether the Mayor of New York
would have done what the Mayor of Oklahoma City did if the lingerie football game
were scheduled for Rockefeller Center during Christmas week. There is reason to doubt.
Last month loud political and celebrity voices in N.Y. City, the very voices first and
loudest to defend freedom of speech and expression for things like semi nude football or
when it came to art, Robert Maplethorp’s opus of Christ’s crucifix submerged in urine
and a dung covered Blessed Mother by another “artist” displayed at the Brooklyn
Museum a few years ago declaring them well worth displaying, spoke out in hypocritical
horror at a pro-life billboard in SoHo of a Black infant with the caption in bold print:
“The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb.” Even though well
over half of newly conceived Black children in N.Y. City numbering in the thousands are
destroyed before birth, they called for its immediate censorship and removal. From
Mayor Bloomberg, so sensitive to the value of health and life that he shuts down city
eateries for using below grade cooking oils with their French fries due to the health
dangers, came not a peep of protest for either life or free expression! But Archbishop
Timothy Dolan was heard publicly decrying the hypocrisy, the selective outrage and
selective tolerance. Needless to say, no support from Madonna came forth. It seems the
really “in” dogma of tolerance, the one preached day and night on TV from Oprah and
“the View “ group to Jay Leno and other late nighters will not tolerate the Church’s
protest and its teaching about life or recognize that one of life’s great enemies, abortion,
is destroying communities and dehumanizing our society. There is little room for
radicalism like that on the airwaves or on the Billboards of NYC. In an almost neoFascist New York, the former bastion of true liberalism, free speech applies only to the
one side approved by the government, the pro-abortion group not the pro-life contingent.
This is a double standard with a vengeance. Shortly afterwards the tolerant heart of the
City opened again allowing anti-Wall Street protestors to camp out in a downtown park
for weeks on end but still no pro-life billboards allowed. Granted, NYC under Bloomberg
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has become even more imbalanced regarding rights than before. The Mayor banned
public prayer at the dedication of the 9/11memorial at ground zero though the victims’
families objected and refused to allow manger scenes in schools at Christmas time though
Menorahs are approved. On top of that the schools may dispense condoms for the asking
but abstinence education and parental notification regarding abortions are resisted. Many
of those protesting against the right of free speech for pro-lifers often detest the moral
restraint in sexual matters preached by the Church but their own restraints on the
Church’s right to free speech are quite acceptable. And this same group often delights in
pointing to the hypocrisy of churchgoers! As was said, needed change is going to be
difficult.
Even without the fact that so many in politics and popular media often crusade
against the restraining rules and responsibilities urged by traditional Judeo-Christian
moral standards, a high moral standard is difficult to maintain even in the best of
circumstances. Without strong religious underpinnings it is nearly impossible. Most
philosophers, Nietzsche included, would say absolutely impossible. Hugo Rifkind a
London Times journalist observed that “People with faith have a stronger moral code
than people without. …It’s harder for non-believers to explain what good means. We
have to talk about respect and humanity, but both go back to ethics and without God
ethics goes back to …what? The best answer he came up with was “convenience.” Gad,
better not become inconvenient!
There has never been a moral regime without religion but some types of religion
would be of little help in this regard. For example, the decline in public and personal
morals following the disruptions of the 1960s and 70s were not stemmed by the
concomitant rise of “New Age” religious beliefs. Non-dogmatic and defuse, these beliefs
had little in their quiver for the fight. Non-demanding deities such as Mother Earth,
Goddess Gaia, Universal Energy, the Life Force with all their “sacred spaces” and such,
and with a central commandment little more than not to harm the trees and animals, fine
as that is, are hardly strong enough to stand up to the forces attacking human life and in
fact just do not serve much beyond the wishes of the holder. By contrast, the God of
Christian revelation is no mere intangible life force, sacred energy, soul of the universe,
sacred spirit, pie in the sky and such but a very earthy and in your face presence. The
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Incarnation made it so. God not only created but entered his creation by becoming a
human being, treading the Earth with us and even suffering and dying as we do and all to
bring about the flowering of love among those uniquely free creatures of his, us. The
goal? To make possible the grace, not of oblivion or re-absorption, but of abundant life.
The promises of Christ are astounding, “Ear has not heard nor eye seen what the Father
has prepared for those who love Him.” And it must be added, by loving thy neighbor too
including the not so lovable, helping them when needed and forgiving them when asked.
While it is important to love “mother nature” and protect it and going green is great, it is
by no means ennobling of man to worship any aspect of nature, a fellow creature and a
non-thinking lesser one at that. That is what happens when God is equated with nature as
happens in pantheistic ideologies. Such systems often vacillate between man the divine
spark and man the speck of dust and they often endorse such religious crudities as
reliance on dreams, crystals, charms, chants, tarots, palms and other rank superstitions.
Nevertheless, all in nature are rightly deemed our fellow creatures though on a much
lesser unthinking plane for the fact is we know and they along with nature as a whole
know nothing. It makes all the difference. Nature follows laws of which it is totally
ignorant. We follow or abuse laws of which we are aware. The gods of nature and of the
East are, in the final analysis, as unknowing as nature itself. Far better the God who
knows, who IS and who commands that we love one another and do good. Indeed, for
those who stand before this, the God of revelation, and are in awe of mind and power,
love and grace, the idea that fellow thinking beings would worship the mindless powers,
forces and energies that are part and parcel of the material universe, is astounding. Gods
that are as unknowing as mother Earth, goddess Gaia, the universe itself and all the rest,
as said, follow rules and laws of which they know nothing and lack the freedom to
violate. It is demeaning that free creatures with intellect and mind should worship the
clueless and mindless or as in the case of astrology’s devotees, allow themselves to be
influenced by mindless celestial objects. It is an example of the blind leading not the
blind so much as the intellectually gullible.
Think about it; science is very limited. It tells us all about the laws of nature but
never answers the questions, from whence these laws come and more astoundingly, why
should nature obey laws at all? That is because its tools are limited to questions of how
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but the mind is impelled to go beyond that to questions of why. We can’t help it. That is
why metaphysics came to be and in a sense acted as a vestibule for the profound truths of
revealed religion. If by the measurements of science a man and a woman are no more
than a buck worth of elements we know we are much more and revelation confirms it.
Otherwise, would a buck bag of elements that accidentally happens to think but is
nevertheless destined for oblivion have inalienable rights? Why? From where do they
come? Those of the Judeo-Christian heritage answer the Creator, those outside it or who
reject it answer convenience or some variable of it. But we in the Christian West had the
advantage of the Judeo-Christian God of Revelation. It is only from such religion that the
social changes discussed and sorely needed, can originate. That is why historically the
West, Europe and America, made up of societies based on Judeo-Christian revelation has
led all the rest in the ways of beneficial change and needed reform and even when parts
go off the track as Germany under Nazism and Russia under Communism, the rest battle
to correct the evil. As English essayist Alexander Smith wrote “If the sores that fester in
the heart of society weigh heaviest on the (Western) mind we have to thank the JudeoChristian tradition for it…The Sermon on the Mount makes the morality of nations
ghastly.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger put it this way. “It is to the Western standard that
groups in other societies appeal to redress injustice.” This may be changing now as
America forges ahead in less noble areas such as porn production and record levels of
promiscuity, single parenthood, divorce, child poverty, abortion and debauch. As was
said, the change and reform we need will not come easily now that religion is being
marginalized and its voice gagged. This puts success in doubt. More doubt than in the
past when the voice was stronger and people of strong religious beliefs like Wilberforce
in England and William Lloyd Garrison in America led the abolition movement and later
when Rev. Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights movement. Imagining no religion,
denigrating religion or banning its public expression as Bloomberg did makes needed
reform more problematic,
There have been great do-gooders in human history, to happily use a term much
despised in the very circles combating reform. Though often a putdown term for religious
people right up there with hypocrites, they were men and women of great moral strength,
determination and goodwill especially toward the weak and disadvantaged. But many of
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them would escape much notice today, pushed off the tube and screen that is often the
only source of information for many, by singers, dancers and performers over whom
many go GaGa.
To bring about change it helps greatly to believe we human beings are really
special. But the idea that humans are indeed on a different level from the rest of creation
with a dignity deriving from their being made in the Creator’s image, an image involving
freedom and intellect has been severely weakened. It’s hard to see how it could be
otherwise in a world tolerating massive destruction of new human life. Abortion equates
the new human being not to a child of God with all the dignity and rights that implies but
to disposable trash. Mother Theresa even saw a connection between abortion and war.
Mass destruction of life in the womb makes mass destruction of life on the battlefield less
unthinkable, abhorrent and reprehensible she thought. It weakens the great inalienable
right to life for both represent the destruction of life at different stages. Adding to the
cheapening and downgrading of human life are those who claim to be impressed by
mankind’s “insignificance.” They are particularly impressed by our smallness of stature.
They relish being humbled by things larger than we are. These are the folks so in awe of
the sheer size of universe as to lead them inexorably into insufferable self-depreciation.
The universe is indeed impressive to say the least but should it reduce us to, as some like
to say, mere insignificant specks? Indeed, can we not maintain true humility and
appreciation without groveling? Gazing into the depths of the Grand Canyon one admirer
said it helped her “realize for the first time my own utter insignificance.“ Really? An
“intelligent” being insignificant before a gloriously magnificent big dumb ditch, is
telling. The greatness and beauty of nature is admirable indeed but to the inheritors of
revelation, humanity can never be insignificant, never dust in the wind not even the preborn. When that label gets placed on any segment of the human family, slave, Jew,
handicapped, the dissenter, the pre-born, the incompetent elderly or cognitively disabled,
the death wagons are often not far off. The Christian can admire the great creation
without this need for downgrading. It is not boastful to say that though we may be small
apparently we are different and the difference makes a big difference. All evidence thus
far indicates we alone in the universe have mind. We alone can know and understand the
workings of a vast creation that has no ability to do the same. We are of greater value
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than all that we know of for the simple reason that we alone can know and understand.
That’s because, as revelation makes clear, we are made in God’s image. We have mind
and a freedom of will undiscovered in anything outside us. We can think, act and love or
not as we choose. It’s a choice beyond other creatures and in spite of scientist Stephen
Hawking’s comment to reporter Diane Sawyer that human life is “insignificant in the
universe,” we are not insignificant by any means, quite the opposite.
Some think it remarkable that there are animals that have larger brains than we
have and we should be humbled by that fact but what really is remarkable is that we are
vastly superior in thought nevertheless because brain is not mind and we have mind.
There is much more to cognition and reason than brain. In the human being, it is mind
that tells brain what to do: concentrate on that or don’t think about this. And when it
comes to love, our mission here if we accept it, it is to love and do no harm. And when
we love we never say to another, “my brain loves you.” It is I who loves you because a
lot more is involved in thought; will, decision making and love than brain. The brain is
the necessary but not sufficient condition of thinking and consciousness. It processes and
provides sense experience and it is a bodily function affected by bodily things. Fever, for
example, can disturb it much as when Scrooge blamed his visions of Marley on a
uncooked piece of beef or undone potato. But conceptual thought, mental reflection,
personal discontent, guilt, along with the freedom to choose good or evil are beyond brain
and matter. They are distinct non-bodily operations transcending materiality. Endowed
with spirit and the inalienable rights that flow from it, insignificance is not part of our
resume but we should not get carried away. As someone wrote, “man is the only creature
who hunts his fellow man for sport or hate.” Mind and freedom can be misused
drastically but only by us because we alone, as far as we know, have them.
What then are men and women but unitary beings of both matter and spirit, material
and non-material, body and mind but so intimately together and unified that the one can
effect the other as bodily ingested drugs can alter the mind. The Athanasian Creed
recognized this intimate unity 1,700 years ago. “For as the rational soul and flesh is one,
so God and man is one in Christ.”
The brain cannot account for this abstract reflection that raises humans above
other seeing and feeling creatures who also have brains. The brain cannot account for the
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spiritual power that man possesses and uses to direct its operation. That power focuses
brain’s attention and questions its accuracy. To know and to love beyond mere sex and
instinct, that is man’s resume and it is more than brain can handle or account for. Love
removes us from the rest of creation. In the Catholic marriage vow with its “in good
times and bad… till death do us part… forsaking all others,” we see an ascent of the body
almost beyond body. We see lust governed by the unbreakable promise of marital
fidelity. For the words and promises to be honest and true and full of meaning the Church
insists on their irrevocability. No room “for as long as our love will last” here. The pledge
and commitment is made and the great and honorable task is to make it work through
mutual love and dedication, Love makes the formidable project possible This is not the
child’s play of the “Playboy” venue. This conscious decision is beyond the demands of
mere flesh because we are in reality more than mere flesh. The mind of man is far beyond
brain. Though, of course, it cannot not eliminate dependence on brain and body with their
unruly urges and ways, it can nevertheless transcend and transform them far beyond the
ability of other living things. Such a power flows from spirit, from a mind beyond matter
and is well above other creatures whose sex drive governs them in entirety. As physicist
Eugene Wigner admitted long ago, the brilliant successes of physics and chemistry
cannot overshadow the obvious fact that “thoughts, desires and emotions are not made of
matter.” We are endowed with a unique freedom that allows us to look inside things and
question, to root out truth, to ascend beyond material imperatives and we have the ability
to change. We alone have the capacity to feel guilt and what a difference that makes!
What life changes, what awful harm left undone or corrected that a healthy and realistic
dose of good old-fashioned guilt can help bring about! This ability to feel guilt is a great
spiritual gift. According to Wilfred M. McClay of the University of Tennessee it is surely
“one of the essentials of our human makeup…and a spur to many of the noblest acts in
human history.” These things are ours alone. Indeed our fellow animals are admirable in
their way, strength, beauty and speed for example but lions do not throw up, shaken to
the core at not being adequately leonine. That’s guilt and they don’t have it. Neither do
Elephants vent their desolation at being so grossly elephantine. And as Leon Kass,
Chairman of The President’s Council on Bioethics (a field badly in need of more Kass’)
was fond of saying, the Monkey, for all his leaping, produces no ballerinas nor is he
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disconcerted about it. It doesn’t make him discontented with himself at all. With brain but
no mind it’s all beyond them. None of them can self-reflect, be disenchanted with self,
change and improve on what they are. They are locked in against basic life change. They
are programmed to a degree far beyond us. We are allowed freedoms beyond anything
found in the rest of nature. We can transform ourselves, and the world. That is what
Christ meant by telling us we must be the salt of the Earth. It is something few Buddhists
or Hindus would understand. Someone once wrote, “To imagine transfiguration and
acknowledge disfiguration is what makes us human and separates us from animality.”
Well, at least it’s one of the many things that do. Add to it change, the ability to turn
around in life like the prodigal and also important, the ability to laugh at a good joke and
at our selves. Finally, we alone know that we must die. We may be a lot of things but
insignificant isn’t one of them, thanks to God.
So, what is this unique creature to do? It is the consensus of historians and a
conclusion of detailed studies and research by scholars including Jacques Barzun, Will
Durant and many others that there has been no moral society in history without a strong
religious base. Most moral philosophers admit that even a secular ethic ultimately
depends on a set of fundamental religious-like assumptions. Even Nietzsche predicted
that the elimination of God and dogmatic religion would lead to the “total eclipse of all
traditional morality.” God eliminated and replaced by convenience or a utilitarian version
of it and of course the first to feel the brunt is usually the most defenseless among us, the
despised racial, ethnic or religious minority, the poor, the pre-born, the handicapped,
cognitively disabled and the elderly incapacitated. The road to hell is paved with the
kindly intentions of compassionate people who have removed God from the equation.
The abortuaries are waiting and the death with dignity cohorts are in the wings always
ready to swoop in, often flying the compassion banner when if we look hard enough the
convenience flag or bottom line banner would often be the more honest choice. If human
life is special from the Creator, we must work with it not destroy it.
There is something sadly ironic in an age where pain containment has never been
more advanced that the call for assisted suicide has never been louder. To “suffer with”
may be the literal meaning of the word compassion but few want to push it that far.
Giving aid and support without stint to the decrepit and useless, “life unworthy of life” as
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the Nazis used to say, is senseless to many “compassionate” people as it would probably
be to all people without the example of Christ and his cross. He put value into our
suffering. His suffering and death revealed the great love of God for us, and life in
abundance. Our suffering and death can draw out love and care from others and the true
compassion of Christ that calls forth aid, comfort and support not suicide. In that way
both sufferer and comforter are ennobled. The person on his deathbed is no insignificant
entity to be disposed of like an unwanted pre-born or is he? Why not if we are all only
cosmic accidents, value one dollar? Then Abortion at one end of the life spectrum and
euthanasia at the other with dog eat dog survival of the fittest in between is hardly a
surprise. On what grounds can it be objected? On what grounds can it be protested?
Inalienable rights based on convenience? Or, are we the special creatures of a loving
Father who endowed with inalienable and intrinsic value and rights? Who offers us not
insignificance but eternal life and who wants the victory of love in return. If compassion
means we should suffer with one another, support and care for one another then
obviously killing the weakest and most defenseless among us will be repugnant. But that
is precisely what will happen if we continue to replace the Creator with a compassion of
convenience. And if in moments of weakness a suffering brother or sister should ask for
relief in death the thought should be dispelled with a rush to love and serve and with all
the scientific pain containment available. Let gentle love and heartfelt caring work its
magic. The gift of life is such that no one should take it upon himself to end it. In this
way we confirm the dignity and self worth of the person and our own by emphasizing his
importance to all who love him and if there is no family to provide love we become that
family. Let those who protest capital punishment also rush into the hospitals with loving
arms. Let us hold in love those dying as long as possible without abusing nature with
extraordinary measures or machines. True love and compassion supplies modern pain
dispelling medicine when needed where the death with dignity squad would supply the
pill. And if there was loneliness and no one to supply love, step up to the task. None of
this requires going to extraordinary lengths with ridiculously expensive means and
machines, just the love that puts compassion into action. Just the actions governed by the
kind of love Christ lived and taught us.
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Practicing love requires faith and hope and as faith fades away as it seems to in
many today so very frequently does love because authentic love always requires sacrifice.
Already there are almost no Down syndrome children being born. About 90% are
destroyed, sacrificed on the altar of convenience. The decline of traditional morality and
Christ-like love has turned pre-natal screening, what should be a blessing, into a lethal
weapon in he hands of many men and women in this era of mini-morality and sacrifice
free “love.” They may love heroes on the screen but not in themselves and as a result
those ninety percent never see the light of day. And of course, the question is who’s next?
It is not only imperfect children who are at risk. Sex selection abortion is growing in
popularity. It non-Christian parts of the world it has taken millions of pre-born females as
has infanticide. But even in formerly Christian areas the Christian life ethic has weakened
as will happen as faith fades, replaced with convenience. In countries such as the
Netherlands non-terminal seniors have been given the needle without their knowledge or
consent and the trend is little protested. This at a time when, as was mentioned, the
science of pain management has never been more effective! Compassionate feelings
alone without the "suffer with" component of Christian love are often hollow and
frequently self-serving. They are no match when convenience or cash is jeopardized. It is
hard to see value in not offing certain of our “useless” or terminal brothers and sisters
unless we look with the eyes and love of Christ and the admonition, “thou shall not kill.”
Efforts at love and comfort would dissipate many requests for the lethal injection. Only
love can do the job and love goes beyond compassionate feelings.
It is neither new age religion nor Eastern philosophies but precisely revealed religion
that puts that kind of value on each individual life and demands that kind of authentic
love along with compassion in the true meaning of that word. Those dedicated to
personal convenience, the unending finding of themselves and the avid search for self –
realization and fulfillment will always fail in their quest unless the lesson of authentic
love is understood and embraced. Here’s the key, it starts with other than self. Serve
others and the rest will be given unto you. Above all else, suffer for and with another at
personal inconvenience and you are on the way to that elusive self-fulfillment. That’s the
ancient Christian message of Christ-like love confirmed by long centuries of experience.
It’s almost always been counter-cultural. For most of us it requires a basic change in
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attitude. To bring about this change from overriding self-concern to empathy and
altruistic concern for others especially the weak and “useless” even at personal cost
requires the forgetting of self and that requires a religion with more moral depth and
demands than can be found in Earth Day antics, winter solstice celebrations, the worship
of Gaia, fields of Energy and their “channeling “or the ever popular Life Force. This is
because empathy does not develop naturally through some evolutionary process. It needs
the jolt of revelation, especially the Gospel. The fact is, the empathetic love revelation
calls for is anti-evolutionary in that it protects the unfit and helps in their survival. To
flourish, that kind of love must become a cultural thing permeating its media and laws. It
must be cultivated and nothing cultivates it better than revealed religion epitomized in
Christianity but with the Gospel almost derided in much prime time, the road back is
going to be a long one. As we know, the unrevealed religions are not usually strong in
this love activity. The Buddha even called upon people to free themselves from concern
and troubles by renouncing all worldly attachments, including even our children. That
leaves little room for love. It’s hard to be the salt of the Earth if you renounce the world,
turn your back on it, even despise it. To the Christian the world is not a horror to be
escaped but good, damaged goods yes but well worth loving and making better. This is
very different from popular nature spiritualities that often mistakenly worship the
creation rather than its Creator. As Chesterton pointed out, the adulation of nature beyond
normal appreciation belies lack of due thought for in fact nature has a very dark side,
damaged as it is.
Eastern and new age spiritualities are not the only detriments to the kind of real
love the world requires. Left without the Christian example, there never would have been
a Red Crescent or a Red Wheel, if there is one now, were it not for Christ’s call to love
and its workings in the West exemplified by Red Cross, Salvation Army and other such
organizations to emulate. Nor is the new secularism, a growing force in the West, noted
for developing altruism. Statistics make clear a point already alluded to, that secularists
and New Age devotees very seldom staff the AIDS hospitals, poverty and communicable
disease wards and orphanages around the world. As a matter of fact 25% of AIDS victims
worldwide are in Catholic institutions run usually by Nuns with other church supported
groups making similar efforts. Again the statistics and studies mentioned earlier show
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that traditional religious believers give much more to charities and sacrifice more
supporting efforts such as these than do secularists and non-believers. As mentioned too,
it tells a lot that the farmers of South Dakota give more per capita than the sophisticates
of San Francisco.
It is true that some of a New Age, Scientology, Space Visitors and Crystals
mentality, when in a warm and pleasant mood, find it is nice to imagine that we are all
one and part of a great mysterious Energy or Force rolling through the universe into
which we will all eventually be blissfully reabsorbed but such thought usually produces
little by way of hard sacrificial giving and doing. The example of Christ on his cross
evidently has a much different effect. On the other hand, if you want to do something
rather shabby, the Life Force or Energy steam being only blind forces with no morals and
no mind, they will never interfere with your despicable plans. Certainly not in anyway
like those dogmas and commands put out by the troublesome God revealed in the Jewish
and Christian scriptures and more vaguely by our consciences. And those secularists who
do go out of themselves and get involved are often unknowingly working off the batteries
charged over the centuries by those very Christian dogmas they rejected.
Dogmas, rules, commandments, strictures are not easy to deal with but following
them produces much good while disobedience has often wrecked havoc. Rule breakers,
my wayers and line crossers have a tendency to leave much ruin in their wake. In the vast
majority of cases it is in breaking rules not following them that havoc is wrought. Though
today’s popular media prizes the maverick, the “breaker of all the rules,” and the guy
who does things “my way,” few would want to live with or near them for long. As the
Romans from whom many of our legal concepts derive well understood, the primary goal
of law is to protect people from one another, the weak from the strong, the citizen from
tyrannical government. And when, on the usually rare occasion a rule or law must be
broken because its legislation violated an inalienable right such as liberty, then the causes
and consequences of breaking the law must be carefully and fully considered as the
Americans did in the beginning of their Revolution when they debated the Declaration of
Independence. These were no “lines are meant to be crossed” lightweights. They did not
relish breaking the law that connected them to the mother country but could see, after
much thought, study, deliberation and debate, no alternative.
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Ordinarily law is an invaluable asset because the alternative is often chaos or worse,
death. As for those poor benighted slugs who day in and day out follow the rule of law,
seldom grabbing all the gusto, breaking all the rules or crossing all the lines and about
whom no song of adulation by Sinatra or anybody else will ever likely be sung but should
be nor any TV series glorify, one can only imagine the crimes not committed, the lives
and families not wrecked, the havoc not sewn because of the often heroic sacrifices made
due to the prodding of their religiously sharpened consciences. The Founding Fathers
including Washington, Jefferson and Adams fully realized how indispensable religion
was for a republic of law. Religion is not just a preventer of harm but a healer too. If rules
are transgressed the conscience formed by religion produces that powerful sense of guilt
that reduces the odds of future breaches thus sparing untold heartache and hell on Earth.
That, and the reparation and repair of the damage that was done to others that just law
demands and religiously engendered guilt requires for forgiveness, are benefits of
religion seldom given due recognition. Because of honestly held religious beliefs and the
moral demands flowing from them, there are innumerable unsung lives through the
centuries that have prevented more damage to others and more hell on Earth than we will
ever know or imagine. “Imagine no religion,” somebody sang. Imagine unending
nightmare.
The so called wars of religion of the 17th Century, if that is an accurate designation
for wars that seldom simply or exclusively involved religion, pale in comparison to the
secular confrontations of the first half of twentieth century with its world wars and
holocausts, death camps and Gulags, all brought on by secular often anti-religious
ideologies. As the weakening of the influence of Judeo-Christian revelation and morality
continued in the second half of the century, it brought on the post 1960s moral debacle
that has been examined in some detail on many of the preceding pages. The facts, studies
and statistics cited give us a fearsome foretaste of what happens when religion is
banished or imagined away. Together, both halves of the century piled up bodies in
unprecedented numbers. Wars, death camps, AIDS epidemics and millions of abortions
will do that. (The second and third titles in this six volume effort, “Holocaust and War”
and “The Sixties Legacy” give much more detail on these matters than can be given
here.) Rest assured, as we swiftly move into the new century, that crystals, incense,
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tinkling bells, oils and holy spaces would not and will not sustain the crosses and
sacrifices needed to preserve a semblance of civilization as increasingly the strong turn
on the inconvenient, weak and vulnerable, be it in the form of abortion and euthanasia,
child abuse, child poverty and even the slow advance of pedophilia as an acceptable form
of sexual activity. Already items are appearing in scientific journals, especially in
Europe, on the feasibility of justifiable infanticide reminiscent of the articles appearing
on justifiable abortion in the years before Roe. It would and will take revealed religion if
this building slide into utopia for the powerful is to be halted. Unfortunately though even
that is under siege. It is indeed devastating and heart wrenching to see the wreckage
created by the moral decline associated with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s.
The sad statistics tediously but necessarily recited in many of these “pearls” underline the
point and tell much. What makes it doubly tragic is that it could have been avoided. It
flew in the face of what we know happens historically with the abandonment of self control and sexual restraint. It often leads to disease and death and ironically in time,
depopulation. We should have picked up the lessons of the past but didn’t. Years ago the
author of a famous American anthem captured the main lesson succinctly in a song that
we all sang but apparently didn’t let its message sink in. If we had, perhaps much
suffering and death could have been avoided. From “America the Beautiful,” we have
these lines:
“Confirm thy soul in self control
Thy liberty in law.”
“Thy” is us, the people of America. It obviously wasn’t done. Without the practice of
self-control prisons get filled, families get wrecked, children get abandoned, education
fails and civilization sinks. Without law there is no liberty.
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XXXV GUILT, EVOLUTION, REASON, THE WRONG ROOTS AND RIGHT
ROOTS OF RIGHT IN DEC. OF INDEPENDENCE.
Mindless Life Forces, holy spaces and Steams of Energy are indeed nice tame new
age gods to be switched on and off when we want but they will never bother us. And, it
might be added, never create the healthy dosage of guilt that is one of the great catalysts
for needed change. So writes C.S Lewis, concluding that these amorphous energies and
forces have “all the thrills of religion with none of the cost.” With them guilt is often
replaced with therapies of many popular stripes designed to banish maladies such as guilt.
According to many of them guilt damages self-esteem and for those of the Dr. Spock era
that is the greatest sin. Thus the catalyst is lost, society suffers and often the joy of
achieving needed life change is foregone. In its place comes not joy however but an
epidemic of depression. Numerous studies reveal abysmal numbers of people today
suffering from it. In England alone anti-depressant medical prescriptions are up 40% in
the past four years according to that nation’s Department of Health. It is telling too that
Dr. Spock’s own son committed suicide. Sadly, suicide among the relatively young has
also grown in our guilt free depression wracked society. What is needed? One massive
study of the topic by Dr. Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University points to
one possible answer. The study revealed that women who have had abortions are 81%
more likely to experience mental health problems including suicidal behavior, depression
and substance abuse than those who have never had abortions.
Would that reason and education were enough to keep us moral and moving in the
right direction but we know it isn’t. Trying to force meaning into a basically meaningless
world, if that’s the belief, does not produce relief it produces depression. Step one, the
world must be made meaningful for us by something beyond us. Professor James
Matthew Wilson of Villanova University alluding to St. Paul’s remarks to the Athenians
puts it this way. “One can only raise so many altars to the unknown God before desiring
to know his name. One can only greet the universe with awe and gratitude for so long
before desiring to bow down in worship before the founder of the feast.” And obviously
even reason fortified by revelation doesn’t always succeed in thyat gratitude as the sins of
the passengers and crew of the great hospital ship, the “Bark of Peter,” the Catholic
Church, amply demonstrates from time to time. Hypocrites! So say some critics but
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“those who are well have no need for doctors (or hospital ships for that matter) only those
who are sick and at risk. As someone once said, “hypocrisy is the tribute the sinner pays
to the saint.” “I have come to call sinners,” said Christ the Good Shepherd. Those looking
for a perfect way or perfect church will always be disappointed for clearly, as the wag
said, if you find one and join it, it won’t be perfect anymore.
It is very obvious that all our best tools including knowledge, reason and religion,
though of great help, do not necessarily lead to virtue. Damaged goods are we
descendants of “Adam and Eve” but though we are down we are by no means out
because goodness was initially and fundamentally built into us. Yet we have been so
deeply wounded by the loss of grace in the Great Fall that, with all peace to Pelagius,
knowing what is good and doing it are two very different things. Two people as different
as St. Paul who knew this well and wrote clearly about not doing the good he wanted to
do and nihilist Nietzsche saw eye to eye here. So did Darwin who was puzzled by the
question of why people are moral at all and even altruistic in the face of an evolution that
is supposed to encompass all reality but cannot explain sacrificial love. The love that
cares for the world’s weak and damaged ones goes against evolutionary theory and that
motor of evolution, the natural selection of the fittest. If evolution with its center piece of
natural selection explained all as proponents claim, it would surely sift out all these
altruists, our race’s great lovers, the clowns of Christ, those who suffer with the weak,
unfit and “useless, the very pride of humanity, but they are still with us. In the dog eat
dog world envisioned by survival of the fittest there should be no room for them. The
type should be as extinct as the dinosaur, weeded out long ago like the newly conceived
Down syndrome child of today. There should be no George Baileys jumping into freezing
rivers to save drowning strangers, old and unfit. They should both be gone. Both are
evolutionary anomalies. Evolutionary change should leave as survivors not the do
gooders certainly but the ruthless and their equally damaging relatives the my-wayers. It
is symptomatic of the modern flight from value judgments, commitments involving
personal sacrifice and reality itself, as reflected in the spiritual but not religious mentality
popular today, that many do not see what Nietzsche plainly did. When God and religion
are eliminated, life does not go on as usual and for many, the burdensome, “unfit,” weak,
sick, useless, inconvenient, costly and vulnerable, increasingly it doesn’t go on at all, for
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without some fixed (dogmatic) sense of rightness, how do we distinguish what is evil
from its opposite? Evolution doesn’t do it. To get around this problem, the redefining of
evil as a mental glitch in the wiring, as some propose, will not do. The really important
things, God, inalienable rights, equality, the definition of evil, will never see laboratory
proof just all the evidence based on the powerful combination of revelation and reason.
Why, for example, weren’t all Germans Nazis? Confronted with Hitler’s rejection
of Christianity many Germans realized they had a choice to make and many made bad
ones sometimes out of fear for survival, a very evolutionary choice, but not all did and
that’s the key. Evolutionary logic does not convincingly explain a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or
a Franz Jaegerstaetter. These great lovers, some would say daring clowns for Christ,
made their choices and unlike today’s abortion choices, paid the price themselves with
their own lives. And the type is still with us, still popping up in spite of evolutionary
theory. What separated them out from the mass of Germans? As one author wrote,
“unless one was prepared to take a relativist view that all values are a matter of personal
taste (and if that is true what fools Jaegerstaetter, Bonhoeffer and the hundreds like them
were) one could hardly avoid asking the question they must have asked themselves: ‘If,
as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our
values and invalidates theirs?’ That is the question that bedevils our relativistic and
utilitarian age. ” What indeed? Or, to up date the thought, if, as I am convinced, prochoice is wrong and pro-life is right what is it that validates pro-life and invalidates prochoice? Speaking personally, if anything gives choice a bad name it is abortion. By
turning the pre-born into disposable trash what are we but walking, talking trash, and the
older we get the more worthy of disposal we get according to evolutionary theory but not
Christianity. What a terrible teacher abortion is in so many ways! Mother Theresa truly
said, “If a nation permits a women to kill her own child in abortion, they teach their
people to even use violence to get what you want.” But, the question is by what standard
is this opinion valid and the opposite not? By what if anything can opinion rise above
mere personal preference? If there is something else to go by and evolution does not fill
the bill, what is it?
Might there perhaps be another law beyond evolutionary law, beyond human laws?
At the Nuremberg trials after WWII, prosecuting the Nazi war criminals posed a legal
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problem. Under what law were they to be prosecuted? Not under German law because,
based partly on evolutionary concepts popular with the Nazis such as survival of the
fittest, the atrocities they had committed were perfectly legal. Not under American,
British, French, of Soviet law either because they were Germans. What then? Is there
another law, a law beyond the merely national, beyond even the human? If so, who or
what legislated it?
To best answer that question we must look at the present situation with its culture
wars raging. There seems to be a dwindling supply of things we as a people agree on but
whether red state or blue state we do agree on democracy, government by the people. We
reject government by any elite. But what are the moral foundations of democracy, of
civility and of law especially that most basic of all laws, the one opposing the killing of
innocent people. Are these things more than personal opinion, cultural conditionings,
taste or preference? As George Weigel pointed out, can there in fact be democracy if the
moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by
nothing more solid than a social consensus based on the personal tastes and preferences
of the hour? Such a consensus in Nazi Germany first declared open season on the
handicapped and then on Jews early in the 20th Century and later in the century did
something similar in America to the pre-born. But in the U.S., it should be pointed out, it
was not a consensus of the majority of the American people that legalized abortion on
demand but rather a judicial coup pulled off with much deception by a powerful cabal of
thoroughly secularized liberal elites. The last century saw the target list grow. First the
handicapped and dissidents, followed by Jews and Slavs but then there was a pulled back.
At Nuremberg after the war the killing was condemned. Twenty-eight years later Roe
targeted the pre-born and the officially condoned killing of the innocent began again.
This latest assault has not been condemned and the law is still there. The question is, who
will be added to the list as this century moves on and away from its Judeo-Christian
roots, the useless aged perhaps as the rationing of health care looms as a possibility?
How do we escape this deadly dictatorship of relativism based on passing, often popular
and frequently deadly opinion and preference? Can we still make value judgments that
are permanent and right, the kind found in the Bible’s Ten Commandments, the
Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights and Gettysburg Address? Obviously the
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judgments in those documents were based on something more solid than popular opinion.
They were value judgments based upon the innate dignity of every human being. But, to
declare such dignity and rights one must assume as even some honest atheists do that
there exists somewhere in some mode of being, a realm of rightness that does not owe its
existence completely to people, to Darwinian selection, social construction, popular
opinion, national consensus, personal preference, taste, congressional legislation or
human invention. Call it the law of humanity as they did at Nuremberg or an endowment
by the Creator as the Declaration puts it or the natural law or the law of God as the
Church has held from its beginning, but whatever it is called it is something beyond the
vagaries of human tampering. As long as an atheist or any non-believer can so reason to
this conclusion there can be no accusation here of an imposition of religion, though it
must be said that many people, including the Founders of our Republic, would designate
such a mode of being or realm of rightness, the work of the Creator, Author of Nature,
God. Without a legislating power outside ours be it God or the Creator or if you will just
leave it a realm of rightness outside our tampering and alteration, can there be any other
basis for the absolute values, truths and rights? Not, it would seem, according to the three
seminal documents just mentioned.
Dangerously of late, the hold of these rights and truths in academia has been
greatly weakened even to the point of the recent excising of the “Under God,” from the
Gettysburg Address at a conference of scholars and “endowed by the Creator” from the
Declaration by the President in several speeches. We saw earlier Drew Faust’s remark as
the new President of Harvard, that “truth is an aspiration not a possession.” Until fairly
recently we thought we possessed solid truths and rights in the Declaration, not mere
aspirations. Aspirations are not known to be a solid foundation for rights or anything else
for that matter. Modern philosophy seems to have become clueless in this regard as
University of Maryland Philosophy professor, Susan Dwyer, candidly admitted recently.
An obvious believer in the aspiration approach to truth, sometimes termed the “unending
quest” school and often popularized as “the trip is more important than the destination”
mantra in which the goal is never reached and the quest seemingly never quenched,
satisfied or even satisfiable. In this school there is no firm goal in sight apart from
experience. Everybody ends up in possession of his or her own version of what is good
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and true. In this school such banalities as “the journey is more important than the
destination” are common. There is no one truth identical for all people. Truth is like a
salad bar. Everyone puts his or her own plate together. You say potato. I say potahto. I
say the holocaust is a great moral wrong, you say it never happened or, who says its
wrong? Why is it wrong?. I say abortion is the destruction of new human life, you say it’s
not human yet. Everybody has a right to his or her own opinions. That’s equal rights! In
this relativism gone mad atmosphere truth takes a beating. The challenge is to remain
civil and on talking terms without shelving truth as if incidental or unimportant. That is
the danger of making diversity or inclusiveness, important as they may be, the
centerpiece of a philosophical outlook. Truth becomes indefinable and undiscoverable
and relatively unimportant. When that happens situations easily arise that can become
extremely dangerous to the life and the human rights of the innocent and problematic that
are the underpinning of civilization.
Professor Dwyer is a case in point. Upon discussing the issues of slavery, the
holocaust and abortion, she candidly admitted “I haven’t got a clue what makes killing
human beings wrong.” Of course she wouldn’t, and given the philosophy professor’s
philosophy, how could she? Here’s the problem. When we disregard the absolute it
doesn’t go away but, as Terrell Clemmons observed in “Salvo” magazine we simply
become ignorant of it. That’s when the heads begin to roll. Then truth serves the cause
rather than the cause serving truth. As Lenin said, “truth is what advances the
Revolution” and the revolution took millions of innocent lives.
The Declaration of Independence took a different approach. It termed such rights
as life and liberty “unalienable” and “endowed by the Creator.” The Founders knew what
was the root and mother lode of all rights and it wasn’t relativism or utilitarianism or
choice or convenience or evolution or even unaided reason and could never be. The
Founding Fathers clearly understood this but many today do not. Read Jefferson’s letter
to Washington during the Constitutional Convention, “God who gave us life gave us
liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that
these liberties are a gift of God?” Yet, the modern secularist often denies such a God and
tends to hold that moral truth cannot be grasped. All we have are personal preferences
based on convenience. Philosopher Richard Rorty, of an agnostic bent, claimed that
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whatever their origin human rights are presumably true and solidly established now.
There is no longer danger of their being lost, especially in the West. The naivete is
dangerous. On such sandy footings, as Jefferson well knew, our liberties could never be
secure. Rights are based on truth and both are of God. Tocqueville, for example, was well
aware that by teaching the dignity of ordinary men, Christianity first initiated the
equalitarian impulse and ultimately made modern democracy and the concept of
inalienable rights possible. Remove that underpinning and we get atheist Sam Harris who
maintains in his book “The Moral Landscape,” that such rights are merely the expression
of cultural preferences produced by evolution. Presumably, as evolution rolls on the
preferences will change. So it seems the roots of right and our rights come down to either
secular utilitarianism or the revealed morality of religion. It’s a no-brainer if we value life
and liberty.
Thankfully, the Founders were not secularists but mostly Christians. Secularists
could not have written the Declaration but they can and sometimes will alter it. When
these lobotomizers get to work wielding their scissors and scalpels amazing things
happen. As was pointed out in an earlier “pearl,” in November 2010 President Obama
quoted the Declaration leaving out the words “by their Creator” after “endowed” and a
prestigious academic society recently published Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address with the
reference to God expunged. Such secularist censoring is becoming endemic. Some
medical schools have even altered the ancient Hippocratic oath by removing the ban on
abortion from it. From such antics it is but a short slide to the opinion of Sir Stephen
Wall that “individuals have their own values…changing moral code is a normal part of
social evolution.” This could serve as the secular anthem. How dangerous can that be?
All rights, values, truths are thus cut afloat. Here is relativism gone mad, everybody
equally a law unto himself or herself and all equally right. The Founders understood what
these modern secularists fail to, that the public morality of the new Republic required,
indeed could not do without, religious faith. Essay writer Wilson Carey McWilliams calls
the equal dignity of each person the “supremely important human fact.” In his thought it
is a confidence that derives from no human consensus but ultimately from the religious
insight that each person is made in the image and likeness of God. A thoroughly
secularized culture and society from which transcendent reference points for human
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thought and action have been removed is bad for the cause of human freedom and
dangerous for democracy because it leaves no solid foundation for the inalienable
dignity, value and rights of the human person.
Of all religions it is Christianity that places the highest value on human life and
dignity regardless or age, sex, situation or condition. From such a source came the
Church’s attempt to protect the pre-born and even the mandating of strict requirements
for a just war. These teachings are increasingly ignored but they will not be effaced. It is
difficult to impossible to imagine the Declaration of Independence being written 235
years ago by anyone outside the influence of Judeo-Christian revelation.
Having seen the results of the dethroning of absolute human rights especially in
Germany, the lesson was not lost on the U.N. of that time. The new organizations’ post
WWII Declaration on Human Rights, modeled partly on the inalienable rights cited in the
Declaration of Independence, was written, among other reasons, to give legal basis for
the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. It firmly rooted the rights and dignity of the
human person with his and her inalienable rights in both faith and reason. Reason alone
could not sustain the principle. It had to be shored up by faith in something beyond
mankind’s often wavering and easily influenced opinions. In today’s media saturated
narcissistic environment the wavering is more notable than ever as faith in anything
beyond self is buried in an avalanche of sex driven drivel.
What’s to be done? Is there any viable alternative to the old Baltimore Catechism’s
answer that served as the foundation of Western Civilization’s sense of the dignity and
worth of all human beings? They are not tools of government. They are not disposable
trash. “Men and women are made to know, love and serve God.” They are made not in
the image of natural selection or survival of the fittest but in their creator’s. Is there
another way to keep the wolves from the door? The question is far from new. With the
pagan barbarian invasions raging around him and human rights and dignity in danger of
being submerged in the flood, Pope Leo the Great declared c.460 “Christians recognize
your dignity and, now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return to your former
base barbaric condition.” This was said as that former base condition was on the rise as it
is again today. Today it is not a barbarian flood of paganism but a media engendered
flood of sex-saturated neo-paganism. The dignity-God connection is not pagan, is not
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traditional Eastern religion or its new age type spirituality spin offs, is not modern
secularist but is uniquely Judeo-Christian. We are all, regardless of race, gender, nation,
station or religion created equally the children of a loving God who endowed us with
inalienable rights upon which our dignity and freedom rests. Needless to say we have not
always lived up to our beliefs or to the dignity and rights the Creator endowed us with.
But the thought and ideal was old long before the Declaration and its writers used it. It
goes back to Genesis, the Gospels and a Pope holding back the barbarian assault. Fifteen
years after our Declaration, the French in their revolution tried to use human wisdom
alone divorced from Judeo-Christian theology. But a religion of pure reason without God
was slim ice as an anchor and the rights were severely curtailed under a reign of terror
that saw more thousands than ever the Inquisition took marched or rolled to the
guillotine.. Oblivious to history, recently politicians and academics, as we saw, have
tried to discard the Creator-inalienable rights connection all the while keeping the rights
right there by their side but their hide and seek game is not only fruitless it is also
dangerous because it never has worked and cannot. Warren Nord in his book ‘Does God
Make a Difference,” puts it this way. “Respect for the political rights of others is
grounded most solidly in the profoundly religious principle that all human beings are
equally children of God. Any alternative, secular justification for respecting political
rights, such as reciprocity or humanism, is prone to situational ethics that admit of
exceptions of convenience,” And as we saw, German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas,
seeing what happened in his country, held that the very concept of inalienable rights is
rooted in and cannot be sustained without the Judeo-Christian dogma of God the Father
and creator of all. The Nazi terror like the French terror earlier, attempted to discard that
belief.
Today many misinterpret such pronouncements as Habermas’ as being
discriminatory, and non-inclusive. God and religion, especially the dread “organized”
variety, often meaning Catholicism, frequently elicits negative responses from many
including of course the secular academics in control of many colleges. They are
reinforced by those narcissistic souls of whom there are many who see themselves
engaged in a spiritual journey of their own uncompromisingly unique and authentic
selves devoid of all dogma and obligation except of their own often self-serving
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construction. This is the viewpoint of Wall’s “individuals have their OWN values.” The
last thing these people want is values imposed from the outside especially by the
“Creator” no less or a religion claiming to speak in his authority on matters of faith and
morals. Breaking all the rules is a common mantra among them and a disastrous one if
taken seriously especially for a democracy.
The inscription over the portal to Harvard Law School states the case against this
deterioration of clear thinking and succinctly captures the thought behind the Declaration
of Independence. “Non sub homine sed sub Deo et Lege.” “It is not by men but by God
and the law,” that we are ruled and governed, is the meaning. Most certainly the Founders
would never want government by men of the “my way” variety who dreamed of being
Wall’s law unto themselves with their own values subordinate to no one and nothing. The
Founders wanted to limit government power and they knew the ultimate source of that
limitation had to be outside us and could never be of men. It had to be God and the law of
God, the natural law, as they understood it, written on the hearts of all men and women.
We are governed, they believed, by a universal law writ deep in our psyche and revealing
itself as self-evident truths that are reasonable and valuable but beyond logical debate or
scientifically demonstrable proof. They have to be accepted. They can’t be proved. “All
men are created equal.” as long as the majority, says so? Not according to those who
wrote and approved the Declaration of Independence. Where is this equality except as the
children of a loving Father? Certainly we are not equal in talent, abilities, intellect or
wealth. “They are endowed with inalienable rights among them life, liberty etc.” The
endowment is by the Creator or else the rights can’t be inalienable. Certainly they can’t
be inalienable if a government endowed them by legislation or court order. If that was the
case the government could as easily take away what it gave by legislation or court order.
Herein lay another danger and threat from the abortion license. A government that cannot
grant or create life deems when it can be removed unhampered by due process based on
inalienable rights. It turns new life into a negotiable commodity like asparagus. Some like
it and keep it, some don’t and toss it away like trash. This is what happens when you
don’t believe in the intrinsic dignity of the human being in all his or her up and down
stages from conception to first drooling to last babbling.
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The Founders aimed to limit what government by the people or any government
could do but those limits are slipping dangerously. They certainly did not envision a
government, especially government that was economically incompetent verging on
insolvency by spending above its economic means yet feeling mysterously qualified to
redefine important life matters that it had no hand in forming in the first place, the nature
of marriage for an example. Marriage is an institution the far predates both state and
church and is a creature of neither. Nevertheless, this burgeoning government has also
taken upon itself to redefine not only when human life begins and decree its taking to be
legal at a certain stage without any due process whatsoever but also what marriage is.
Such a government, in the thinking of the Founders, would have already far exceeded its
competency as well as its ideal limits.
Remove God from the equation as President Obama and some secularist academics
are trying to do now and expect what the Roman historian Tacitus termed “Corruptissima
Republicae, plurimae leges.” As the Republic is increasingly corrupted” (in our case by
the removal of a God based morality from its public life) expect “a lot more laws,” in
other words, a lot more government and government unrestrained because the people are
becoming themselves unrestrained and with dire results. From religion comes the selfsacrifice and implicit virtue necessary for the democracy that Tocqueville observed in
early America. They provided the compelling reasons that the new secular religion
cannot provide for obeying laws that conflict with our natural desires. The statistics and
studies cited throughout these “pearls” show what happens when those desires get free
reign. Lets just start with an over 40% divorce rate and a 22% child poverty rate in
today’s America. If a people fail in restraining their base impulses, and religion is an
essential aid for multitudes in that regard, “coorruptissma Republicae” will certainly
occur leading to more government and more laws in the attempt to contain the spreading
disorder, decay and decline. We already have large expensive government with
multitudes of laws, the very things the Founders didn’t want. It looks like we’ll be
requiring even more of the same unless a reversal is achieved but with media in the
driver’s seat and religion increasingly in the closet, it’s hard to see that happening in the
near future.
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XXXVI A CASE IN POINT: ROE AND DRED SCOTT
The people who established our republic 235 years ago believed in the necessity of
rules and laws but as few as possible. They believed that a religious people would not
need a great many. That is why religion was so politically important to them and to ne
encouraged. It made limited government so much easier. They would likely be horrified
at Engle vs. Vitale. They would be distressed no end by people like Madonna or “Lady
Gaga” with their nonsense about rules were meant to be broken and lines were meant to
be crossed. Not meant to be broken though sometimes, very rarely, they did believe they
had to be. When they did break the rule of law binding them to the Mother country as
they most certainly did when they broke away in revolt, as was mentioned, it was only
after long and serious thought and debate. Law was important to the Founding Fathers
and that is understandable. They were civilized people who were by trade mostly lawyers
though some were farmers and sometimes, like Jefferson, both. As such they were
familiar with the two kinds of law, the natural moral law that formed the guiding basis for
most of the law they, as lawyers, dealt with and the laws of nature, so important to
farmers. As philosopher J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas puts it, these men
were convinced that “a created moral order exists as certainly as does a physical one,”
and neither were the work of mankind. The created physical order, what is sometimes
called the laws of nature, were well known. Everyone knew, for example, that plants
need light and moisture and that they produce seeds in order to reproduce. The created
moral order, what is sometimes called the natural law, was well known too. Everyone
knew without being told by legislation that men should not murder or steal. As with the
created physical order and its laws governing the workings of the material world so too
with the created moral order with its laws governing the actions of men and women, but
there was a major difference. Whereas nature had to obey its laws, men and women,
made in the image of God with intellect and free will, didn’t have to obey theirs.
Nevertheless, the two were alike in that the laws governing nature and the laws governing
morals were undeniably there. And, as the laws governing nature were true for all known
parts of the natural world, so the laws governing people were true for all people, at all
times and cultures and known at some level by all. They contained familiar moral
precepts such as the rightness of acknowledging the Creator, of loving family and
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neighbor and the wrongness of stealing and committing murder. These precepts were
underived. We don’t need a law on the books to tell us about them. They are simply
known to men and women, engraved in their hearts to be poetic, whether we choose to
follow them or not. In the individual, this moral code is usually called conscience and
when it is broadened out among all people in general as a kind of world conscience, it is
often referred to as the natural law. This natural law is the law that was resorted to at
Nuremberg, sometimes under the name law of humanity, for a legal basis in the
prosecution of the Nazi war criminals after World War II, their own nazified national law
being of no use. Our lawyer, farmer founders were very familiar with both kinds of law
and knew that if men and women were guided and restrained from doing harm by this
God created moral order, as they conceived it, implanted in all, all would be well with the
Republic they were setting up. Since they were also to a great extent Christians they
believed the best expression of this implanted moral conscience was found in the Ten
Commandments, known also as the Decalogue. There, and from Revelation in general,
came the all-important and at the time uniquely Judeo-Christian belief in the essential
dignity and equality of all men and women. Few outside Judaism and Christendom
believed this at the time because few outside of Judaism and Christendom believed that
men and women were created in the image and likeness of God. For the Christians, this
originally Jewish belief was unimaginably enhanced by the Incarnation, the central belief
of Christianity, that human beings somehow merited the Creator becoming a creature for
love of them, the Christmas miracle. How much more dignity can be bestowed on human
beings? God became one of us! Using our free will as God intended in creating us was
how we were to fulfill that dignity. To help in doing this and help was provided, we have
the law of conscience, the law of the Ten Commandments and man made law based on
them. Yes, law was important to the Founders for it conveyed not only civilizing duties
but also important rights too such as life and liberty.
All this spoke to them politically when it came time to write the Declaration. They
called on these deep-seated beliefs when they felt a Declaration of Independence had
become necessary. They realized that good foundational law was derived from these
basic concepts and must be put in place. The Declaration of Independence besides being
the birth certificate of the nation was to be that foundational law. It would later be
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safeguarded by the working rules built into the Constitution. In the Declaration they laid
out the issues that impelled their break with England and those basic beliefs that they
held so dear and hoped would guide the future of the possible nation they were
establishing. With these principles implanted in the hearts of the people and enshrined in
the nation’s founding document, as Jefferson said, the Republic would be secure. It
would prosper with little government and the need for few laws.
Recent events have put the hopes of the Founding Fathers to a severe test. Now the
question is, how much hacking and amputation can these basic beliefs take? With a
ubiquitous media that can only be escaped with determination at work day and night
preaching quite different principles, with academics and politicians amputating parts of
the documents and with a people who often know more about the latest celeb. faux pas on
American Idol than what’s in the Declaration, the edifice is loudly creaking; the latest
symptom? The world economy shows the strain. Here and worldwide nations cannot lay
their hands on enough money to contain the problems they face without going deeply and
dangerously into debt. These problems are the very kinds the American founders feared
when the religiously enhanced self-control, self-discipline, and self-responsibility
necessary for a healthy republic were cast aside.
The statistics cited in earlier “pearls” about the debacle of the 1960s and afterward
when freedom for many became more willful license than anything else tell part of the
story. The widespread social dislocation and personal pain, disease, depression, poverty,
loneliness and dependencies that ensued and that a better understanding of history, the
Declaration and religion might have helped mitigate if not avoid, tell part of it too.
Government can’t get the money and spend it fast enough so great is this social
dislocation. The billions spent on AIDS containment, massive jailing for drug related
violent crime and drug rehabilitation programs are expenses that didn’t even exist prior to
the 1960s. Obviously the Republic is paying a heavy price in its economic, social and
family life as the traditional moral standards, never perfectly realized in the past but of
great guidance always, are replaced with a grab bag of personal values, self-realization
nostrums, law unto oneself preaching, grab all the gusto you can get cons and the “we
only come this way once” song and dance that are so popular with many of today’s
captains of media and the impressionable, mostly but by no means only young people,
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influenced by it. Private morality declines and with it the economy of the republic, as a
quick look at the higher than usual level of low-grade ethics and dishonest practices
plaguing politics and business in recent years indicate. Individual conscience can be
greatly dulled and submerged if surrounded by a seedy society and, can anything be
seedier than what is dished out daily by so much of our popular media? The Founders
well knew that a strong sense of morality, of honesty, of right and wrong in elected
officials, in the business sphere and most importantly among the people themselves are
essential for a vibrant society and a healthy economy and it could not be achieved
without a strong religious base. Listen to Washington. “Reason and experience forbid us
to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.” Many of
the others said the same thing. It is what Franklin was getting at when he told the women
who asked what kind of new government they had come up with, “It is a Republic
madam, if you can keep it.” Adams was even more adamant in that he believed it could
not possibly work well or be “kept,” except in the hands of a strongly religious people.
The evidence of our present difficulty is all about us as the long parade of
disastrous social statistics presented earlier testifies and the budgetary insolvency of
governments faced with these problems screams out. The growing gross thievery in
business is an added blight. The end result, the Republic goes into a decline that any of
the Founding Fathers would have had no trouble predicting. In addition to being
economically hurt, the nation has not been so deeply divided socially since the fight over
slavery a hundred and fifty years ago. At the present time the nation dividing catalyst that
has contributed mightily to the red state, blue state split with no end in sight is not slavery
of course, though that’s on the increase with great growth in sex trafficking arising since
the “liberation” of the 60s, but the issue now is life itself. Our Fort Sumter was Roe vs.
Wade. What happened afterward was predictable with a rudimentary grasp of American
history but missed by those calling for the convenient shrinkage of the right to life. Like a
receding wave leaving a beached whale high, dry and dying, the right to life was
withdrawn from those of our kind in a similarly helpless and vulnerable condition, the
pre-born. The “pro-choice” forces, oblivious to the tearing effect on the national fabric
that was bound to result, completely missed the boat as the silly headline in the “New
York Times” the day after the decision demonstrated, “Supreme Court Settles Abortion
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Issue.” As if Sumter settled the secession and slavery issue! What the Supreme Court had
done was fire a gun into the heart of the American creed as laid out in its birth certificate,
the Declaration. Far from settling anything it began the present deconstruction of
American life, its confidence, hope, health and optimism, turning us into a much older
and more cynical nation in the course of a few decades. And the media with its blaring
rock scene and the spreading seediness of MTV –Jersey Shore type programming, almost
as a placebo for narcissistic devotees, cannot forever sedate the crowd. Even they must
wake eventually as they age and find the blues just won’t go away that way.
It was a susceptible Supreme Court, with flimsy reasoning, legally, logically and
scientifically, as much subsequent examination and commentary on the decision make
clear and the papers and argumentation at the time reveal, that decided to overrule the
opinion of the American public and the laws of most of the states to create a new
category of sub-humans to join the “sub-humans” of the past. Now we could add the preborn to slaves and to the Nazi’s list that started with the handicapped, “life unworthy of
life,” and continued with Jews and Slavs. The U.S., that had painfully overcome the
slavery and later segregation issues, now found itself plunged into the abortion issue by
the Judiciary. The decision put us in some fine company! The nation would never be the
same. Especially telling was the misinformation contained in the Roe decision rationale
of Chief Justice Blackmun, the decision’s architect. In essence the court kow towed to the
loud and rising tide of liberation mania from college campuses, radical feminists, liberal
academicians and supporting media like the N.Y. Times to overrule a large segment of
public opinion and the common understanding of the Declaration. This is always a risky
proposition in a healthy democracy because the “silent majority” doesn’t always remain
silent and neither does the nation’s conscience, as a little reflection on American history
especially the reaction to the Dred Scott decision and even to a lesser extent at first,
Plessey vs. Ferguson, would have revealed. It sometimes takes time but injustice irritates
and agitates minds that eventually must come forth. All three decisions were blows
against justice, the dignity of human life and the concepts enshrined in the Declaration.
Those concepts will always give rise to strong opposition in a society still sensitive to the
document’s beliefs and values or at least not completely sedated.
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What brought the disastrous change about is not difficult to discover. Loud cries
against “the establishment” from anti-war demonstrators of the 60s soon called for “love
not war” and as usual with many of the “liberated,” the “love” became sex. Something
had to be done about the usually unwanted result. The liberated kiddies were not ready to
measure up, after all children can get in the way of freedom, liberation, career paths,
degree expectations and vacation plans and condoms never have and still don’t stand in
the way of passion. With promiscuity soaring and a condom failure of about 15% on
average, many “mistakes” happened.. The dignity of human life was in for a body blow.
An understanding Supreme Court of the Engle type mentality agreed. Liberation from the
“mistakes” that the happily liberated often made and those obligations and
responsibilities that they happily shunned in spite of what justice, honor and life itself
may call for, were the way to happiness and fulfillment. In a curious reversal of trends,
all of a sudden a government increasingly involved in various areas of American life
couldn’t get involved in this one. A new “right to privacy” was created by the Supreme
Court to fill the bill. Concepts such as laissez faire and privacy may have been in
increasing disregard in economics, but in the social realm they were now in vogue with a
vengeance, specifically in this small but all-important area of new life. There, the
government, it was decreed, may not get involved. There a new laissez faire was in.
Government could not impose. A child could now be destroyed even when half born on
any altar, inconvenience being the most popular one. Government could impose in your
pocket book, in your smoking activities, in your driving habits with belts and halters, in
how you discard old oil cans and batteries, to whom you rent a room, even in the use of
spanking by parents and in what you do to your pooch, but for new human life it was now
open season. His or her right to be born and continue to live would not be allowed to
interfere with the fun and games. This was the new “privacy.” It allowed “choice” to
trump life itself. So much for the hard won revelation based dignity of every individual
human life, rich or poor, young or old! Pro-abortion forces were often heard to say that
abortion would be rare for it would never be an easy decision. That is until it was
revealed that almost forty percent of abortions were repeats like Whoopie Goldberg’s.
New life became so cheap that many people used abortion as if it was just another form
of birth control so low the value of each life had fallen thanks to Roe. In N.Y.C 40% of
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conceptions ended in abortion on average though the percentage was higher among
minorities. Abortion proponents also predicted that child abuse would all but disappear.
This was held out as a lure for the easily conned but with the abortion genii out of the
bottle and the value of each life severely damaged, problems that should have been
foreseen developed and that particular one, child abuse, worsened in ways undreamed of.
We have already examined the telling statistics. Now, in the area of sex, everybody could
indeed become laws unto themselves, as long as it was “consensual.” But, in the new
morality it became increasingly difficult for women to resist the media and new
establishment built pressure to chuck out the old nonsense about chastity. (See the
Weisman-Becker letter exchange) and withhold consent. Imagine the pressure build up
on the young women when even their schools began to distribute condoms to all for the
asking giving the whole debauch an imprimatur. And, of course, no consent from the new
beings being terminated was practical, nothing like the Church’s requirement for a
Devil’s Advocate in its canonization process to argue the case for the absent or
speechless subject was devised as a sort of substitute due process. Planned Parenthood
even fought against periods of counseling and consultation including with parents! So,
the value of new life was thoroughly trashed. Inconvenience was deemed quite enough.
Nothing was lost save human dignity, honor, and human life in abundance. What
happened as a result is a nightmare of extreme proportions. Over 50,000,000 new lives
destroyed since 1973. If it wasn’t for the forty million or more immigrants pouring in and
filling the vacuum, the whole national safety net would be in tatters specially the
programs for the aged not to mention the condition of the economy as a whole. No need
to drag out the rest of the statistics on post 1960s America all over again including the
child abuse statistics. In spite of all the wailing rock groups, delirious fans, porn in every
electronic gadget, abortion on demand, no fault divorce, pot for every “medicinal
purpose,” the anti-depressants are being handed out hand over fist like never before. And,
the face of America seemed much older, worn like no war had ever done and its spirit
grew darkened with the passing decades. The plethora of tattoos couldn’t cover all the
lines.
When it short circuits a healthy democracy on a life and death issue like Dred Scott
did on slavery and Roe on life, the nation is asking for trouble. The division, dissent and
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even disenchantment with what America is, what it stands for, what it is supposed to
stand for continues to spread and grow even with Friday night, Saturday, Sunday,
Monday night and Thursday football and all the rest of it. The country is not nearly as
healthy or happy in many ways as it was before. In spite of all the diets and gyms, the
girth of the average American swelled even as the heart of many seemed to shrink. We
won’t go to the record book again. You can look at the preceding “pearls” if you wish. If
the life and death matter of abortion, much like the similar but less directly life
threatening issue of same sex marriage now, were put to a vote of the people of the
several states they would never have passed. This is true of the latter in spite of
historically inaccurate comparisons with the earlier racial segregation laws in the U.S. as
the 2010 passage of Proposition 8 banning same sex marriage in liberal leaning
California demonstrated. That is, until the Judiciary got into the act at the behest of the
defeated group and overturned the vote of the citizens. The Judiciary seems more
susceptible to certain trends, sometimes as in the case of Roe, while ignoring the well
established belief of the vast numbers with little time to protest as they silently go about
the daily task of working and raising families. Meanwhile the courts are at work trying to
reshape America in their image most recently with regard to same sex marriage. They are
often devotees to social reconstruction made achievable by the adoption of an
increasingly bendable view of the words of both the Declaration and Constitution.
Realizing this, the forces behind these radical changes shy away from democratic
decision-making such as referendums in favor of the court route. Sometimes bogus
historical parallels are called into play as we have noted, the comparison between laws
forbidding racial inter-marriages and those forbidding same-sex marriage. being an
example. It may not be in the spirit of democracy but since Roe, judges have proven an
easier and more pliable target in these matters than plumbers, farmers, firemen and the
whole gang of those who are taken up in the business of earning a living and bringing
into being the new generation. With Roe, their will and the laws of almost fifty states
protecting the unalienable right of pre-born life were all swept away. A similar
phenomenon is apparent in the same-sex marriage issue.
But the plot thickens and that precisely is what it was, a plot. Norma McCorvey, aka
Ms. Roe has come clean and made public the lies that her National Organization of
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Women lawyers constructed for her for the consumption of an easily swayed court
including the claim that she had been made pregnant in a gang rape. Phony statistics on
the extent of “back alley” abortions were supplied too as Dr. Bernard Nathanson, part of
the plot, later confessed, all designed to grease the deadly skids. But, the deed was done
though the story was far from finished in spite of the fatuous N.Y. Times headline. In all
this, the unmentioned goal of the choice forces was to make room for more carefree
sexual freewheeling, that being an important part of liberation, and kids are certainly a
care. Indeed, the pre-born child had become a danger, an inconvenience, a mistake,
reducible to disposable trash by the decision, much as the slave Dred Scott and all slaves
had been reduced to saleable property by that Supreme Court decision with Chief Justice
Roger B. Taney in the role of Blackmun. So much for the human dignity inculcated
through the centuries by the teachings of the Church. All that was reduced to trash too by
the freewheeling, instant fulfillment, grab all the gusto, do your own thing society that,
with the help of much of the media, was striving toward center stage in the national
consciousness. Its success became apparent in 2009 when the media tripped all over itself
to glory in the 40th anniversary of Woodstock and its magnificent heritage spiritual
liberation of all things, all the while passing over with nary a headline the 20th
anniversary of the crashing down of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain along with the
demise of the Soviet tyranny that had engulfed a good part of Europe for decades.
Millions enjoyed freedom and real liberation for the first time. The media seemed
confused, this time on the real meaning of liberation.
If the victorious end of the Cold War had freed millions from communism, the new
society emerging would take millions of new and innocent lives with not so much as a
scintilla of due process or a fraction of the notice Woodstock got. The defense of these
innocent targets had been in the hands of a Supreme Court willingly self-deceived or
bamboozled if possible by much pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo about when life began
as well as doctored social misinformation about things like “back alley” abortion and coat
hangers (see Part III, the 60s Legacy and Part IV “Don’t Take the “A” Train, for the full
story). To its disgrace there was only one lone dissenting voice to cast a vote for life over
convenience and human dignity over the human disgrace of one generation destroying
much of another generation, No country built on the inalienable right to life was going to
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rest long with a Supreme Court decision that trumps life with choice and a distorted form
of privacy. In the deep divisions disturbing our nation today, abortion with “choice”
trumping life has been the main catalyst. Result: an abortion rate taking about 25% of
each new generation doing irreparable damage to the value of human life and its dignity.
A dignity painstakingly developed over the millennia since Exodus and the later rise of
Christianity. Poor Pope Leo the Great, urging Christians in the 5th Century as they were
being inundated by the rising tide of pagan barbarism, not to give up their dignity as
creatures made in by God in his image! They didn’t. They eventually overcame the
onslaught. We shall see if we can.
Perhaps a better grasp of American beliefs and history along with stronger religious
beliefs could have held off and even defeated the attack on innocent human life launched
in the 1960s and 70s. But in much primary and secondary education history had been
neglected for lessons in self-realization or self-actualization and Christianity itself, the
religion of the majority, did not pose a united front even on such a vital issue as abortion
weakened and divided as it had become since the Reformation. Basically, it was the
Catholic Church, the largest of the churches that almost alone first led the opposition. On
the issue of slavery too American Christianity had been divided north and south like the
nation though often taking the lead in the northern anti-slavery movement. In the north it
strongly opposed the Dred Scott Decision as the Catholic Church opposes Roe today. In
the 1859 Dred Scott decision the issue was essentially the freedom to choose to own
slaves trumping the human personhood and liberty of the slave. Dred Scott maintained
that he, a slave, had become free when his owner took him to live in the free state of
Illinois and was still free when he was moved back to live in Missouri, a slave state.
Justice Taney, speaking for the court majority, declared that not only was Scott not free
but that slaves were not even citizens. In other words, they were property. This was
analogous to Roe declaring pre-borns not only possessing no human rights including the
right to life but essentially not even human. As a result of Roe millions of lives have been
destroyed. As a result of Dred Scott, 3,500,000 people were kept in bondage and it took
a war that destroyed 600,000 lives to undo the damage and right the wrong.
Our history, indeed human history, tells an important lesson. There is an evident
need for absolute, divinely commanded norms to anchor the moral, political and religious
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life of a people and they have to be strongly proclaimed especially by religion. However,
it also teaches that even that doesn’t work all the time because we are free to ignore them
and because our intellects, sometimes clouded by passions and misinformation, do not
always see clearly what those norms call for. These norms are however of great help and
when abused often tend to rebound and push movements to bring about the repair and
restitution necessary and required in the name of justice. In our history movements and
programs have attempted to help discriminated at risk sectors of our people including the
Native American, the African American, The Nisei, children and women at labor, for
example, with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, societies that intentionally
subdue religion or where religion atrophies, correction is often slow or non-existent and
worse still, the odds that humanity is more likely to see concentration camps, Gulags,
genocides, abortuaries, destruction of the weak, inconvenient, non-productive,
vulnerable, “useless,” damaged and resource draining, “life unworthy of life,” are greatly
increased. In such societies the rug of revelation upon which such groups stood with an
innate dignity reflected in their creation and likeness, however imperfect, to God has
been pulled out from under them and they will quickly begin to fall, targeted by the social
engineers and secular ideologues who are more often than not as crassly utilitarian at
heart as a Dr. Singer in their quest for utopia.
As debate raged in the U.S. after the Dred Scott decision and the Abolitionist
movement spread with the Civil War eventually descending upon the nation, so debate
and political war rages today over Roe. Looking at Lincoln, especially his debates with
Stephen Douglas, the main choice spokesman of the day, may supply help in our present
mess. How did Lincoln get away with confronting the “choice” mentality of Stephen
Douglas and the slaveocracy in the struggle to over slavery? Wasn’t choice at the heart of
democracy? To many who agreed with Douglas, slaves were property not people and
slavery was a neutral institution. Like abortion today, one could choose it or not as one
saw fit. Similarly today the pre-born are not new people but like slaves, disposable
property, but even worse, discardable indeed destroyable property to some. People are
free to destroy them or not as they choose. People should be free to choose, that’s what
democracy is all about went Douglas’ argument in his debate with Lincoln. Lincoln
disagreed. To paraphrase Lincoln’s point, he said we are talking here about human
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beings, not Nebraska turnips or Maine lobsters. That was his great caveat, humans are
different from anything else and that’s why Lincoln rejected choice as far as he could
without ripping the nation apart when it came to what was called, the peculiar institution.
Ideally, he would have been rid of the blight, lock, stock and barrel. But, and here’s the
question, from whence his conviction that human beings were different, not chattel as in
the south, not swine as later the Jews and Slavs under Nazism, or unproductive parasites
as Capitalists under Communism, but so different as to have special rights? We can be
grateful he grew up with the Bible as his reader and later the Declaration beside him
along with his Blackstone and Shakespeare or there would likely have been no Lincoln,
no Gettysburg Address, no Second Inaugural and very likely no United States of America
as we know it today. He answered that slavery was an evil that must be set on the road to
extinction because slaves are people and it violated those inalienable rights short-listed in
the Declaration. These were things that should be beyond the will of the majority or any
government for that matter, because they don’t derive from either the people or
government. They are the inalienable rights that are ours by neither majority vote nor
government decree and could be removed by neither of them. That equality, that dignity,
that life and liberty, are the endowment of the Creator according to Revelation and as
such reflected and stated in the Declaration. Slavery violated those rights. For that reason,
far from a neutral institution, slavery was an evil one and outside the realm of choice for
that reason. Evil? Again, who or what told Lincoln this? Likely it was the same thing
that told Jaegerstetter, Bonhoeffer, and other Germans that Nazism was evil; that tells
millions today that abortion is evil. Who or what told them that? Slavery was evil?
Nazism was evil? Who or what tells millions today that abortion is evil? If there is
nothing beyond personal choice when it comes to these “neutral” things, there is no evil.
Slavery, holocaust, abortion are neutral institutions. And, down the road, perhaps the
dispatching of the less than fit whether in infancy, puberty or old age in the name of
“compassion” or economy will be neutral too and for the common good. Unless, of
course, there is that “ realm of goodness” that some agnostic philosophers talk about
against which we must measure ourselves, or more convincing for most, that endowment
by the Creator that the Declaration proclaims. A natural law beyond human law but
reflected in the consciences of human beings, the law that was called upon at Nuremberg.
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A law implanted, later revealed and enshrined in the Ten Commandments of Jewish
scripture and later still, on a more positive level, in the Beatitudes and Works of Mercy
proclaimed by Christ. In it all the worth and dignity of even the “least of my brothers and
sisters,” as Christ put it, was put forth to all.
Facing the evil of slavery Lincoln did not hesitate to call upon the source of that
higher realm of goodness. “That this nation under God will have a new birth of freedom.”
Those who recently censored those words out of the Gettysburg Address and the growing
number of secularists who agree with them clearly do not understand what’s at stake.
That something beyond personal autonomy, beyond Wall’s each a law unto themselves
logic, beyond my rationality is as good as your rationality subjectivism and relativism
and the priority of personal privacy and choice above even new life, is most certainly
needed for a safe, sane, just and free society. We are not laws unto our selves, This
should in itself be self-evident but in our deeply confused age with hardly any grasp of
history and with consciences often dulled and muted in the cacophony of pop-media
world, it is no longer. Modern science can confirm over and over that human life begins
at conception and can ratify what author and medical doctor, Walker Percy, wrote at the
time,” any other point would be completely arbitrary” yet a Chief Justice with an agenda
can nevertheless be conveniently confused on the issue and happily kow tow to the
gathering anti-life forces that proclaim and raise privacy and choice over life. Thus the
shot was fired leading to the current national malaise. Wherever private choice reigns, or
the convenient ignorance of a Chief Justice Blackmun, it can easily checkmate a modern
science.
The Founding generation as did Lincoln took the lessons of history and the message
of revelation about these life and death matters seriously but we seem to be loosing grip.
The retention of them is needed for the Republic to prosper. They are essential in
avoiding the debilitating reign of feel good mysticisms and ghost hunting delusions.
Remove God, specifically He who Is, the God of revelation, and the result is low
maintenance morality that cannot serve a free society or protect the vulnerable when the
urge is strong to remove inconveniences. No other source has ever been discovered for
our cherished “self-evident” truths. Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher and
faltering atheist has admitted, “Christianity and Christianity alone is the ultimate
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foundation… of conscience, human rights and democracy. To this day we have no other
options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is post
modern chatter.” Ever watch “The View” and such?
Our Declaration of Independence has four references to God as the author, creator,
supreme judge and the endower, of our “unalienable rights.” Remove the strong internal
guides that God and religion provide and people will need help guiding and controlling
themselves. Government of necessity will have to loom large in providing that help for
social control purposes. Remove God and religion and a thoroughly secularized
government fills the vacuum assuming those same roles and thus achieving the exact
opposite of what the Declaration and the Constitution intended. Limited government
becomes government supreme, expensive and unmanageable for the people have become
unmanageable and socially destructive.
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XXXVII FORGETTING THE ROOTS OF OUR SAFTY AND FREEDOM
The “strong” disdain it. Indeed, the very word “obedience” sends shivers up their
unbending spines. The buckaroos of media land prefer anything but, opting instead for
the envelope pushers and breakers of all the rules. Obedience to rules and laws is for the
dull and adventure-less. It earns low grades in a media land full of pop heroes who are
above such mundane things and who achieve greatness not by obedience to law but by
bending it or breaking it when they see fit. Of course, on TV they only do it for the
general good but how long will that last before they or others get into the act for other
than the good. They become laws unto themselves. The weak better hide and the
vulnerable head for the hills. Pundits like England’s Sir Stephen Wall, we saw, lent
support by decrying unbending moral principles. To repeat his point, “Changing moral
code is a normal part of social evolution.” But where does this leave our unalienable
rights based as they are on an unchanging moral code? These rights have to be grounded
in something beyond personal whim, public consensus or court decisions else they
become easily disposable. And as we saw, George Weigel wrote in “First Things,” “What
are the moral foundations of democracy…civility, tolerance, and the rule of law (and the
rights of man)…if the moral principles underpinning (them) are themselves determined
by nothing more solid than social consensus?”
Social consensus today is almost nil in many areas if you go by the reds and
blues on our political map. With nothing more than political pragmatism and moral
relativism to go by in place of rights endowed by the Creator, this should not be
surprising. And when it comes to popular moral consensus, sexual promiscuity, as we
saw, went from disapproval to approval almost overnight during the 1960s, a perfect
demonstration of Sir Wall’s changing moral code based on social evolution. Result?
Millions of lives ended by abortion and more dead from AIDS than were lost in WW II.
Flexible moral evolution gave us legalized abortion in 1973. Of course the rising
promiscuity had a lot to do with that and more recently, with strong media pounding,
public opinion seems to be changing on homosexuality and even same sex marriage. As
the waves of fluidity in opinion and law flood over us and the idea that the only thing that
counts is what works or what the loudest or most monied, visible and connected voices
want or can convince the public to want, the weak, incompetent, useless, inconvenient
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and less empowered will be washed away along with their formerly inalienable rights as
inalienable rights become increasingly fluid and negotiable. What we end up with is not
inalienable rights endowed by the Creator, as the Founders of our Republic held, but the
rights of man coming not from the hand of God but from the generosity of whomever
runs the state. Those with little influence get little by the way of inalienable rights. A hint
of what may be fast coming was the recent curtailment in Massachusetts of the
inalienable right of freedom of religion and conscience. For over a century Catholic
Charities had worked out of love and concern to find homes for unwanted orphans
without regard for the child’s sex, religion or race. It is now denied that good work
because it refused, in accord with its religious principles and recent research as we saw,
to place children with same sex couples. Studies, it was mentioned, show that situation
fraught with dangers but nevertheless, the thick and sturdy ice of established and
inalienable rights, in this case religious freedom and freedom of conscience, upon which
we once stood, has become thinner. The Gay Rights lobby is well organized, well
financed; media backed and increasingly vocal and effective. Many homosexuals have a
lot of time and often money too on their hands, freed up as they are by the dearth of
family concerns and obligations, and so can exert inordinate pressure on pliable and
susceptible politicians. The history of Prohibition shows the damage even a wellintentioned lobby group can do.
Today’s champions of tolerance apparently cannot tolerate the toleration of religious
freedom and freedom of conscience if it opposes its will. To these moderns often of what
amounts to a pseudo-diversity credo and pro-choice conviction, how much more in
keeping with their conception of democracy as seen in the Roe case is a Laissez Faire
approach whereby government does not impose its will but stands off. But, if that had
been consistently applied in Massachusetts the Church would have been spared this
attack. Government however is anything but consistent especially under pressure Indeed
it often bends under well heeled media backed clamor. So toleration of Religious
conscience and freedom was pulled for toleration of Gay demands for same-sex adoption,
in spite of the dangers. True tolerance, it should be pointed out, presupposes disapproval,
objection and opposition or there is nothing to tolerate. As Andreas Kinneging points out
in his book “The Geography of Good and Evil.” Otherwise it (tolerance) is not needed.“
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What we have today as eminently demonstrated in Massachusetts, though it will hardly
be confined to that state, is actually a pseudo-tolerance serving the chosen.
We need to protect our unalienable rights in order to enjoy the basic safety and
freedom upon which the pursuit of happiness and the security of our civilization rest.
Remove God and religion and the republic must find a new foundation for its self-evident
truths or they will fade. The explorer or innovator in search of such a replacement
foundation often falls back on pragmatism as a basis. But for the morality and the rights
we depend upon to make life free from unending fear, pragmatism and utilitarianism
make a very dangerous foundation. Frequently such a basis is almost indistinguishable
from might makes right. To avoid that dangerous dead end, the searching secularist
sometimes ends up unknowingly borrowing from revealed truths and from that universal
natural law chiseled in our hearts as the Golden Rule and codified in the Decalogue and
the rest of revelation. This is what Habermas meant when he wrote that Christianity alone
is the ultimate foundation of liberty and that secularists continue to use it, sometimes
without realizing it. This is done often without asking the obvious questions, from
whence these principles, this Golden Rule? From what does conscience derive? What’s
the source of natural law as epitomized in our “self-evident” truths? Obviously, as
Darwin admitted, the spirit behind the Golden Rule is not the product of natural selection
or survival of the fittest because it protects the “unfit” along with the strong and
“superior.” The self-evident truths apply to “all men,” fit and unfit. Well then, as with
the material world and the life in it, the same question has to be asked, from where? An
evolutionary theory that asks us to believe that inanimate, dead unthinking matter, origin
unknown, is a masterful practitioner of natural selection and eventually produced living,
advanced thinking beings with inalienable rights is more hindrance than help as an
answer because it is unbelievable to most rational people.
So, from whence “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal
and endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights among them life…” The
God of revelation, “AM” he who IS, provides the only good and reliable basis for an
answer though modern day secularists perform amazing logical contortions to avoid that
conclusion. But, what it amounts to is Habermas’ “post modern chatter.” Failing in their
search, some secularists, as we saw, simply censor God out of our national documents as
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earlier the Supreme Court banned prayer from our schools in the Engle vs Vitale school
prayer decision of the early 1960s. Not only was school prayer banned in that decision
but subsequently even the very mention of God and the religious roots of our nation was
discouraged in various ways. They were, at least, heavily downplayed by a growing
number of timid teachers.
In this regard our nation’s great documents can cause trouble for the new wave of
secularists so their hands, often led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), go to
work with scissors and jackhammer. Lines from documents disappear, crosses and Ten
Commandment plaques are pulverized. Their dream is to build a tall wall of separation
between church and state far higher than anything Washington, Jefferson and the
supporters of the First Amendment had ever envisioned or considered necessary. The
statistical consequences of this national moral lobotomy are hellish on the most obvious
levels some of which we examined earlier and especially on educational achievement.
After something occurs need not mean on account of or because of that event but in this
instance the effort helped bring about the results. Putting the influence of God and
religion into retreat led to some sad innovations in American education. Our nation now
has many schools with metal detectors, drug sniffing dogs, security guards in the halls,
bouncers in the cafeteria, pregnancy counselors in the health office, condom distribution
centers and abortion referral procedures. Social activity and “cool” communication
devices have, to a notable extent for many of the young, pushed aside “reading, writing,
rithmatic whether taught to the tune of the old hickory stick or not,” in many parts of the
country. Abortion may be “in” and the old hickory stick out but what in essence we have
is a minor cruelty being replaced by a much greater one.” The old stick, found useful at
times in the schools of old, it is now shocking to the sensibilities of some of today’s
discriminately sensitive souls who often have no problem with condom distribution and
abortion referral services in middle schools. But with odd logic they shudder at the
thought of corporal punishment with or with out sticks at least not in the hands of
increasingly overwhelmed teachers. Ironically, the barbarism of abortion and even the
sexual abuse of children in public schools are growing blights but hickory sticks are
deemed barbaric!. Though there were some fearsome old public school marms in the
classrooms of the past and some pretty tough, rigid Nuns in the many Catholic schools of
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those days, the vast majority of both contingents were remembered well and respectfully
by those who learned in their classrooms. And they got results for the little they were
paid as comparative achievement scores illustrate. Sadly, in many areas of our country
today the new and very bleak educational accouterments found in many schools and
listed above are now common necessities. They have replaced the old dunce stool for
those who didn’t prepare the assignment and the paddle or hickory stick for the
disruptive, disrespectful student. The switch has not been a boon to education. Even the
prized goal of self-esteem that called for discarding dunce stool, hickory stick and the “go
stand in the corner” order has not been realized. And needless to say, learning
achievement in many areas has slipped badly. Today we rank near the bottom among
industrialized nations in math and science achievement. “Reading, writing and rithmatic,”
may be a sideline for many perplexed and dysfunctional students but ranks of counselors
and remedial learning classes are there trying, often with less than striking success, to
take up the slack. Often little can be done to enhance self-esteem in the avalanche of
dysfunctional and broken families now plaguing America and helping to produce the
22% child poverty rate. And of course unsupervised hours in front of the tube can be a
severe encumbrance to learning and with mom or dad or both often not there. Sadly, this
horrific home situation, rather than nurturing, can become a severe life handicap with
immense social costs and expenses.
With the other factors discussed earlier, it can be observed that the downplaying of
religion or to put it another way, when the state got out of prayer it got into law
enforcement like never before with the possible exception of Prohibition. Where religion
emphasized responsibility, self-control and abstinence from sex outside marriage rather
successfully for years, the state stepped in with modern sex education stressing Dr.
Weisman brand of “responsible” sex complete with condom instructions. Result?
Disaster. We’ve seen the stats. As anyone should have predicted, the condom mania gave
the green light to rampant promiscuity. Twelve years after Engle came Roe in 1973.
Coincidence or part cause and part effect, you decide. Since Roe over fifty million have
been aborted, about half a million have died of AIDS, and STDs are a spreading plague.
There is another danger to the diminishing influence of religion that even now is
partially upon us. If we point to the fact that we are a caring society there is some truth in
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and many exceptions to that claim, but when one looks to the source of those caring
attitudes there is cause for concern, especially for the weak, non-productive and
inconvenient members of society. Historically, to a great extent the caring for widows,
abandoned children, orphans, the sick and unwanted, the call for the humane treatment of
prisoners and the mentally ill, feeding the hungry and helping the poor were all explicitly
adamantly and in many ways exclusively Christian ideas as historian Eric Metaxas
explains in his book “Amazing Grace…” a biography of William Wilberforce,” the great
19th Century anti-slavery advocate. This caring and concern were and are foreign to
many societies outside the Christian influence. As mentioned before, there was no Red
Crescent without the prior example of the Red Cross. Atheists, Pantheists, agnostics,
Buddhists, Hindus and merely nominal Christians were comparatively uninvolved in such
pursuits including, as the Wilberforce biography makes clear, the abolition of slavery.
The idea of a social conscience with outrage at injustices done to others especially the
helpless and a stubborn willingness to do something about it, sometimes at great personal
inconvenience and even risk, was found in no non-Christian culture at that time. It was
largely a Christian thing like the emphasis on forgiveness or the equality of the sexes
under the marriage commitment. Our present secular culture sometimes carries on
selected and usually less sacrifice involving parts of this Christian heritage and
inheritance but is often ignorant of the original source of the concern and determination
to help. The source was this: “Lord when did we find you naked and clothe you, hungry
and feed you, a stranger and welcome you, sick and care for you, broken hearted and
comfort you etc.…I tell you as long as you did it for these the least of my brethren you
did it for me.” The Gospel is and was the bedrock of the caring that was found almost
exclusively in the formerly Christian West and is not found even now in many parts of
the world.
Even the Stoics of the Classical era did not approach the Christians in indifference
to a person’s social status when it came to helping. No one did. The new secularists when
they support more government social welfare programs are basically parasitic on the
Christian moral roots of caring though many are unaware. We already saw the historian
Arthur Schlesinger and philosopher Jurgen Habermas allude to that vital Christian spirit
of help, renew and reform earlier. The Christian ideal of self-giving love reflected in the
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recent studies on charitable giving already mentioned is bound to dwindle as secularism
spreads and faith fades. Government may have to expand and move in even more as
social problems continue to spread, though more government and government trying to
do what the Church has done for two millennia is not exactly what the Founders
envisioned. And it is bound to do a much poorer and more tax draining job for study after
study, as was seen, show that when secularism displaces religion it fails as a strong
philosophical motivator for the generous giving of funds and self to the aid of others.
More often, as we have seen, it can be counted on as a platform for the morality of my
rights, my self-realization, my way, myself, and my money.
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XXXVIII
I”D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA, 1925
When that paragon of good humor, W.C. Fields playing Sheriff Cuthbert Twilly in
the 1940 film “My Little Chickadee” was asked if he had a last request before they strung
him up him for malfeasance, incompetence, collusion, you name it, he replied that he’d
“like to see Paris before he died.” When the lynch crowd sneered at the request Field’s
quickly added “Philadelphia will do.” Poor Philly! It was the great W.C.’s hometown and
the butt of many a joke but he learned the wonderful trade of making people laugh there
at his inimitable mother’s knee. Actually, back then Philadelphia had much to crow about
and still does but there is a tarnishing now growing as secularism comes to increasingly
dominate the scene and the old religious tradition of caring begins to change into
something quite different, a sinister form of compassion that sees killing as a solution to
some of life’s old problems and difficulties and even advocates the destruction of new
life on the possibility that it may not always be “wanted” or on the prospect of poverty
and hardship. But, as scientists and observers have noted, many a child grew to be loved
and wanted before the horror of Roe even when unexpected and unplanned. And, as one
of Darwin’s contemporaries noted, it is the struggle of the butterfly as it emerges from the
cocoon that gives its wings color and the strength to fly.
In some respects Philadelphia isn’t doing as well now as it was in W.C. Field’s time
in several vital areas nor is the nation as a whole nor does the future appear overly rosy.
As is true in many urban areas drugs ravish large numbers of people and neighborhoods,
abortion on demand takes thousands, family breakup and cohabitation is rampant and as
of 2010 more than 22% of the children live in poverty up from 20.5 % the year previous.
Pro abortionists had promised the child poverty and abuse problems would all but
disappear after the legalization of abortion. Wrong again! And to the disgrace on the
nation, child poverty is almost 10% higher than the rate for adults. So much for making
love not war. War is still with us only a major target now is our own people. This is
bound to happen when the value and dignity of each individual life is trashed and their
Judeo-Christian foundations discarded. Eastern religions and New Age beliefs just can’t
do the job for the equal dignity and value of each individual human life are concepts that
do not flow from their principles. As Walter Lippmann wrote long ago, “What is left of
our civilization will not be maintained…what is wrecked will not be restored…There is
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no use looking for some new revelation of what man needs in order to live. The
revelation has been made…sacrifice and duty…the grace of love and charity are the
things which have made men free. Only in this profound and tested wisdom shall we find
once more the light and courage we need.”
There is an obvious decline of love, honor and dignity in the new priorities of the new
age resulting in a new phenomenon, a society that destroys and neglects its young. Now
we witness the common occurrence of great numbers of adults living better than the
children. The children are being destroyed by the millions while awaiting birth and after
birth millions are in poverty. This is America? It wasn’t the America of W.C.’s day. That
America was in many material respects a poorer country but not in love.
The sad fact is more hell on Earth should not be unexpected. These evil trends are
likely to worsen as the revelation Lippmann wrote about is increasingly ignored and
national and state economies come under increased strain due mostly to debt created by
governments and politicians saying “yes” too often to programs and expenses best
deferred until more affordable or able to be corrected in less costly ways. Trouble is, as
the decline in personal morality and responsibility evidenced by so many studies and
statistics quickens, these remedial programs become more necessary even as the ability to
pay for them fails to keep up. Meanwhile politicians fearful for their offices, dreading to
tell the people “no” and equally dreading to tell them of the higher taxes these programs
require take the less immediately painful borrowing route thereby plunging the nation
deeper into debt and thereby passing the obligation and whole inevitable day of
reckoning on to the next generation. It’s called living beyond ones means or willingness
to pay or more crudely, “dumping on the future.” The trend usually leads to budget
devouring debt payments and economic crisis’, indeed the proverbial panics brought on
by the danger of default. Frequently the end result if default is avoided by painful
economic belt tightening is a very unhappy populace used only to hearing yes to their
demands for new and bigger programs and now hearing no or, if the high tax route to pay
off the debts is taken, the specter of many nations sagging under the weight of big
government and big taxes and stunted economic growth and prosperity. The middle
routes, the usually better course, are in themselves painful. The painful truth is sometimes
pain is inescapable. It is simply a matter of when and who will face it.
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Difficult times are evidently upon us and will be, it appears, for a long time. That
is, unless the people and politicians begin to say that all-important word “no” in both
their private and public lives. Not wanting to do that, they must be willing to foot the
immense bills, face the huge debts and eventually shoulder default escaping tax increases
that are inevitably brought on by a populace creating too many problems and
consequently demanding too many services to contain them to which vote seeking
politicians have invariably said “yes.” The rare courageous politician who truly fears for
the future real well being of the nation rather his own immediate personal situation and
who dares to say “no” to those demands often faces the defeat the “yes” men usually
escape. Fulton Sheen once wrote that “there are basically two ways of living; first the
feast and then the headache or first the fast and then the feast.” Saving the best for last is
always the better bargain because as he added, “ deferred joys purchased by sacrifice are
always the sweetest.” But that takes wisdom and a people up to the challenge of selfdiscipline. Both qualities of character are often in short supply in a grab all the gusto
society in which self-sacrifice is meaningless. After all, more than ever before Americans
are destroying their own offspring because they are inconvenient or they walk away from
them letting them languish in or near poverty. As always, personal irresponsibility
becomes government responsibility fueling the growth of government, expense, taxes and
debt. New to America since the 1960s, drug laced lives and rampant sexual promiscuity
provide much raw material for the bonfire.
The 1950s America, in many material ways a poorer society than today’s with fewer
things except in many cases the free time that the computer age promised and failed to
deliver, may have had a lower standard of living as economists measure it but was higher
on the happiness scale as sociologists and psychologists gage it. Everyone must realize
that no time or period on Earth is idyllic, all face problems and challenges, but some are
clearly closer to that ideal than others. The period after WWII and before the
assassinations, Viet Nam, Watergate and the general moral debacle of the 1960s,
measured up rather well even as it confronted the racial segregation problem. Brown vs.
the Board of Education was 1954.. Indeed the period between 1945 and 1963, even with
the Cold War, nuclear threat, Korea, worry over juvenile delinquency, an economic down
turn in 1957 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 62’ generally heard music in the air and saw
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optimism in the driver’s seat. Even the cars they drove often sported three bright colors
rather than the dominant grays and blacks of the present soul troubled time. For one
reason, it was pretty much devoid of many of the post 60s problems, mostly of a moral
nature, that effect America today including massive abortion and divorce on demand,
family breakup, drugs, promiscuity, illegitimacy, child poverty, single parenthood and the
AIDS epidemic which it should be pointed out, actually has killed more Americans than
WWII and is with us yet. Add to that an education system not capable of absorbing and
educating all the troubled kids it gets, a record of falling academic achievement, a drop
out rate at about 40%, and an economy staggering under the massive debts partly
incurred to handle these self-created problems and black seems the appropriate color for
the styles of the times. Even the end of the Cold War in 1989 didn’t snap the gloom or
appreciably boost moral for the age of terrorism quickly took its place, America entered
the new millennium rather worn even before 9/11.. It seemed to have less of its old
bounce, its optimism, its self-confidence. It seems to have produced a bumper crop of the
very people that, according to the Founders, would be destructive of its founding ideals.
Before the 1960s, with the exception of an emergency like the Great Depression
and an unemployment rate above 25% with about as many people working only part
time, government had to devise ways like the New Deal to try to alleviate the joblessness
and suffering. But in more normal times government was usually less involved in caring
for its citizens because the citizens for the most part didn’t need much looking after or
caring for. Their lives were not plagued with promiscuity, a nearly 50% divorce rate,
family disintegration with many non -supporting fathers allowing their children to live in
poverty, an AIDS epidemic, a STD epidemic, a drug epidemic, nor were they surrounded
by a media bombarding them with ideals far different from the ones the republic was
built on. Many expensive government programs came into being precisely to try to
contain the damage that resulted from the change in moral climate. It became very easy to
say the “yes” word to the new demands but hard to say a word about needed behavioral
change and few said it for they were often labeled as intolerant or lacking in
understanding. The break down in Judeo-Christian moral standards forced many a
politician to say basically, “what else can we do?” But moral decrepitude is not cheap and
it is a sure fire invitation to big government. On some level though, either on the personal
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and private level or the public and governmental, “no” has to be said. Far better the
personal and private. No to sexual promiscuity, to divorce, to abandonment, no to
abortion, no to drugs, no to the things that bring people, societies and governments down.
With fewer manmade social problems, the pre-1960s nation expected less and
demanded less from government. When caring was called for it was usually done on a
local level, in house, meaning family, friends, church and local community with what
major government programs out there, the Social Security System for example, serving
largely as emergency back up. There were few large government remedial, educational
and poverty programs for, as mentioned, before the 1960s the taxpayers were not faced
with the deluge of single mothers, fatherless children, children in poverty, rampant sexual
promiscuity with new diseases and epidemics, and a drug culture that clogged the courts
and filled the jails all at tremendous expense. At this point, should we throw in a little
thank-you to the popular rock groups who came along in the 60s and helped popularize
and promote this new drug culture as the “in” thing among the young and
impressionable? “Cool” became the accepted jargon. The resulting damage was immense
especially on the young and impressionable, Besides its great contribution to crime and
violence, drug use was second only to homosexual promiscuity in spreading AIDS. The
lifetime cost of HIV/AIDS treatment in present day United States is estimated to range
from $470,600 to $665,500 per person in 2004 dollars with much of it covered by the
taxpayers. Again what you do in the privacy of the bedroom doesn’t always stay there. If
the economic crash of the 1930s was costly, the moral crash of the 60s was even more so
for it has lasted much longer and isn’t over yet. Consequently, before the moral crash,
government was less costly and debt ridden, discounting special emergencies like the
Depression and WWII, and would likely have returned to that pattern but for the coming
of the 1960s and its aftermath. As noted, in many ways the society before then was far
healthier and it must be added, richer in caring and less reliant on government. That’s
where Philadelphia comes in.
Philadelphia, despite the jolly black eye from W.C. was typical of the people and
municipalities back then. It managed to care for its weak and unwanted in a multitude of
ways and without heavy dependence on federal budgets. Philadelphia was typical of how
problems were handled for the activities there were duplicated in municipalities and
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communities all over the country. In 1925 Philadelphia, faith based activities were
paramount along with the municipality’s efforts in alleviating hardship and suffering. The
city records show for that year that the Catholic church alone and not to include the
activities of other religious groups who were also very active, supported eight hospitals,
thirteen orphan asylums (these were the days when death was not the preferred treatment
for the “unwanted,”) eleven day nurseries, one settlement house, seven homes for the
aged, three homes for the handicapped, eight boarding homes for working women, five
homes for “unfortunate’ young women and three visiting nurse associations. Men and
women, often nuns and religious brothers whose motivation was primarily love of God
and neighbor and whose compensation was little more than room and board with a small
allowance, along with lay people staffed many of these institutions. That’s how the
inconvenient and unwanted, both the young and aged often with no family able to help,
plus those brought low by the hard vicissitudes of life and assaulted by poverty and
mental illness, the very ones increasingly up for destruction today, were cared for back
then when the country was much poorer but more generous and loving. Many of these
institutions are gone now especially the orphanages, replaced in many of the old
neighborhoods with abortuaries. It is not hard to imagine some of them also occupied by
the proliferating pet caring establishments. As one observer put it, “Never have
America’s fire hydrants and telephone poles been wetter or its cradles and cribs emptier.”
Priorities have changed. Orphanages may be mostly gone but billions are spent
yearly of pets and pet products. Today we hear, in a nation that can spend over 43 billion
dollars in that area annually, that American children are aborted at a rate of over a million
a year often because of the hard life of deprivation they may have to face. That’s about a
quarter of all those conceived. They would have been better off as cats and dogs. Who
would have thought that life in the biggest rich country in the world would be so hard on
the children? Who would have believed that life was so terrible in the rich U.S.? But, of
course, it’s a typical pedantic smokescreen meant to placate the comfortably living. The
kids were cared for before and would be still. It’s not a failure of means, it’s the failure to
love like before. And so much for the false accusation that the Church or the pro-life
movement “has no concern for life after it is born.” The statistics of 1925 show how it
was done and are reflective of pro-life efforts even today especially in the proliferation of
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centers supported for the help of expectant single mothers and the care and adoption of
the children. Those who for whatever reason can’t personally adopt often support the
agencies and institutions that work in area.
Also part of the beneficent and mollifying smokescreen thrown up by the
defenders of abortion is the often-heard remark of how tough the decision to abort is. But
in fact about 30% or more abortions are repeats. In N.Y.C. sometimes called the “Big
Apple,” the figure is an atrocious 56%. How difficult can it be? Evidently for many
abortion is looked at as just another form of artificial birth control. It is hoped that
Whoopee Goldberg’s six are the record but it might not be. The numbers show that there
have been more than 50 million abortions since the 1973 Roe decision. Law is a great
teacher. In this case a very deadly one but it blesses the choice and thereby makes it ever
easier to choose. The cheapening of the value and dignity of all human life, a key
inheritance from our Christian roots and reflected in the Declaration, is an inevitable
consequence of this home grown holocaust. The justifications for the tragedy are painful
to hear. To spare the new life the pain of living in the richest, biggest, freest country in
the world just doesn’t cut it. Sparing the pre-born life’s hardships is a smokescreen for
sparing ourselves any hardship or inconvenience. How hollow a justification it is,
compassion unguided by revelation and turned deadly! Death the preferred solution
relieves the living of the burden of caring love.
This is the new lethal modern “caring” arising as the insights of Christian love are lost.
This mass destruction of innocent human life in the womb without the benefit of due
process or any other such civilized protections thanks to the Roe decision is considered a
good thing because the children would have been unwanted! Their lives would have been
harsh and difficult, bereft of love. What is really being said is that it is no longer 1925
and although the country is richer in stuff it is by no means richer in love and sacrificial
caring. There are no longer enough people especially parents who care enough to give the
very best love and to inconvenience themselves in order to give their own children a
chance at life. Often pets get the priority! To repeat, never in America have the fire
hydrants been wetter and the cradles emptier. Safe to say, probably half the kids in 1925
Philly were unexpected, unwanted, unplanned but loved anyway. For those who weren’t
loved or couldn’t be cared for, the afore mentioned institutions including the eight
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orphanages and five homes for “unfortunate” young women all supported by the love and
giving of the Catholic people there were ready to step in. Such was the value and dignity
of life then and the power of love.
How things have changed! Now we have government, often by court decision, that
legalizes and endorses abortion in spite of Jefferson’s admonition that “ the care of
human life and not its destruction is the just and only legitimate object of good
government.” Not only that but it subsidizes it. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading
abortion business with 309,000 abortions in 2009 alone and charging on average back in
2003, $375 per abortion gets in addition $350 million from taxes, an amount still there in
spite of the deficit crisis. Saying “no” is still too difficult for many! We need politicians
like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius who told the Danubian Legions “no” when they
demanded more pay. The demand might be justified but the cost too burdensome on the
people.
As the uniquely Christian insight into who we are and its profession of the unique
and irreplaceable dignity of every human person fades, subjective impressions laced with
merely utilitarian notions of individual value, dignity, freedom will not last long as gap
fillers. Men and women will become walking, thinking meat with personhood eventually
fading into glinthood. As that happens, expect more death with dignity squads to search
for new subjects in need of “help.” Already we are witnessing a spin off of humanity’s
essential lack of value, the serious rebirth of slavery even in the West mostly for illicit
sexual purposes. It should be remembered that Christians as a group were the first to be
completely opposed to slavery; the first for raising women to equality in marriage and
elsewhere; the first for faithfulness in monogamous marriage and the first for the
egalitarian brotherhood of all men. These values are eroding and the pagan past is
seeping back in. Disposal of the sick and elderly infirm in the quise of mercy killing at a
time when so much palliative care is available is already coming on strong. This is
compassion without expense and inconvenience and without the vital “suffer with”
component. With the concerted secular effort to ban God from public education, the
Public Square and public influence in general, censor him out of historical documents and
exile him to the closet, we remove the ultimate imperative upon which we build anything
beyond self-interest. Watch for the disappearance of those who cannot care for
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themselves without inconveniencing others. With the eclipse of traditional religion
specifically Christianity, there will be fewer others. The disappearance of Down
syndrome children is only the beginning. The disappearance of females in non-Christian
societies is upon us. Aided by modern science, there is already a scarcity of them in
China and India where Christian influence is small and the value of the male is
traditionally prized over the female. Gender based abortion in China has left at least 24
million men single and in India males outnumber females by millions with potential
problems that can be imagined, sex slavery just one. But where every child is a child of
God, that fact makes an immense difference, but a difference to be found only where
revelation has been received and accepted.
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XXXIX
THE NEW CHURCH AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS
In addition to an avalanche of newly concocted space age spiritualities ranging from
Scientology with benign space visitors coming Hale-Bopp-like to free us from our
despised and disposable bodies to the pantheistic god indistinguishable from nature and
its forces proclaimed by folks like Shirley MacLaine, who sometimes runs about
exclaiming “I am god. I am god,” we now have coming our way a new church. It is a
self-designer scientific secular church boasting a new priesthood and new sacraments.
However, these sacraments are frequently not life giving like the old ones but often rather
deadly. Under these new priests human life is nothing special or sacred and certainly not
endowed with inalienable rights. Indeed, with them pre-born human life especially,
though not exclusively, is vulnerable to some deadly ministrations. Rather analogous to a
tooth that someday may develop a cavity and turn bad, they would pull or shall we say
root out new life on similar pretexts, the possibility of future hardship, poverty, abuse or
disease, for example. They might be looked upon as dentists ready to do what has to be
done to clean up not simply a mouth but the whole Earth and move it closer to a painless,
ultimately purposeless utopia. One of the new priests is a well known scientist, Peter
Singer of Princeton, who has for a long time been calling for not only abortion but also
infanticide for those who are notably less than perfect or potentially troublesome.
Dismissed out of hand as he may be by the inheritors of revelation and believers in the
principles of the Declaration and in general by people of balanced and healthy mind, he
has apparently attracted attentive listeners of the secular utilitarian bent from the usual
places, academia and media being two. He has written that, “The fact that a human being
is alive, does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that beings life.” Well, if it
doesn’t, there are many who had best watch out especially if a Supreme Court of the Roe
mentality should ever get to hear his case. Of course, if infanticide is on the table and
learned journals are now discussing it without dismissing it out of hand, imagine what’s
beneath it! Can pubecide be far behind? It’s already the stuff of novels. The pressure is
off. No need to rush to judgment? Now, in this new scenario parents or the state can take
all the way to puberty to decide whether to keep the individual around or not. How better
to be rid, after careful cost evaluation, of those turning disappointingly troublesome and
sour, violent and incorrigible? The secular utilitarians of the Singer ilk who dream of
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reforming society into a much better place, indeed into a utopia, can easily foresee the
families freed from anguish, the multitude of improved schools, the emptied jails, the
safer streets with the implementation of pubecide as similarly they saw abortion reducing
child abuse and child poverty. Pubecide could be looked at as a form of permanent
irreversible extreme detention. And just think of the bumper crop of healthy organs to be
harvested to help those deemed worthy of them! We will have a new clergy empowered
to sift and ration life. This is the new Church’s form of compassion. Jonathan Swift
where are you? We need a new “Modest Proposal.” And while we are at it, let’s use the
new prenatal testing techniques to eliminate all those clearly incapable of attaining 100
IQs. Improvement, improvement, improvement, forever and ever attainable, amen. This
is the new church’s most popular prayer. With a little imagination of the Peter Singer
variety there might be no end to progress. And what’s to be lost? Just the trash!
What atrocities can’t be justified or if you will, human improvements achieved,
once we are rid of that troublesome Judeo-Christian revelation and the inalienable rights
that rest solidly upon it? Already, as mentioned, over 90% of those diagnosed with
Down syndrome have disappeared from the Earth. We are looking at the new church’s
sacraments of early and deadly dispatch, sort of new non-baptism of the young. It’s rather
easy because without the Creator, our self-evident truths and inalienable rights are not
self-evident or inalienable anymore. No one has ever found anything more dependable
and reliable on which to rest them than the God of revelation. The new priests are highly
rational men of the scientific variety. They demand hard evidence of these rights and
truths but, to paraphrase an analogous situation 2000 years ago, “no sign will be given
them except the sign of Jonah.” We saw in “pearl” XXII what that sign was.
A self-evident truth is so basic as to be beyond arguable of demonstrable proof.
English essayist, Coventry Patmore, put it this way, “ There are truths which to many are
incapable of proof, yet their denial is not to be tolerated as the most tolerant society finds
out when it is compelled to face the practical results of such denial…There are no two
sides to every question…(especially) the question of the sacredness of human life. There
are no two sides to murder, you are dead or you are alive.” A self-evident truth is one you
accept or you don’t for whatever reason and the soundest reason for acceptance, as many
of the Founding Fathers would agree, is revelation. The great Judeo-Christian
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proclamation of the equality of all as children of the loving creator is not self-evident
without that revelation. That we are all children of the same truly loving God who created
us and respects the gifts of intellect and freedom he gave us only comrs from JudeoChristian tradition. The concept of “all men and women created equal” was found in no
culture outside its influence. If an outside culture has advanced to it, it like the Western
Enlightenment of the 18th century that built on it, they did so by borrowing from the fruits
of that revelation. Our laws especially of equality and inalienable rights accept those
fruits and were built on them or once were. From them and the natural moral law within
us come some of our most basic concepts, that justice is good for example and that the
killing of innocent people is murder no matter how much good it does. This great
inheritance, enhanced by experience, brought us to our basic political concepts: that the
power of government derives from the consent of the governed; that the people have the
right to change that government by force if justified; that the power of government is
limited for the protection of the people from tyranny. Today especially the threat is in the
form of an attempt to remove inalienable rights most especially, life and liberty from
certain inconvenient segments of the human family. The Founders accepted these
principles, the Peter Singers, the priests of the new church, don’t. The Founders are dead,
the Peter Singers aren’t and they are very vocal and sometimes, as we know, the courts
listen to them. The late Bernard Nathanson pointed that out. Others listen too as we saw.
To help, academics have been known to excise God from the Gettysburg Address and
even a President attempted a like removal from the Declaration of Independence. And as
long as the self-evident nature of these truths weakens with the weakening of faith and
the happy populace continues to be more concerned with Black Friday shopping sprees or
the latest Lady Ga Ga antics, we can expect more exceptions to the old rules. Already the
compassion cops are pressing poisonous cocktails on the useless, expensive and
sometimes terminal elderly. And, as faith in revelation and the morality contained in it
weakens, former self-evident truths will be submerged in a secular mindset that declares
mankind rather than God the ultimate arbiter with calamitous consequences for the usual
victims. Helping in all this, as was mentioned, is a vocal part of the academic and
scientific establishment and the new priests like Peter Singer who ironically is the
descendant of Holocaust victims, and Richard Dawkins, Britain’s leading atheist
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preacher. After the 1960s these new icons began to replace the priests of the old
discarded “establishment” including the Church with its terribly dated and unpragmatic
rules and moral strictures so easily discarded as “impractical> by the many Dr.
Weismans. The Church had been preaching the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of all mankind, a mankind created with dignity and in the Creator’s image, for two
millennia.
The message of the new church is quite different. The new establishment church and its
pop. media pulpit see mankind differently and it forebodes great ill for the future of the
weak and dependant parts of the human family. Here’s a small sample of the new
priestly pronouncements describing the new man: He is no more than “nerve cells and
their associated molecules,” –Marvin Minsky. “A soul made up of many tiny robots,”neuroscientist Giulio Giorelli. “In essence, we are nothing but a big fly,” biologist
Charles Zuker. “A pack of neurons,” -Francis Crick. “Over-anthropomorphized humans
who are after all mere machines,”- MIT Researcher Rodney Brooks. “A mere accident,”
biologist Jacques Monod,” or as someone else put it “”walking meat…meaningless
brutish bits of matter.” This is as bad as dust in the wind and even worse than glint on the
snow! And as for those bits of matter, the mere machines, the pack of neurons, the
walking meat that can’t tote their load because of illness, handicaps or age, watch out!
There is no equality for you; no inalienable rights. After all, the foundation of that
equality and those rights, God the Father and creator of all is, according to one of the new
high priests, Richard Dawkins, no more than “The Flying Spaghetti Monster.”
Historically, verbal dehumanization of persons has frequently been a prelude to
destruction. Slavs and Jews first became “swine,” and the handicapped “unnecessary” or
“life unworthy of life” in Nazi Germany before their mass elimination and of course the
pre-born were labeled “blobs of cells,” according to Planned Parenthood on the eve of
Roe’s open season declaration. And more swine are on the way if the new priests have
their way. Peter singer thinks it is not a defensible moral position to take the interest of
animals less seriously than we take human interests simply because they are members of
our species. Between a year old pig and a day old baby, the pig has rights superior to the
baby because of its greater self-consciousness! It comes down to this, the new (selfevident) truth is, there is no self-evident truth beyond the scientifically provable.
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Therefore, of course, the most important truths are gone. If to be true a thing must be
laboratory verified, if there is nothing beyond scientific proof and based rather on a
rational faith in revelation, then our national guide posts, “We hold these truths” and
inalienable rights “to be self evident” and “endowed by the Creator,” as the Founding
Fathers wrote, are, to dip into the old jargon bucket, in deep dew dew especially given the
views of the new priests on the disposability of certain categories of humanity. According
to their laboratories we are essentially big flies, mere accidents, a pack of neurons,
walking meat. So much for human dignity and equality before God! If everything must
pass laboratory proof for approval and not much of vital importance to us as human
beings, especially our inalienable rights can, then the apparently useless and decrepit
among us or as the Nazis used to say “those not worthy of life,” are already far out on the
plank. This was Patmore’s point. If nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is
obligatory at all. If the inalienable rights of equality, life and liberty were not self evident they could never be proved because they are beyond proof without the revelation
of the Fatherhood of God. The laboratory evidence is lacking because the whole stack of
cards rests on God. In fact, since the failure to persuade of Kant’s categorical imperative
which stated as a rational non-revealed ground for all rights and morality that any action
or right to be legitimate must be extendable or expandable into a universal law of action
and behavior without doing damage, no modern school of philosophy has argued that
reason uninformed by revelation can produce an ethics or a basis for these building block
rights and immoral ideas. As the late Richard Neuhaus wrote, “From Nietzsche and
Heidegger to Rorty, modern philosophy insists that reason offers little guidance in
matters of morality. The people who supported the Declaration of Independence
understood this. Here’s Washington: “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of
refined education on minds… reason and experience both forbid us to expect that
morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” He meant principle far beyond
what is discoverable in the laboratory and far beyond the “spiritual but not religious” new
age mode. Once morality becomes untethered from revelation and its philosophical
sidekick natural law, it becomes as dust in the wind. Toleration and compassion, the
virtue of virtues in the secularist’s increasingly skimpy arsenal but certainly vital values
that must be preserved can become, with the best of intentions but without divine
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underpinnings, a road to hellish tyranny. Often the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. Goethe wrote about Napoleon, that he “went forth to seek virtue, but since she
was not to be found, he got power.” How hard did he look? Did he overlook revelation
and the millions who take it to heart in their daily lives? Dostoyevsky illustrates the
danger of a discarded revelation and the moral law it contains in the story we related of
the murder of a devout old women, in order to steal her money for a good cause: “A
hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped on that old women’s money
which will be buried in a monastery,” said the murderer. And the murderer did much
good, “dozens of families saved from destitution” and thousands got a new chance. If
murder of the old lady did that much good, why not murder incorporated, call it Robin
Hood Inc., to spread the wealth to those really in need by offing the rich? Why not sex
selection abortion to make families desirous of only males happy? Or, as it was claimed,
falsely as it turned out, eliminate most poverty and abuse by bringing in abortion on
demand! Create a world full of happy families by eliminating the pressure of unwanted
children. And what promised benefits! More education will be available to fewer but
more wanted children leading to great social improvement, more doctors, more nurses,
more scientists. Lives will be saved in the long run by sacrificing some (not one’s own of
course) now and so much good done! We now see the reality that Dostoyevsky saw
behind the murderer’s good intentions. That good intentions unhinged from revelation
was, in reality, the road to hell. It’s the road all moralities have historically taken when
wrenched free from their roots in the Creator. Dostoyevsky could see through the good
that could be done if only we cut loose from revelation and the great value JudeoChristian morality puts on each and every life including the most “worthless,” and he saw
horror. He was dead before their time but he saw the Lenins, the Stalins, the Maos, the
Hitlers, the Pot Pols even the terrorists who use religion devoid of its moral strictures.
And he saw the Manhattan women who aborted one of her twins because she didn’t want
to be forced by economic depravation to shop at Casco or move to Staten Island?
What havoc is wrought when compassion, good intentions and not so good
intentions are released from the strictures and demands of our Judeo-Christian roots!
Like sex, good intentions unchanneled, uncoralled and unguided by a clear morality of
life can become destructive. Without infusing toleration and compassion with the genuine
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love that has been examined in detail in some of the previous pearls, things go easily
awry. Today, in the name of toleration many a college campus has seen freedom of
speech severely corralled by what amounts to thought police enforcing so-called hate
speech mandates which often ban such things as anti-abortion rallies and vocal opposition
to same sex marriage. Catholic Charities is being forced from its traditional task of
placing orphans and abandoned children up for adoption because the new morality finds
its policy not to place with same sex couples intolerable. On the other side of the
spectrum, just how confused things can get with the right to choose was demonstrated at
San Jose State College when a student opposed the school’s anti-plagiarism and anticheating program. She told a student rally “it totally hurts a person’s right to choose
whether or not they want cheat or plagiarize.” And so it does in a society that thinks
choice means the right to destroy new life. This is Sir.Wall’s individualism gone mad. It
is choice unhinged from revelation and even from basic biology.
For those supporting the stealing of someone else’s life under the banner of choice
but opposed to the exercise of that kind of choice when it comes to stealing someone
else’s life work, homework or research there is a need for the consistency that logic and
revelation can provide. But logic without revelation will lead many into the thickets of
utopia. Secular materialistic logic might well see here a perfect opportunity for pubecide.
Terminate before full maturity all those who begin to show definite and incorrigible signs
of a predisposition to cheating or for that matter, drug addiction, violence, rape, murder,
theft excessive religiosity, whatever in the years ahead may eventually get added to the
hit list started by Roe vs, Wade. In that ruling, according to a culpably bamboozled
Supreme Court, to be an inconvenience was enough grounds for a “mother” to destroy
her unborn child. So, why not now when? Since it’s already open season on newly
conceived life to logically add the life of the young and very dangerous or the old and
absolutely useless? But wait! The old do vote and can sound off! Political power may
not be the best moral grounding for the right to life but with the best one, Judeo-Christian
revelation, being shelved, perhaps it will hold back the hammer from them…for a while.
The pre-born, of course, don’t even have that edge.
If life doesn’t begin at conception, all other points are completely arbitrary, wrote
Walker Percy. It can begin anywhere, implantation, birth, self-awareness, puberty,
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personhood, at the 100 IQ point, at full body growth, at full brain development (usually at
age 25) you name it. All other starting points after conception, are arbitrary, adjustable
and usually agenda driven. It was pointed out that placing the start at implantation, as a
growing number like to do, is like saying a long trip begins when the family checks into
the hotel room on the first night.
Even working toward equal economic opportunity another value with roots in
Christianity’s concept that all are equally children of God, when unhinged from
accountability to anything above us, historically has turned into Gulags and new selfevident truths. “Truth is what advances the revolution” pronounced Lenin from his own
Mt. Sinai to the adoring revolutionaries like the American John Reed, subject of the
movie, “Reds.” It is dangerously unhinged values like that often surrounded by the best
of compassionate intentions that bring hell on Earth. The irony is Marxist-Leninist
revolutionaries declared traditional religion the opium of the people only to become the
arsenic of the people. They killed tens of millions to make their revolution come true.
Exclusive of religious principle and with the underpinnings of religion removed, we can
expect even more hell on Earth especially from the priests of the new revolution as their
“walking meat” school of thought replaces the faith that raised mankind to the status of
children of “Our Father”. The hundred million dead from the Marxist and Hitlerian
revolutions, the fifty million abortions in the U.S. alone since Roe are no accident.
Thomas Paine wrote, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a
superficial appearance of being right.” The forty years since Roe have done their job.
Paine might have had Pope’s “Essay on Man” in mind:
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs only to be seen
Yet seen too often, familiar with her face
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Many who would have been horrified by abortion in 1973 have grown accustom to her
ugly face since. Today those who continually prattle about making abortion safe and rare
obviously do not understand the human being as well as Christianity, Tom Paine and
Alexander Pope did. Legalization of the destruction of life in the womb is the first
blessing bestowed on America by the new church, and as we know blessings are
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encouragements. 50,000,000 abortions would have surprised neither Pope, nor Paine, nor
the Church. We, after all, are the poor, damaged, children of Eve and Adam. We are a
mixed bag and the bad in the bag needs little encouragement to break forth in new and
gloriously horrible ways. Roe was just such encouragement. The good God gave us
freedom, even the freedom to be our own worst enemy.
Law and religion can help put the bad back in the bag. They cannot make us moral
but they can help or hinder what does. The Supreme Court’s Roe Decision has been a
great hindrance. It is a deadly teacher that has taught many to embrace a terrible evil, the
killing of innocent and defenseless life. It gave a terrible wrong the superficial
appearance of being right by draping it in the mantle of law and replacing the “Thou shall
not kill” of natural law, conscience and the revelation on Mt. Sinai with vague and
vacillating ideas about choice and privacy that have no foundation either in the
Constitution or revelation. Law like media helps shape culture for better or worse and
culture shapes conduct…for better or worse.
The culture spawned by the new law and the media’s delirium about its benefits for
women fits in well with the tame undemanding new gods of new age religion, life forces
and energy fields along with their promise of cosmic nothingness waiting all after death.
Do not expect from such religion a thirst for justice that will impel great inconvenience
and self-sacrifice in defense of the defenseless. Rather expect the unconcern for justice
that started with the pre-born to spread to other inconvenient vulnerables, the diseased
with problems other than Down syndrome, those blighted by dependency, discrepancy,
illness, loneliness and age especially the severely handicapped, the mentally ill and
dependant, all those burdensome invalids no longer enjoying life or sometimes convinced
as much and so costly and inconvenient to those who are. As massive national debt forces
tighter budgets, expect great pressure for medical rationing with the above categories
viewed as expendable opportunities for saving…not life of course, but money. Facing
these challenges without further disgracing ourselves as human beings requires the wellhoned wisdom of a morality based on revelation and the dignity of man not utilitarian
materialism. Rolling things back so that the pre-born and other potential targets are again
under the one tent of humanity will be a consuming task. Don’t expect the institutions
and people of 1925 to spring to the rescue but we can take a cue from their love and
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caring. But it all rests on faith. In lieu of that, expect instead Planned Parenthood type
outfits and death with dignity squads.
Even the smiling and apparently oblivious Buddha of so many photos and statues,
contemplating, anticipating and welcoming the oblivion to come seems to exude a
comparative unconcern for the plight we are in although he was a person of great
compassion if not exactly love. It was noted that between eschew and renew love must
always choose renew to be authentic. That’s hard to do if you believe, as the Buddha did,
that in order to free ourselves, we much renounce all worldly attachments, including even
our children. And how much help can be hoped for from his follower the Dalai Lama
who believes in a similar detachment? A kind and gentle man, he nevertheless fails to
see the basic difference between a religion that teaches a detachment ending in our
ultimate melding with the impersonal, indefinable and oblivious universal spirit and one
based on revelation that teaches us to become the salt of the Earth, the leaven in the lump,
indeed the light of the world with the promise of a new, abundant, fully aware life to
come for each individual who learned to love here.
Love without action and sacrifice is mere words as compassion without “suffering
with” is just sentiment. The cross is the symbol of the kind of love we need. Love without
the essential willingness to sacrifice self for the beloved is no love at all. And, as
authentic love spread under the aegis of Christianity, writes Joseph Sobran, “Quietly,
gradually, without milestones, Christianized Europe abolished or discredited many
everyday evils of pagan antiquity…” Included in the list was slavery, abortion,
infanticide, divorce which usually meant easy male divorce, polygamy that rated many
women to be worth one man, pederasty, sodomy,” add concubinage, and prostitution and
we have a huge slow miracle in which women and children were among the main
beneficiaries. This was not achieved through Buddhist-like detachment but Christian
involvement. It is now being undone with the rise of a secular neo-paganism and popular
soft new age spiritualities that have nothing to offer with which to resist the moral
tsunami. Only Christ-like love will turn things around.
There is hope. There has been peaceful turns-around in history before, perhaps not
as all encompassing and sweeping as the original Christian revolution described above,
but nevertheless brought off usually by reform movements with strong Christian
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motivation. Christ urged us to be the leaven in the lump of dough. It takes very little
leaven to raise the whole lump, very little salt to flavor the whole hash. It is this spirit that
has advanced the west out of the escapism, detachment and inertia that has plagued most
of the rest of the world and that Alexander Smith and Arthur Schlesinger wrote about
several “pearls” ago. Some of these turns-around have happened fairly recently.
Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movements were discussed earlier and it has also
happened in the distant past. Christianity preserved and regenerated a Roman culture
sinking under a sea of pagan barbarism. Pitirim A. Sorokin, the founder of the Sociology
Department at Harvard in his book “The American Sex Revolution,” stated concerning
ancient Rome: “Salvation and regeneration came from Christianity with its antimaterialistic, anti-sensualistic, and anti-erotic system of values and moral
commandments…Christianity was able to curb greatly the prevailing sexual anarchy and
to restore the sanctity of marriage and the family, and the normal or lawful forms of sex
activity.” It did indeed, but he does seem to overstate the “anti” part. Substitute
“rationally directed,” for “anti” and the picture becomes more accurate.
Given Sorokin’s assessment and others agree with him, the question can be raised
whether “sexual anarchy” by which he would include rampant promiscuity and a
spreading homosexuality along with their damaging effects on marriage and family life is
always a precursor to the decline of a culture and civilization? It may be so, given those
factors are definitely associated with demographic decline which if not reversed sounds a
society’s death knell. The healthy condition of marriage and family is the direct remedy
for such a decline but a culture plagued with “sexual anarchy” can hardly resort to them.
Andrew Sullivan, a leading spokesman for the homosexual life style in the U.S., may
have inadvertently put his finger on a situation that makes our present condition in the
U.S. fraught with danger. Even while pushing for same-sex marriage he wrote, “gay men
have a need for extramarital outlets.” Research by David McWhirter and Andrew
Mattison and published in their book, “The Male Couple,” agree citing a sexual fidelity
rate for male homosexual couples of 4.5% compared to 85% for married females and
75.5% for married males in the heterosexual category. If spreading heterosexual
promiscuity including both widespread extra-marital sex among the young and the
substitution of cohabitation for marriage among many others weaken marriage and family
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life, the homosexual will end up making a disproportionately large contribution to the
decline especially in pressing for legalization of same sex marriage. There are other
factors doing damage too. The popular media, besides its tilt in favor of the equalization
of hetero and homosexuality especially in marriage rights, presents a world of sterile,
fully contracepted, abortion backed extra marital sex as more the rule than the exception
especially among the “cool” and that’s sure to do additional damage to marriage and
family given the media’s influence especially on the coming generation not that the
media moguls care. The result is that with the family already under pressure and in very
shaky condition, the American birthrate has slumped below replacement levels and the
trend seems to be gathering overall momentum in that direction. Were it not for
immigration and a not negligible though proportionately shrinking number of religiously
minded married couples having families we would be seeing and feeling the demographic
decline and related economic problems much more than we are
The massive avoidance of children is something new to America. Posterity loomed
large in everything the Founders attempted and remained so in the pioneering generations
after them. The dismissing of children and posterity as of no great concern or importance
is often an indication of a loss of faith or interest in the future, neither of which bode well
for a nation facing a new century. It also shows a loss of faith in ourselves and our ability
to rationally solve such issues as environmental impact, an overpopulation already
peaking and even the persistently exaggerated picture of the horrors and hardships of life
used to justify removal of a quarter of our posterity each year. Often these issues are thin
covers for the big reasons for avoiding children, inconvenience and financial
commitment. They cost money, and require lots of self-sacrificing love. The decline of
love leads to the decline of a lot of important things, one of them population.
Demographic decline is usually not a good thing, as history often demonstrates, for any
nation or civilization. It’s frequently another sign of decay as it was for Rome when its
people could not even fill the ranks of the army defending them against the invading
barbarians. The revitalizing effects of Christianity came too late to save the Empire. It did
however help preserve the best of the culture for the coming age. In other words, based
on authentic love, the Church as the leaven at work in the lump has in the past and can
again lift and transform a morally decaying society and save a crumbling culture. It does
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this by convincing enough people to bring under control the disorderly, destructive and
often sterile moral life that enslaves people to their own lowest drives and often breaks
their spirit as well, thus turning people away from the authentic life goals indicated by
their better grace aided natures. By bringing under the control of faith and reason those
things that always tend to undermine the life’s blood of any culture and rob it of its
physical and mental health, its morality and its creativity, civilization can be dragged
away from the brink of a rising moral barbarism. The current descent into this barbarism
is everywhere statistically evident but especially so in the popular media. There the slide
has been long but it’s picking up momentum. As early as 1961 the symptoms were
gathering. Read Newton Minow’s observations that year: “Sit before a television screen.
I assure you, you will observe a vast wasteland…game shows, violence, audience
participation shows (the progenitor of today’s reality programs), formula comedies about
totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem and violence, sadism,
murder…gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly (he should be around
now!) commercials-many screaming, cajoling and offending.” Lucky Minow! He missed
violent sweat drenched, half clad rockers, tattoo coated athletes and reality shows that
create a yearning for Buddhist-like oblivion or at least the mute button if not the plug.
Today much of the media is a petri dish of decay with almost total primetime
involvement in everything from grungy to glitzy unreality featuring graphic life
demeaning rather than life enhancing sex and a violence that regularly features mutilated,
dissected, and blown up bodies in HD living color. Meanwhile, the language sinks
increasingly under the weight of crudity and vulgarity with what passes for humor hardly
rising above a depressingly sour cynicism.
Historically and biologically, loss of soul leads to decay. Surveys increasingly show
that many people don’t know they have one. Historian-philosopher Will Durant
comments that the moral and physical backbone of Persia (its soul) was broken at
Marathon, Salamis and Plataea. The nation descended into corruption and apathy with
immorality and degeneration spreading among the people. In a few generations they went
from Stoicism to Epicureanism. As someone described it, the rule to eat once a day
became eat all day. One has to wonder what’s our excuse. Persia’s was a philosophic and
moral downturn that a later Roman general, Manius Dentatus, (the bucktoothed,)
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observed in Rome’s Greek and Macedonian enemies during their invasion of Italy under
Pyrrhus, (the Red King,) and he was glad to see it. He observed in their Epicureanism a
life sapping philosophy not fit for Romans but very handy to Rome when sapping the
vigor of her enemies. Later when the Romans, as stoical as a people could be at the time,
finally defeated Hannibal after many defeats at his hands and destroyed Carthage,
diggings centuries later at the site revealed heaps of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy
relics of their decayed and awful religion. Their god Baal had devoured her children. It
was a culture severely gone astray and the Romans cut down the groves of Baal as, after a
new version of the old decadence caught on in Rome and helped bring her to its knees
centuries later, the Christians cut down the groves of Venus. From the Latin name for her
orgiastic temples found in those groves, “fanum,” comes our word “fanatic.”
Moral decay with the accompanying loss of soul has brought many a civilization
down. Christianity arrived too late to save the Rome of the Empire and much too late for
Egypt, Persia and Greece. Sorokin mentions the “sexual anarchy” that assumed extreme
forms in Egypt and cites the “homosexual love that entered the mores of the population.”
A similar development later enveloped Greece. J.D. Unwin’s classic “Sex and Culture,”
describes Athens in the fifth century BC where the old customs “had disappeared, the
sexual opportunity of both sexes being extended…Divorce became easy and common,
pederasty (homosexual sex between men and boys) appeared; the men possessed
mistresses as well as wives, women broke bounds, consoling themselves with both wine
and clandestine love affairs. The energy of Athens declined…” It declined rapidly. Her
pioneering philosophical advances stalled and it took the message of revelation brought
to it by Christianity preached by disciples like St. Paul to get it going again with a
renewed intellectual vigor though in altered form centuries later. Greece evolved into the
Byzantine Empire with Constantinople its capital. Some civilizations may give out with a
long sigh and sag but not the Byzantine Empire. Even with all its internal divisions and
failings and its external defeats at the hands of an aggressively expansive Islam, it
resisted vigorously and its holding out for centuries saved Eastern Europe from Moslem
inundation while at the same time in the West the Christians of Spain were pushing back
against the same aggressive force. Byzantium was a civilization that lasted a thousand
years and withstood seven centuries of Islamic pressure and intermittent onslaught before
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being taken by storm in 1452 with its Emperor dying on the ramparts. It became Turkey
with Constantinople transformed into Istanbul but most of Eastern Europe was saved.
Long before the roots of Byzantium were set by the Emperor Constantine when he
moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome east to his new city of
Constantinople, the Greek decay and decline had led to Athens fading with a sigh and
being absorbed by Rome. Yet it happened to Rome too. What Dentatus happily saw in
the leaders of his Greek and Macedonian opponents, not necessarily the debauch
associated sometimes unfairly with Epicureanism but a decayed version of aloof stoical
detachment and self-absorption similar to the Buddhist and practiced by many followers
of Epicurus, eventually, as he feared, got to Rome. By the 120s AD the Emperor Hadrian,
though far from aloof or detached did become a full devotee of things Greek, so much so
that he was nicknamed, “greekling” for his admiration and imitation of the Athenian
penchant for pederasty, popularly known as “Greek love,” as well as secret cults and
Eastern mystery religions. Later, under the stoical Marcus Aurelius, a faulty version of
the old Roman admired by Dentatus reemerged but not for long. Commodus, his son
reverted to the easy life and the Empire declined rapidly only to be temporarily saved by
Diocletian and Constantine, the first Christian Emperor. But it could not hold out against
the Germanic tribes pressing in upon it in the way that Byzantium later resisted the
Islamic invasions. Christianity arrived too late to have sufficient impact to revive the
Empire’s sick and dying soul but much of the good was salvaged.
Perhaps there was no hope for Egypt, Persia, Classical Athens and Classical Rome
because the hope filled message of Christianity was yet to be revealed. Still, it must be
admitted, Christian revelation is by no means a panacea for political ills. It is first and
foremost a message loaded with good news and aimed at the individual and the
transformation of his and her mind and heart. It is not a political message at all nor a
political remedy guaranteeing the survival of a society yet, by transforming individuals, it
can have that effect. The Christian religion that transformed and built on Rome’s GrecoRoman cultural roots gave rise both directly through the achievements of the Middle
Ages and indirectly through some of the advances of the Enlightenment, to the
civilization of the West with all the benefits that we and many others influenced by it can
now enjoy, specifically government based on individual dignity, rights, responsibilities
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and freedoms. That civilization is nourished from three main cultural taproots, the GrecoRoman, the Christianity and the Germanic influence brought in with the barbarian
invasions. But, the hope held out by that civilization is now under siege because the
message of revelation carried by the Church and from which the civilization arose and
received vitality is now under siege. David Horowitz, a reformed 1960s radical, in his
2012 book, “A Point in Time,” sees our problems arising from a secular hope grounded
entirely in “earthly institutions.” This type of hope is not enough. He calls hope not
grounded in anything beyond such institutions bound to disappoint and frustrate. He
remembers his father’s never fulfilled hope and devotion to communism as a prime
example and sees the Judeo-Christian vision of reality as the best answer for coming to
terms with our ubiquitous problems. Dimmed our hope may be by the new secular
priests and the new secular church that they wish to prepare for us but the hope and life
revelation offers is still ours and still the West’s great advantage.
It is appropriate to begin the closing of the clasp on our pearl necklace with a quote
from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who was reacting against modern atheism and the
Marxist claim that religion was the opium of the people. He wrote “A true opium for the
people is a belief in (ultimate) nothingness after death-the huge solace of thinking that for
our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.” That danger is
growing but this nothingness has no place in Christianity. On the other hand, the elements
of classical Eastern thought centering on karma and reincarnation ultimately end with the
same nothingness. Even the agnostic Buddha in his reaction against the Hindu pantheon
of gods sounds almost atheistic. He constructed an ethical religion but it, much like the
central tenants of Epicureanism, was designed to avoid what Stoicism, Christianity and
Judaism face up to and indeed embrace, namely life with its difficulties. No salt of the
Earth for Buddha, no leaven in the lump for Epicurus, escape into tranquility though by
different roads was the way that they preached. But, though, at about the same time in the
West the philosophies of Epicurus and later Lucretius were sounding a variation of the
same aloft and aloof approach to facing life’s disruptive challenges that the Buddha was
preaching in the East, there was one vast difference. The approach found home in the
East but never in the West where Christianity took root. In both an Epicurean West had it
come to that and Buddhist East, there was that opium of nothingness awaiting all
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indiscriminately that Milosz feared and condemned. There was no ultimate reckoning, no
ultimate justice except perhaps in the form of many punishing existences before escape
and ultimate absorption into the life force of an impersonal and unknowing universe and
thus in the words of the modern poem mentioned earlier, achieve at best glinthood. No
help or hope there, and no drive to face the world and try to change it. Escape was their
way but not the way of Christianity. But as Christianity is increasingly pushed away by
the new powers and priests of the West’s new religion, what then?
Similar to the Dalai Lama, the post-modern New Age take on all this, often Eastern
in orientation, is that there is but one dogma. It is that there is no dogma except of course
the dogma that all truths, and all approaches to truth are equally true or equally false, it
hardly matters. This is how a false notion of equality turns destructive. What is rational
for one person may not be for anyone else but who is to judge? Judgment is elitist so
goodbye to rationality and farewell to objective discoverable truths based on evidence
and self-evident truths based on revelation. Sounds a lot like the return of nothing! We’re
being robbed of our soul! Agreement about important matters is becoming extremely
difficult. In this atmosphere of a mistaken tolerance and ultimate nothingness, the
intellectually indolent often seem immunized against evidence but are granted equality
status with the studious and serious searcher after truth. For someone to try to convince
others of a truth is often taken as a sign of elitism and a sin against equality, This new
take on toleration seems to demand that everybody is right and nobody is wrong and if
you disagree, do so silently or be labeled intolerant, elitist or worse. In this false equality,
open and rigorous debate is stifled and truth is the casualty. The one and only dogma is
the one that denies that some truths may be truer than others, some windows clearer than
others. No sturdy soul enliving ethic, no salt of the Earth, certainly not one calling for
self-sacrifice even to the point of suffering for the good of others, can stand on such sand.
With both Eastern religion and New Age thought, suffering is caused by our stars or
our Karma and has no value. That the fault may be in us and not our stars as Shakespeare
attested or that suffering may be redemptive, transforming and productive of love as
Christ’s cross teaches is denied. Justice, renewal, reckoning, suffering, redemption,
dogma, such are the thoughts of the “organized” religion that the new priests loudly
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condemn. If they continue to win a following, our suffering society will lose a vital
support with inalienable rights quickly put in jeopardy.
The most “organized” religion of all, if you will, Catholicism, must try to shoulder
some of the burden for this dangerous development due to her past errors of political,
scientific and social judgment epitomized in some circles by the Galileo case. These
errors are ammunition for her opponents though the fact is, much of the opprobrium is
based as much on ignorance as historical realities and much of it comes with the label,
“made in media land” where historical distortion is common. In all this it is helpful for a
realistic appraisal of Church history to keep in mind the image of the great hospital ship
striving to salvage humanity for a better life here and for the new life promised but by no
means always piloted and manned in its two millennia journey by saints. Indeed it
sometimes becomes rather sullied as will happen to the leaven in a lump. As Flannery
O’Connor wrote, the Church was promised protection from formally teaching error in
faith and morals, not sinlessness or for that matter political astuteness. It’s a simple
appraisal but one missed by many, especially those who would like nothing more than the
removal of Christian influence from all public life and those who live their lives in
media’s suffocating box and are heavily influenced by it.
But, to repeat, there is hope. That’s one of the great lessons of revelation along with
faith and charity. John Noonan has written, “It is embarrassing to live in the most
materially comfortable time in history and not be happy.” Yet many are not happy
though there are many reasons to be. There is reason for hope and happiness far beyond
what material comforts can provide. The Christian especially should never surrender to
pessimism. And it is not only the Church’s revelation based faith and theology that is the
basis for the optimism. Reason and science too, though they took some deadly turns in
the hands of 20th Century totalitarians, speak out strongly for hope and against despair.
The history of modern physics illustrates not just the nuclear with its promise and dangers
but the more it probed into the structure of matter, the greater was the mathematical order
it found. The order we see in nature does not arise from chaos or from nothing; it is
distilled out of an even more fundamental order, an order of remarkable mathematical
structure and of patterns more beautiful than those known before our time. Emily, in “Our
Town” called it, with child’s imagination, the mind of God.
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“An order of remarkable mathematical structure,” and beautiful too, these are the
thoughts of physicist Stephen M. Barr of the University of Delaware. Truth, with its
bonus of beauty, exists in itself and not just in the eye of the beholder. Let those from
either traditional East or secularized West replete with its new church and deadly clergy
deny eternal reality but never the Christian! Classic Eastern religious thought and
revealed religion, especially Christianity, go off in very different directions, the one
toward the abolition of man, the other toward man’s full realization in eternal life in its
prime with a loving Father. Though we turn them against ourselves at times in terrible
ways, our Father never takes back the gifts that make us like him and indeed in his very
image. They are the gifts that make us unique of all the creatures we know, our reasoning
intellects and free wills. It is from them and our ability to use them for authentic love that
come our irreplaceable innate dignity. It makes a big difference. One that should not and
need not be papered over in the name of a distorted toleration that tends very easily to
drift into intolerance and even tyranny in the hands of the new priesthood and a new and
deadly secular church.
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THE 40TH PEARL
One more pearl, perhaps a little tarnished at times but a pearl nevertheless. It’s the
original Church, first called “Catholic,” about 100AD and forever new, forever salting,
and still identified by its four ancient marks, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Holy
does not of course mean perfect. Holy means the Church is always working at doing the
good she was established to do though the work is never perfectly realized. We read and
hear about her sins, from the Galileo affair to the recent sex scandal involving a small
percentage of the crew, but she’s been around a long time and is comprised of humanity
and all that means, hundreds of generations of it, all crowded on the great Bark of Peter.
It’s a vast hospital ship, a great lifeboat for many of that immense tribe made up of the
poor and sinful children of Eve. All are on their way home to the Father through what is
for many of them a vale of tears but the Father has let them know he has plenty of room,
“many mansions.” Naturally, there’s always room for more on aboard.
The Church’s sins and human failings during the long centuries of leavening action
are often highlighted by her critics who prefer to ignore the great good that she has
accomplished. Some of those accomplishments and benefits to humanity have been laid
out in a few of the preceding pearls with the aid of unbiased commentators. Nevertheless,
hostility is sometimes the reaction of a world she is commanded to change and she knows
full well the obstacles she faces. They are many faceted and over the years have been
varied but typical at present is a media establishment often mentioned here that is very
prone to accentuate the negative and almost eliminate the positive in human life. To listen
to some of the extremists, we are a plague on the planet when in actuality we alone have
the ability and intelligence to save it and it can be done without the destruction of human
rights and dignity. As a typically sensationalistic example of its skewered approach, it
give the Florida woman who killed her young daughter because she was in the way of her
social life a year of intensive news coverage while the young mother of Rayne,
Louisiana, who out of motherly love perished using her body to shield her infant during a
hurricane got an hour’s treatment and was forgotten. Or take the many women who
refuse to have abortions and who pass unknown while the Casco mother who destroyed
one of her twins for economic reasons gets full treatment. Movies too are made of a
million Al Capones and godfather thugs but a do gooder like “Dagger” John, an
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Archbishop of New York, is passed over and forgotten though his works are still with us.
No Scorcese for him. We hear much about abortion as necessary in today’s harsh world
but little about how the “unwanted” were cared for in places like Philadelphia before Roe
declared open season on them. We are bombarded with bad priests entangled in sex
scandal and cover up but nothing of the faithful 97%, the celibate and selfless priests who
still work in the fields and cities of the nation unsung. Mother Theresa is gone but we
would never know of the hundreds of her nuns still at work in the poorest parts of the
world if we relied on the popular media. They, the Dagger, the mother and the millions
like them are all the leaven that helps keep life and hope going in the vast lump of
humanity, though they hardly make to the tube unless they drop the ball. Not all are in
Peter’s bark in a formal way but they are there in many different ways. It’s good to
remember those many mansions. So, on and on the ship goes, spreading the good news of
the fullness of life for each of us that is Christ’s promise to every new generation and
bringing all it can of us prodigals to that promised new life in Our Father’s house.
The Church has its work cut out for it. It faces external obduracy and internal
dissentions. The first is an ever-present but faulty mindset that thinks the answers of the
present are always superior to those of the past. Indeed, many hold that we should let go
of the old fashioned insights of long ago for those of the present but it is humbling to
remember that the new insights for which the old are abandoned will soon be old too and
scheduled for abandonment. In going for the truth, pride in the present, the idea that new
thought is superior simply by being new, is an obstacle that must be realistically
dethroned. There is also the related danger of simply going with the crowd. In this vein,
though popular demonstrations and protests have their legitimate place in a free society,
Kierkegaard was making a valid point when he wrote in his hyperbolic way,” A thousand
people saying the same thing makes it false even if it happens to be true.” Mark Twain
was saying something similar when he wrote, “If you find yourself in agreement with the
crowd, think again.” The accumulated wisdom of the past, a good part embodied in the
Catholic Church, the oldest institution we have, should be attended to, fairly examined,
studied and scrutinized, then possessed when found valid and true rather than summarily
cast aside. In the electronic clamor of our distracted age, that can be a daunting task. I
wonder if Milton would be so optimistic today as he was almost four hundred years ago
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or would he alter his opinion that “Truth can be counted on to have her say and way…Let
her and falsehood grapple…who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open
encounter.” It would seem he was not confronted with a media and academia that are
really not all that free and open to encounter on the really important issues. For that
reason, sometimes divisive but important life questions, hot button topics and traditional
metaphysical concerns are avoided, even banned like the Danish cartoons critical of
Mohammed were a couple of years ago. In some similar venues the pro-life position,
questions critical of the Darwinian version of evolution, criticism of the homosexual life
style and such are barely tolerated if not totally censored. The use of the word
“encounter” itself would raise fears in some yet debate and mental confrontation are tried
and true methods of attaining clarity and truth. To placate very vocal and hypersensitive
segments of society, much of the media and many a campus avoid such openness. They
like to claim that they entertain all diversity indiscriminately but the really sensitive
issues that need to be explored and debated with all views given equal opportunity for
airing such as the aggressive history of Islam that the Danish cartoons tried to raise are
avoided rather than risk divisive debate and, sad to say, in some cases even violence. The
Church has learned through the ups and downs of centuries of experience in a variety of
social and political settings that it functions best overall at its main job of spreading the
good news in societies that are free and open. Even societies that supported it in the past
eventually weakened it, infringed on her freedom and became liabilities. Often she
negotiated concordats to insure her freedom to operate. Societies closed against it and
sometimes even persecuting it such as the Communist and Nazi regimes in the 20th
century and currently radical Islamic countries in the Middle East and the heavily
secularized Western states adept at trying to push her out of the public square and into the
closet of merely private opinion are at this stage of history her biggest headache. By
remembering the long past the Church attains a very realistic perspective for viewing the
present.
The second danger is a weakening of the Church by internal dissention. It is a
danger that often arises when too much of the lump of human frailty rubs off on it. The
Reformation might be considered a good example in that it was partially a reaction
against the worldliness of the Church at the time but typically, as with most revolutions,
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zealots take the helm and much of the baby goes out the window with the bath water. The
result was multiple divisions and the general worsening and weakening of Christianity
especially regarding unity and authentic doctrine with benefits hardly commensurate.
Holiness was not appreciably increased but the divisions remain. But nevertheless, the
Catholic writer G.K.Chesterton pointed to a real danger when he wrote, “If the world
grows too worldly it can be rebuked by the Church but if the Church grows too worldly it
cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world.” This is very true although
now, rather ironically, some of that world justifiably rails against the small minority of
priests and protectors who became sexually worldly but at the same time shorts its own
criticism by refusing to condemn, abandon or even seriously criticize its own wantonness
and ever increasing sexually destructive ways, Ways that frequently put children and
family in great disarray. There have indeed been some bad times for the Church when the
salt lost much savor and tang and the leaven much strength but it always came back,
often improved.” We are reminded of author Flannery O’Connor’s description of the
bark:
It’s a Church of saints and sinners too. Christ never said that the Church would be
operated in a sinless or intelligent way, but that it would not teach error. This does not
mean that every priest will not teach error (or sin) but the whole Church speaking through
the Pope will not teach error in matters of faith. It was founded on a man who three times
denied Christ. Don’t expect his successors to walk on water.
Such a realistic view of the Church would help avoid much confusion and
disappointment in her human failings and clear the deck for an apt appreciation of
essayist Stephen Tonsor’s assessment of some of the more unsung personal benefits of
Christianity. To paraphrase: The true Christian is free of metaphysical anxiety and if not
happy as a clam given the evil we experience, is a realist in a world that bears the
unmistakable imprint of God’s ordering hand. He is free of bitter and radical alienation
and is not taken in by, indeed has no hope in any secular utopian social order or social
engineering scheme. Regardless of what many moderns have insisted, sin, evil, tragedy,
are not the consequence of inadequate social planning and education and will never be
eliminated by those means. They are the consequence of man’s sin prone and disordered
nature. That’s where they have to be confronted and improvement achieved and the
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Church is uniquely equipped to do it, all the while knowing, “the poor (the evil and
sinful) we will always have with us.” So why bother to fight? Precisely because in the
battle we are improved!
I close with Albert Camus who wrote, “The writer’s job is to speak up for the
voiceless.” And not just the voiceless, but all who feel cowered or overwhelmed by the
almost inescapable roaring of a secular saturated entertainment media as well as an
academic establishment often of like mind. This I have tried to do.
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POSTSCRIPT, EPILOGUE, AFTERWORD, APOLOGY (YOU NAME IT)
I believe it was Machiavelli who wrote to his children. “I send you the worthiest gift
I have to offer, inasmuch as it comprises all that I have learned from long experience and
continuous study.” This I have also tried to do. If things were written here that are
commonplace, I tried to say them in my own way and certainly not to bore. If there are
any useful insights, I am glad. They have been culled from the thought and hard work of
many others and have come to me through years of reading, studying, sifting and
evaluating. Eighteenth century English writer and wit, Sydney Smith, wrote something
about writing that strikes me right, “If I don’t write I fear no one else will say what I
think should be said in the way I think it should be said.” I only wish I could have said
those things I did say and wanted to say, so much better. I like to write and I’ve been
trying to learn how to do it well for years. Forgive me for practicing on you dear ones and
dear readers. Needless to say, if there was any unfairness to or misrepresentation of any
point of view in what I have written, it was not intended and I shall happily stand
corrected. Logical lapses and non-sequiturs should be reported too. What is presented
here is not a history but a personal reflection based on the factual record, If some of the
“pearls” seemed to have a similar sheen or appear to overlap remember redundancy is a
teacher’s occupational hazard. I’m afraid I am a master at it so please be forgiving and
chalk it up to over thirty years in the classroom. That said, it is obvious that Christ had
answered Pilate’s question before he asked it, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” As
Joseph Bottum wrote:
God gives all He has to give
His Son to speak that one word, LIVE.
Dedication: In memory of my Sister-in-Law Linda Niver Murphy who died in
December of 2010 and to my mother who would have been 100 that same year. Also, to
my California Cousin Carol Finn, who died in January 2011 and my father who would
have been 100 in November of the same year. The work is also dedicated to Susy with all
my heart and to the future, to my loving children and Grandchildren and those coming
after.
Dick Murphy Sr. Beacon. 7/31/2011
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