Wolves Circling in Winter

Ah, yes. It is certainly about time for some muckraking by the NYT. It asks in its hand-wringingest-best smarmy self-righteous mode, Sex-abuse scandals involving priests have shaken Ireland to its core. The reaction has been fierce, but is that enough to break the grip of the Catholic Church?

Any guesses how the NYT would like to answer that question?

Coming Up for Air

To my mind, Ronald Knox puts his finger on the primary problem of western culture, the demand for novelty. This is the motive for the rejection of Christianity in general and Catholic faith and morals in particular. This is the motive for the overweening coddling of the Scimitar into the heart of the west ("Hey, it's not threadbare 'Me 'n Jesus'. Let'em have their prayer service breaks at work and build their special toilets. Stop being intolerant, ya moron. HEY! You Christians! Stop foisting your stupid faith on the rest of us with your 'Merry Christmas' and caroling!").

Deeper still, Knox in his Broadcast Minds delves into the dangers of scientism and shrill atheism that he began to notice in the mid-twentieth century. These sniping and brattish anti-God types he saw would lead to what we now see today as the "new atheists." As opposed to the civil, urbane, and even friendly arguments between, say, Chesterton and Shaw, Wells, Russell, and Darrow, the so-called "new atheists" sound like Dan Quayle debating with their cat-calling and boorish behavior.

Perhaps it is the Sesame Street mentality all grown up, but what passes for consideration of the meaning of things today is a rat-a-tat-tat of sound bytes rather than quiet contemplation, an unconscious giving-in to disordered passions (Gr: epithumeia ( ἐπιθυμίᾳ ) rather than what we see supremely in, for example, the Holy Father, Benedict XVI and his works.

I see it more and more - sadly - in the classroom; even in the classroom of a Catholic school. It seems an espousal of a mere group of carnal sensations, a giving-over of value delineation to the most outrageous expressions of pop culture, and a surly yet absolute assurance that all-things-young define the terms of public discourse.

Of course, Girard would see - and does, no doubt see - all this as the furtherance of the cultural meltdown ("sacrificial preparation" - Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World) going on apace.

I say, on this Gaudate Sunday, that I am humbled by being given the grace to find my way into the sole place of solace in said cultural meltdown, the Catholic Church. May more and more and more stumble, half-frozen, tormented, and bereft of hope into Her gracious arms. Pray that Our Lady of Guadalupe will bring more conversions to the sad old, sinful old, West.

WaPo - Satanic Verses

Once again, the Washington Post, that organ of humanist progressivism, launches into the breech of teutonic battle with its arch foe, the Catholic Church. Today, the WaPo features this. The usual dredging of past sins of priests, dating usually to thirty or more years ago, offers the clinching quotation by a victim during an interview:

(He) frequently took a breath and choked back tears as he described the way Petrella had destroyed his life and his faith.

As a child, "I realized all that stuff about God living in the church, priests being God's representative, that your parents can protect you - I realized all those things weren't true," he said. Years later, he developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which he thinks helped kill his marriage.

Let's be clear and say that abusive priests, like any sexual predators, need to face the consequences of their actions.

But the Washington Post, at once crying to its godless heaven for the sake of speaking up for victims (and seeking verifiable victims to victimize, like Catholic priests), will turn right around and offer its sanction for the sexual behavior of such organizations as NAMBLA.

What is wrong with this picture? Extolling inter-generational "love" between men and boys, on the one hand; terrorizing Catholic priests on the other. Hmmm.

Now, you try to square the circle with that contradiction. The WaPo won't even try. Its soul is hollowed out with its luciferian logic.

Trajectory of Our Knowledge

The Day After Trinity is a 1980 documentary about Dr. J Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the Manhattan Project.

"The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

I am going to ask a couple leading questions and link to 2 great posts by Athos. 

What is the trajectory of our knowledge?  What are the MIRACLES that come from our knowledge (referred in the quote above) and what are the miracles that Knox and Lewis refer to in the post below?

If we are worried about the path on which our knowledge flies and about its ultimate destination we had better go back to its launching pad and deal with the passions - the desires - that fuel and guide its course.

Miracles - Knox and Lewis

I cannot recommend highly enough Father Milton Walsh's book about C. S. Lewis and Ronald Knox, Second Friends. For example, on the topic of what it takes philosophically in order to believe in the miraculous ("something that traverses the law of uniformity in nature and does so in such a way that it gives evidence of divine power directly at work"), Walsh quotes Lewis:

If the end of the world appeared in all the literal trappings of the Apocalypse, if the modern materialist saw with his own eyes the heavens rolled up and the great white throne appearing, if he had the sensation of being himself hurled into the Lake of Fire, he would continue forever, in that lake itself, to regard his experience as an illusion and to find the explanation of it in psycho-analysis, or cerebral pathology ('Miracles', God in the Dock, 25)

Walsh states that for both Knox and Lewis, post-enlightenment persons have certain prejudicial philosophical presuppositions that preclude acceptance of and belief in miracles. Note: philosophical rather than scientific presuppositions. Science, by definition, can only study the regularly recurring laws of the universe and other phenomena available to the scientific method; science, therefore, cannot even hold an opinion about the existence or non-existence of miracles. What are those 'certain prejudicial philosophical presuppositions?' The following:

- that the only reality is the spatiotemporal world in which we live

- that the laws of nature exclude the possibility of the miraculous

- that God would not 'stoop' to do miracles

It is not easy to put these presuppositions aside, because many intellectuals since the Enlightenment have claimed insistently the contrary: there is no world beyond what we can experience with our senses; miracles are impossible; God does not enter into the workings of our world. It is also challenging to put these presuppositions aside because a living, personal God makes demands on us that the Enlightenment "Watchmaker" or pantheist "Absolute" do not:

(Lewis:) Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional [biblical] imagery. It was hated, at bottom, not because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheists' God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance.

If any of this strikes you as being seen, heard, or felt by today's so-called New Atheism proponents, your Pantheist friends, or ignoring-of-God neighbors, once again I highly recommend Fr Walsh's book, Second Friends.

Hart - The Desirist's Unsatisfiable Desires

To my friendly atheist interlocutor on the Outer Banks and other committed atheists, I submit the work of David B. Hart - fallacy-ridden as his scholarship may be by their standards of sacred-based logic. Hart writes of philosopher Joel Marks here.

Postscript to an Atheist Friend

Having spent a delightful week in the string of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina known as the Outer Banks, I am pleased to offer up beginning tomorrow an experience known as "chemotherapy". Probably the best online resource on the latter can be found here.

I spent some time with an old acquaintance there, a self-designated atheist. Interestingly, he went to the bother of "becoming ordained" so that he could perform weddings (which he has), yet he has abandoned, seemingly, the institution in his personal life.

Like so many such atheists, he sees a major issue to be one of authority. Where does a mainline Christian pastor get his or her authority? Where does the Pope? He asked these questions, clearly brandishing his "ordination" as carrying as much authority as either of these (being a relativist as well as atheist). Of course, we Catholics can guide any such questioner to the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew when Our Lord proclaimed Simon to be kephas / Πέτρος ("Rocky") and "on this rock," said He, "I will build my Church" (18-19). Catholicism is historical; Benedict XVI stands as our 265th pontiff since St. Peter.

Now, my atheist friend has several presuppositions that keep him from acknowledging such biblical authority, most of which were laid to rest as unsubstantial in epistemology by the great British Catholic thinker - some say the greatest mind to come through Eton and Oxford - Monsignor Ronald Knox (and others). But he still gives credence to "higher criticism" of liberal schools of thought, like, for example, the so-called "Jesus Seminar." Let us just say that authority for them comes from whomever thinks and sees things their way; i.e., the scriptures they see as "authentic" prove that Jesus, as it turns out, was a Jesus Seminarian!

Let me say, in the hope that my old friend will possibly read this post: authority is posited from a much higher and substantive source than one's individual opinions and life experience. We are created, finite, and mortal. We will answer to the One from whom we have our lives on-loan, ontologically speaking. And the Catholic Church has and provides the greatest and most coherent explanation of our lives, our purpose here on earth, and, please God, our ultimate telos.

For further information, Philip, please pick up a copy of A Little Guide for Your Last Days, here or here. Or, if you have no desire to shell out twenty bucks, perhaps you will find something of edification in my favorite post, here (pardon the title, if you will). Best, old friend.

Last Days of A. J. Ayer

Speaking of life without humility, herein lies, gentle reader, the extraordinary account of renowned and outspoken British atheist, A. J. Ayer, and his last days. Allowing a piece of fish to go down the wrong pipe, he was saved by medical personnel. But what he experienced, being dead, lead him to become best friends with old debating acquaintance, Father Frederick Copleston. Here.

Atheists are Fussbudget Ninnies

OFTEN ONE WILL HEAR atheists proclaim that we are here due to the random dance of atoms occurring in a vastly uninhabited, ferociously beautiful, yet totally fluke-filled universe. We are "the stuff of stars," as dear old Carl Sagan said.

And I, of course, agree with Carl's statement, being an Earth Science middle school teacher. We are indeed begotten from the star matter (plasma, baby - and that's as close as I ever want to get to it).

We dwell in a tiny cocoon of atmosphere around our tiny, garden planet, protected from solar radiation by an electro-magnetic field that is produced because the outer core of our planet is a billion-trillion tons of molten iron spinning around the inner core of solid iron at about one thousand miles an hour (I am not making this stuff up - who could?) which sends the EM field out one pole, around the Earth, and back in the other. This, by the way, flips every so often, causing the mid-Atlantic ridges to show the reversal in polarity with geologic time scale frequency. Your compass will one day point south. Yep.

And besides this, we are beings dwelling in this tiny, protected, garden planet that can imagine all of this in our puny minds which are inextricably intertwined somehow with seven pounds of gray matter between our ears and who can talk about it with one another due to the manufacture of language in the Wernicke region of our brains. (As Walker Percy said of this in his famous Thomas Jefferson lecture of the humanities in 1989, "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind" - "Draw me a picture of us 'picking out language' from the Wernicke region. Go ahead. Draw me a picture.")

And as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, "It is an act of faith (on the part of scientists, largely unacknowledged) to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all."

So, I find it remarkable that atheists are atheistic, given the above facts. What an amazing pile of remarkable "coincidences" and "random dance-steps!"

My Catholic faith, on the other hand, has produced some of the greatest scientific thinkers of western civilization, bar none, and depends completely upon both common sense and high rationality the likes of which cannot be found elsewhere.

And if our Creator was kind enough to allow each of us into the greatest Adventure of all - namely, being blessed enough to be born and avoiding that man-made obstacle, abortion - surely, surely, we can depend upon Him to see that that which follows this biological existence will be at the proper focus distance to see, provide sufficient existential and ontological substantiation to still remain His be-ings (if it be His will), and be a part of something at least, if not more, miraculous than all astonishing existence we now share.

For more important facts, get your copy of A Little Guide for Your Last Days.

Answering an Atheist

Way to go, Albert! [ht: New Advent]

Nihilism as 'Being' in Nothingness - Are You Still Confused?

Tips all the way round. First to Athos' post Nihil who tips to Daniel Mitsui's post A Creature of the Depths

NIHILISM The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age by Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose

Read it HERE

I have pulled out a few excerpts to hopefully wet your apetite to read this article.

Nihilism has error for its root, and error can be conquered only by Truth. Most of the criticism of Nihilism is not directed to this root at all, and the reason for this--as we shall see--is that Nihilism has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any "front" on which it may be fought; and those who think they are fighting it are most often using its own weapons, which they in effect turn against themselves.

The whole food of Christian Truth, however, is accessible only to faith; and the chief obstacle to such faith is not logic, as the facile modern view has it, but another and opposed faith. We have seen indeed, that logic cannot deny absolute truth without denying itself, the logic that sets itself up against the Christian Revelation is merely the servant of another "revelation," of a false "absolute truth": namely Nihilism.

The first stage of Nihilism, which is Liberalism, is born of the errors of taking our diseased eye for a sound one, of mistaking its impaired vision for a view of the true world, and thus of discharging the physician of the soul, the Church, whose ministrations are not needed by a "healthy" man. In the second stage, Realism, the disease, no longer attended by the necessary physician, begins to grow; vision is narrowed; distant objects, already obscure enough in the "natural" state of impaired vision, become invisible; only the nearest objects are seen distinctly, and the patient becomes convinced no others exist. In the third stage, Vitalism, infection leads to inflammation; even the nearest objects become dim and distorted and there are hallucinations. In the fourth stage, the Nihilism of Destruction, blindness ensues and the disease spreads to the rest of the body, effecting agony, convulsions, and death.

The Nihilist rejection of Christian faith and institutions, then, is the result, not so much of a loss of faith in them and in their divine origin, as of rebellion against the authority they represent and the obedience they command.

But if "rebellion" is all the "natural man" may know today, why is it that the "natural man" of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment seemed to know much more, and thought himself to be a much nobler being. "They took too much for granted," is the usual answer, and lived on Christian capital without knowing it; today we are bankrupt, and know it." Contemporary man, in a word, is "disillusioned." But, strictly speaking, one must be "disillusioned" of an illusion: if men have fallen way, not from illusion, but from truth--and this is indeed the case--then profounder reasoning is required to explain their present "plight."

If you need a visual aid to help make sense out of this "nihilism" then check this out:



And here is an opinion which I think is more prevalent than what we would like to admit.

I'm a Christian and Nihilist and I say why must we be oppressed to accept what is unacceptable: and I have the answer for once just as Nihilism and Christianity does: We live in a world, where false beliefs become radical realities, and what is considered unsafe we make safe. Oppression is omission of freedom, we will not be dumbed down, fuck the political system now and then, they run our futures if we have any futures left due to their political incense.

Dismantling nihilism in our age where it is so rampant will take more than prayer - not to say that prayer is not a good place to start. I can't help but think that we need more help in maturing and understanding our faith through knowledge and reason supported by reasonable and responsible accountability in and through the Church as well as public life.

The Darkened Intellect Serves the Fallen Will

Mark Shea explores the mirky world of atheistic SSA, citing David Morrison and Eve Tushnet. An excerpt:

It's fairly obvious to unclouded faculties that homosexuals are acing themselves out in the Darwinian struggle for survival, since they are not in the deep end of the pool of those mostly likely to pass on their chromosomes. That doesn't mean that homosexual orientation might not have "natural" causes, just as other disorders do. Nor does it mean that some sort of Just So story can't be concocted to overlook that glaring fact ("Same-sex attracted individuals could have made excellent, er, nannies in pre-history, thus guaranteeing a higher species survival rate, blah blah, etc."). Nevertheless, a fact it remains: As a Darwinian advantage, homosexuality is highly unconvincing.

Read all of The Darkened Intellect Serves the Fallen Will [h/t: New Advent]

Skeptical About Atheists

If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are by Edward Tingley, The Skeptical Inquirer. [h/t: New Advent]

And, as The Anchoress reminds us of GKC's words to early 20th century atheists, Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
- Orthodoxy

Behind the Times

Fr Timothy Radcliffe, OP, bemusedly jibes Richard Dawkins as being 'So 19th century.'

Referring to recent assaults on the Christian faith from philosophers, scientists and others such as AC Grayling, Christopher Hitchens and Professor Dawkins, he said: "I do not think we should be the slightest bit alarmed. It would be a great mistake to cast ourselves in the role of some persecuted group. When people criticise Christianity, we should welcome this as an opportunity to engage in debate."

He said the greatest challenge facing Christianity today was a loss of hope. "It is tempting for people to see no way forward. The two main stories the young encounter are the 'war on terror' and ecological disaster. Faced with that, they may well inclined to wonder what future they have. They wonder what future their children will have. So it is very important that as Christians, we are seen to believe in the future of humanity."

No More Wistfulness

Tom Piatak at Taki's Magazine makes a startling admission, I Confess: I Don’t Understand Why Some Atheists Are So Angry.

Ben Stein Takes On Hostile Atheism

Watch the trailer.

In my opinion, Stein is noticing, naming, and trying to confront the worsening level of scandal in the scientific research community. This is something of which many take notice, like Stein himself, but few know how to address. To do this, one must have revelatory knowledge borne of the Church and her saints, or the homespun wit and wisdom of a Flannery O'Connor, or, most exceptionally, the gift of René Girard's mimetic theory.

Having said this, let it be stated for the record that Girard, a son of the Church, would bow to the greater knowledge and magisterial wherewithal of the Catholicism, according to sources close to the great man. Indeed, again in my opinion, mimetic theory is a subset of the deposit faith; a true expression of the work of theology and anthropology in service to the Magisterium of Scripture and Tradition.

Even so, it is fun watching Stein clean the clock of Darwinian fundamentalists. Anyone want to watch? Anyone? Anyone?

Philip Pullman Is A Liar

As Jimmy Akin makes manifestly apparent.
Naturally, the Catholic League and its head Bill Donohue are warning parents against The Golden Compass, and Pullman is quoted as saying the following:

"To regard it as this Donohue man has said - that I'm a militant atheist, and my intention is to convert people - how the hell does he know that?" he said, in an interview with Newsweek magazine.

How "the hell" does Bill Donohue know that Pullman is a militant atheist out to convert people?

Because Pullman himself has said so!

In an interview published in the Washington Post (Feb. 19, 2001), he stated:

“’I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,’ says Pullman. ‘Mr. Lewis [C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia] would think I was doing the Devil's work.’”

Enough said.

Fr Barron on Hitchens - Part 2

Fr Barron on Hitchens [HT: CMR]

Atheists - "Autonomous, Loose and Randy"

Doug Giles pulls the covers off with his slam-bang funny -- and truthful -- essay, Atheism: An Intellectual Revolt or Pelvic Rebellion?

Look, I’m not buying that the atheists’ altruistic self-professed pursuit of reason is what undergirds their conclusion that God does not exist; I believe it’s because they want to believe that they’ll never be called into eternal accountability for their temporal actions by a holy God. Talk about an opiate for the masses ...

Y’know, Karl Marx said religion is the “opiate of the masses.” I think the real poppy derivative is the black tar belief that tells you atheist lads and lasses that when you take the big dirt nap that’s it. Ah what peace. What a high. No God. No accountability. All our sins of commission and omission will never ever come up again. No pain. No penalty. No heaven. No hell. Imagine. Yeah, dude. Hold that hit. Let it out slowly. Ahhh. Feel better?

There’s your opium.

Ouch. Sometimes the truth hurts. But it is preferable to the alternative; namely, denial of the biblical God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who wants us to redeem us from a hell of our own design. Update: What the New Atheists Don’t See -- Theodore Dalrymple (To regret religion is to regret Western civilization)