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.

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.

Consequential Judgment - Nations

Not that I am advocating extremism that can lead deplorably to the dehumanization of scapegoating; rather, I am saying simply that abortion is - absolutely, categorically, magisterially - demonic. But this category has been cast out with the bathwater by materialists - along with the baby, I hasten to add. Abortion and its industry of easy, disposable human life has been swept clean even the possibility of personal evil. They have made their charnel house clinically-clean and sanitized; empty and awaiting that which they deny even exists.

The poor, besotted secularist atheists who live their cool and detached lives of quiet lack of charity need to read and digest Matthew 12, 43-45 vvery carefully.

And, as theologican Peter Kreeft points out here, abortion IS demonic.

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.

Atheists are Fussbudget Ninnies

Reposted from The Four Mass'keteers, 9/16/09:
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.

Dumb Luck or Creation

Monsignor Charles Pope on a remarkable piece of "dumb luck" --

I just read in the news an interesting story. It seems that a tornado recently went through junk yard. As you can imagine there was a horrible amount of junk whirling around in the air. But here’s where the story really gets interesting. It seems that the tornado swirled that junk together just right because as the wind died down all those banana peals, cans, broken pieces of pottery, stuffing from old mattresses springs, car parts etc all swirled together into a fully functioning 747 jumbo jet airliner with a filled fuel tank and fully equipped cockpit. There was even a logo emblazoned on the tail fin: “Tall Tales Airlines"..MORE>>

Heresies, Faith, and Chivalry

" ...thirsty traveller(s) trudging doggedly and dogmatically through a spiritual desert, ... carr(ying) the burdens of bereavement with resignation "

What Pope Pius X condemned in his encyclical, Pascendi, namely the heresy of Modernism, is today shown to have a tedious and tenacious ability to harass and damage the human race, damning souls with error and lies.

World War I ended with two of the twentieth century's greatest apologists grieving. Hilaire Belloc lost his nineteen-year old son, Louis, in the air war over France, and G. K. Chesterton lost his brother, Cecil, to trench fever. And yet how prolific, how invaluable would be their continuing contributions to the remnants of Christendom and to the faithful in the Church for many, many years to come amidst the darkening, post World War I wasteland.

Today, the faithful seem to be experiencing a kind of grief as well. The heresy of Modernism has never been so rigidly deployed and enforced in the West. Many who call themselves Catholics not only voted for a president who embodies and exemplifies Modernism with a great if naive sincerity, but seem to regard the Magisterium of Mother Church as something optional, conditional, lower than their personal, subjective "choice".

The power of Modernism to attenuate Catholic truth - downstream from which all - ALL - Christianities gain any access to certainty - is only, astonishingly, matched by Modernism's working hand-in-glove with the Scimitar against remnants of the Christian faith and morality in the West. Political encroachment by both seem an ever rising tide whose lapping waves threaten to swamp what is left of truth, goodness, and beauty of Christendom.

As the twenty-first century enters its fledging years and nearly the mile-marker of its first decade, we have much to learn and glean from both Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton as well as a great many other champions of the Catholic faith in the early twentieth century. It is not a time for despair and hand-wringing. In the very least, we must be prepared to rescue refugees and shipwreck survivors. For, in the wise words of Joseph Pearce, "... the faltering, flickering candle of the sincere sinner (is) in as much need of the oxygen of grace as (is) the flaming faith of saints." (I know, being much nearer the former than the latter.)

We must stay in a state of grace, receive sacramental power from Our Lord who has "overcome the world," and practice the virtues in Marian chivalry.

It is our moment to be faithful in a world darkened by sin, death, scandal, and idolatry. God bless each of us. What a great time to be alive!

Better a Machine than Dead

Michael Cook, editor of Mercatornet, discusses the new Terminator movie, the attractiveness of human-machine hybrids ('transhumanity'), the Belbury-esque (cf. C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength) establishment of Singularity University, and other pipe dreams of such scientism advocates as Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is near.

A. N. Wilson - Return to Faith

(O)nly hard evidence will satisfy the secularists, but over time and after repeated readings of the story, I've been convinced without it.

And in contrast to those ephemeral pundits of today, I have as my companions in belief such Christians as Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Johnson and all the saints, known and unknown, throughout the ages.

When that great saint Thomas More, Chancellor of England, was on trial for his life for daring to defy Henry VIII, one of his prosecutors asked him if it did not worry him that he was standing out against all the bishops of England.

He replied: 'My lord, for one bishop of your opinion, I have a hundred saints of mine.'

Now, I think of that exchange and of his bravery in proclaiming his faith. Our bishops and theologians, frightened as they have been by the pounding of secularist guns, need that kind of bravery more than ever.

Sadly, they have all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity, and that the few intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief after all.

As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.

Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.

J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.

But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives - the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis, the man, woman or child next to you in church ...

Read all of Wilson's Religion of hatred: Why we should no longer be cowed by the chattering classes ruling Britain who sneer at Christianity.

Dawkins Delusion

Gerald Warner of The Telegraph comments on Richard Dawkins who said that Pope Benedict XVI is 'stupid, ignorant or dim' -

Dawkins is not interested in empirical, scientific evidence when he is kicking religion. If the Pope favoured condoms Dawkins would probably be against them - on sound scientific grounds. Atheism is the new superstition and nobody illustrates it better than a scientist who rejects scientific method in favour of blinkered prejudice.

Read all of Warner's observations here.

I Think It's a Great Idea

Godless 'congregations' planned for humanists. There were many, many times when I wondered why the heck the people who came to potlucks, Scout meetings, Vacation Bible Schools, committee meetings, and Sunday Schools came in the first place. They sure didn't like each other much.

So if the humanists can do it better without all the church growth/market research stupidity, worship-as-entertainment nonsense, or grousing, maybe they can teach us something!

Reno on Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart's new book is reviewed by R. R. Reno at First Things. Reno drops one quote that, if nothing else, should entice the reader to one-click over at Amazon:

"(A)theism that consists in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism.”

Read the review here.

M. Pera - Hope for Europe

VATICAN CITY, DEC. 7, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Philosopher and writer Marcello Pera says Europe must call itself Christian because it's exactly what can bring the continent together.

Pera, an Italian senator, presented his latest book, "Perché Dobbiamo Dirci Cristiani" (Why We Must Call Ourselves Christians), in Rome on Thursday. More than 300 people were present at the event.

In the book's introduction Pera writes: "My position is that of an atheist and a liberal who asks Christianity about the reason for hope." Benedict XVI, in a letter to Pera, said that the book is "of fundamental importance at this hour in Europe and the world."

Read all of An Atheist Looks to Christianity for Hope.

Hubris and Naïveté Meet and Make-out

The American Humanist Association is planting ads on sides of buses and bus stops: Why believe in God?

It's so easy, right? "Just be good for goodness' sake." Who the heck needs to think about it as hard as, say, Charles Taylor, huh? Sheez, louise.

You want a reason to believe in God. Here’s why you should believe in God.

Atheist War Against Science

Tom Piatak at Taki's Magazine weighs in on The Atheist War Against Science.

... Colin McGuckin, “ a professor of regenerative medicine at Newcastle University and an expert on the use of adult stem cells,” is leaving Britain for France, because the only stem cell research the British government wants to spend money on involves embryonic stem cells. According to McGuckin, “A vast amount of money in the U. K. from the government has gone into embryonic stem-cell research with not one patient having been treated, to the detriment of [research into] adult stem cells, which has been severely underfunded. Cord blood has already cured around 10,000 people, but despite this much of the U. K. stem cell funding goes towards other types of stem cells including embryonic stem cells, which are not expected to cure people in the next 50 years.”

Don’t expect to hear any angry denunciations of the climate that caused Prof. McGuckin to leave Britain from Richard Dawkins, P Z Myers, Christopher Hitchens or any of the other usual suspects who are eager advocates of stem cell research that destroys nascent human life but far less supportive of the research that is helping to save human lives today without, however, advancing their agenda of attacking Christian morality.

First Principles for Atheists

The ever insightful Peter Hitchens opines on What Atheists never get.

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

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.

War of the Cosmoses - 2a

In War of Cosmoses - 1 (below), I began with a quotation from Chesterton: "A religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in." Then I looked briefly at two faith presuppositions held by the Scimitar; namely, the belief in Mohammad as the "perfect man" worthy in every way of imitation and his having received the inalterable revelation from Allah, the Koran. On these two a priori first principles all of Islam hangs, and, aided by the Ahadith, radical Islamists make Jihad upon the faltering Christian West in utter logical and legalistic certitude.

I meant to turn next to the second combatant in the "cosmos wars," Christianity, however, it seems more important to look at the third combatant, Modernism, since it is its present bombardment that has left Christendom enervated before Islam's current attacks. It is, as I said, "Legion", because it is comprised of characteristics of all the Christian faith's attackers in its two thousand year history.

Many books have been written and much cyber-ink spilt describing this Modernist combatant: DeLubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism, DeMarco and Wider's Architects of the Culture of Death, to name only two fine resources. But I think going back further, one sees with an acerbic yet tonic eye the outlines of this foe in Hilaire Belloc's great surmise, The Great Heresies. The great historian even struggles to give this new assault on the Christian faith a name:

...save the vague term "modern." I should have preferred, perhaps, the old Greek word, "alogos"; but that would have seemed pedantic. And yet it is a pity to have to reject it, for it admirably describes by implication the quarrel between the present attackers of Catholic authority and doctrine, and the tone of mind of a believer. Antiquity began by giving the name "alogos" to those who belittled or denied, though calling themselves Christians, the Divinity of Christ. They were said to do so from lack of "wit," in the sense of "fullness of comprehension," "largeness of apprehension." Men felt about this kind of rationalism as normal people feel about a color-blind man. [12-13]

Belloc names the central tenet of this combatant: "the proposal to treat all transcendental affirmation as illusion." One sees how little distance Modernism has traveled when scanning the titles the books of Hitchens, Dawkins, and their ilk.

Belloc did not say newer, different assaults would not come upon Catholic truth in the future; he said "the main kinds of attack would seem to be exhausted by the list which history has hitherton presented." He summed upon these attacks as: the Arian; the Mohammedan; the Albigensian; the Protestant; and "the Modern." The Arian attacked the root of the Faith, the Incarnation. The Mohammedan worked without, forming a new world in their fashion. The Albigensian grew a "foreign body" cancer-like from within the Church. The Protestant attacked the personality, the unity, of the Church. In my opinion, the Modern attack is willing to use any and all of these former attacks as MEANS to win. Here is what Belloc said:

...the modern phase (the "cosmos wars") has abandoned reason. It is concerned with the destruction of the Catholic Church and the civilization proceeding therefrom. It is not troubled by apparent contradictions within its own body so long as the general alliance is one for the ending of all that by which we have hitherto lived. The modern attack is materialist because in its philosophy it considers only material causes ... Being Atheist, it is characteristic of the advancing wave that it repudiates the human reason ... (it) is indifferent to self-contradiction ... It advances like an animal, counting on strength alone ... there is coming not only a contempt for beauty but a hatred of it; and immediately upon the heels of this there appears a contempt and hatred for virtue. In a word, either we of the Faith shall become a small persecuted neglected island amid mankind, or we shall be able to lift at the end of the struggle the old battle-cry, "Christus Imperat!" [146-147,155]

I would add this: the Modern attack, now nearly two-centuries old, has used psychology wearyingly well, as C. S. Lewis depicted the witch using it as a weapon in The Silver Chair -- all that is transcendent is merely "projection", as Feuerbach proposed.

The effect of the Modern attack is a moral, ethical, and faith playing field that is level, Darwinian, and brutally violent. For an accurate taxonomy, one must delve into the mimetic theory of René Girard to see where Modernism intends to take the human race: back to the "dark gods of blood."

Oakes Chops Down Atheism

A stunningly astute rebuttal -- "Atheism and Violence" -- to the recent spate of atheist-lite books near the top of the bestseller charts by Ed T. Oakes, SJ, at First Things:

With hope in progress gone, with the lessons of the twentieth century still unlearned in the twenty-first, with technology progressing, in Adorno’s words, from the slingshot to the atom bomb (a remark cited in Spe Salvi), with a resurgence of religiously motivated violence filling the headlines, all that the new atheists can manage is to hearken back to an Enlightenment-based critique of religion. But they find their way blocked, not so much by Nietzsche (whom, as we saw, they largely ignore) but by the ineluctable realities he so ruthlessly exposed. Not Nietzsche, but the history of the twentieth century has shown that godless culture is incapable of making men happier. All Nietzsche did was to point out that no civilization, however “progressive,” can dispel the terrifying character of nature; and once progress is called into question, the human condition appears in all its forsaken nakedness. [h/t: Creative Minority Report]