Fish Eaters: The Whys and Hows of Traditional Catholicism


``Where the Bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be;
even as where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church'' Ignatius of Antioch, 1st c. A.D



 
For Atheists, Agnostics,
Those Afflicted with Scientism,
and Other Secular-Minded People
Who Are Nasty to Religious Folk


(This page is snarky. The snark isn't intended for all who are sent here.
If you've been sent this URL and aren't nasty to Christians,
ignore the tone and just read the arguments themselves)





 





You're an asshole, and here's why...

Don't worry; this isn't a page set up to convert you. Nope, not going there; I'm guessing you're so incredibly intelligent, especially after having been exposed to those three greatest geniuses the world has ever known -- Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher -- that my doing so would be a waste of time. Instead, the purpose of this page is to make some points about your dealings with those of us who believe in God, because dealing with you materialist types is getting a tad tedious. A Christian can't even go to Youtube, watch an hypnotically beautiful video of a murmuration of starlings (see above), and post a sweet, simple comment such as, "God is such a Genius Artist!" without being verbally assaulted.

"Oh, boy, here we go. Another sky-fairy believing idiot! Religion is the cause of most of our problems!"

"I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and have more evidence for his existence than you do for your god!"

"'God'? I think you mean 'nature,' idiot."

"You only believe in god because your parents taught you to or because you're afraid of death and want to make yourself feel better" (Yes, the doctrine of Hell is such a comfort!)

And if any reference is made to creation, to the concept that the universe was brought forth, ex nihilo, by God, then come the standard "You're stupid" and "You hate science" routines, typically coupled with tons of assumptions (e.g., "You think the earth is 6,000 years old"). You set up strawmen, knock them down, and seem to expect Christians to be bowled over by your fallacies.

Seriously, pretty much everything you throw at us, so often with an apparent attitude of extreme hubris, is something we've heard a gorillion times before. It's not clever, interesting, or thought-provoking. Worse than that, it's boring. Seriously, it's tired, man. Been done. Y'all are in need of a new schtik.

But even worse than that, it's mean-spirited. A Christian watches that truly beautiful video of a starling murmuration, is filled with awe and pleasure, publicly expresses a simple sentiment of gratitude that such a thing exists, is harming absolutely no one in the process -- and here comes The Professional Atheist, thrilled to shit all over it. This is your attitude personified:


If you don't know who this person is, see this video.

I mean, let's say, arguendo, that you are absolutely right in your atheistic conclusions. You are the genius of all geniuses, more brilliant and correct in your beliefs than all of your ancestors put together. You've read Aquinas and refuted each and every one of his points with unassailable logic. If Aristotle were sitting across from you, he'd be ashamed of himself, stuffing his mouth with Cheetohs so he'd have an excuse not to talk and, therefore, be thoroughly thrashed by your shocking brilliance and shown up as the poseur he obviously was in contrast with you (I think we should cut him some slack, though. I mean, how intellectually dazzling could he have been anyway without having been exposed to the great expositions of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Maher?)

Christians, on the other hand, are -- well, they're just not that bright. They don't -- likely even can't -- comprehend that there is no God sky fairy and are too afraid to really look at the world and just admit what they really, truly know deep down inside, but can't bring themselves to say: that everything we see is inherently meaningless, meaningful only in terms of the meaning we, as individuals or a collective, depending on your persuasion, assign to it.

Christians are like children, really, but you, the atheist, for whatever reason, given the chemical processes that take place in your individual brain, are in possession of the sort of mind electro-chemical brain patterns that the religious -- a type that desperately clings to what amount to fairy tales, that lives in fear of death and needs a "security blanket" of faith in order to get through life intact -- cannot even begin to grasp.

The Christian is an addict, needing that "opiate of the masses" Marx wrote about. You, though, are free! Christians believe only because they want to believe!


Putting aside the erroneous idea that desiring something means it doesn't exist (seems to me that most things we desire actually do exist), even if all the above were so, why would you take such great pleasure in smashing the delusions of those poor, pathetic, not-too-slick-in-the-membrane, silly, junkie bastards? Doesn't that strike you as at least highly uncool if not plain old outright nasty? You're encountering people you see as not very intelligent and who live in fear, a people who at least feel the need for pretty lies to maintain their very will to live, and your response is to gleefully and with great hubris smash the beliefs that give them comfort as they endure their sad little lives.

Y'all enjoy pulling the wings off of butterflies, too? What the Hell is wrong with you? How is that not different from getting your kicks out of telling children there is no Santa Claus?


Believing it right and good to dissuade a kid from believing in Santa -- where "right" and "good" are defined by whatever the atheist pulls out of his ass, of course, no matter how many five-dollar words he uses to describe his morality ethics -- and going about it gently, with love and concern, is one thing; taking pleasure and pride in it is quite another. And the equivalent of the latter is what so many atheists do. They almost seem to lie in wait with the hope that a Christian says something he considers "dumb," like "God is such a Genius Artist," just so they can hop all over it and talk about that stupid-ass Flying Spaghetti Monster (which, as an Italian, I call cultural appropriation on).

The sort of attitude shown by such behavior is more than just bizarre and annoying; it comes off as truly sociopathic.


I imagine that some of you might reply with "But Christians are pro-life, think acting on homosexual desires is wrong, are against gay marriage, and think sex outside of marriage is sinful. That affects ME, so screw them! They want to impose their morality on to the rest of the world!"

If that's your response, I've got two things to say. First, ever notice how so much anti-Christian nastiness comes down to "They think it's wrong for me to fuck anyone I want to, anywhere I want to, any time I want to! And they don't want me to be allowed to kill the biological conseqences of fucking just because they see them as human beings! Waaaah!"?
That's so deep, man. (see "What's your pet sin? Or what did your parents do to you?"  below).
 
Second, get real clear on the fact that the secular-minded want to dictate their "morals" onto the world just as much as -- nay, MORE than -- any Christian does. A country's laws either include prohibitions against killing babies in utero or they don't, there's either a thousands-of-years-old, rooted-in-biology view of marriage that informs the law or there isn't, etc. The two cannot exist at the same time. Unless you're an anarchist (and most of those who claim to be are just Commies who have to be either radically ignorant of History or just plain old evil bastards given what History teaches), you want your version of "morality" to be given the force of law at least as much as anyone else does, you hypocrite. 

And don't think "well, a Christian can just not get an abortion while letting a pro-choice person get one if she wants!" Would you have said in Germany during WWII, "well, a German can just not kill a Jew while letting a Nazi kill one if she wants!"? What is it about the belief that "abortion is MURDER" do you not comprehend?

Has it never truly occurred to you that if the Christian sees human life as beginning at conception, he has no real choice but to be against abortion? He believes that when a human sperm and human egg meet, a human being is formed. Do you disagree that it is human as opposed to, say a platypus? Do you disagree that it is a being? That it is alive? That it has its own DNA and, though dependent on its mother, is a separate being from its mother? Break it down and it becomes pretty clear that thinking that an embryo or fetus is "an individuated living human being" is in no way some mark of "superstition"; it's science.

It isn't some horrific form of anti-woman nastiness for someone to not want to see unborn living human beings murdered in the womb, is it? I mean, doesn't the opposite sound a little more intuitive -- i.e., doesn't it actually sound more like anti-woman nastiness to agree with the idea that it's OK to kill what are, in fact, living human beings just because they're in the womb? That's what they do in China, man -- hold a pregnant woman down and rip a baby right out of her.
 




 
And if you're down with abortion, how far do you want to go with that line of thought? At what point does it become human "enough" to warrant protection? Is it a woman's desires alone that make an unborn living human being deserving of protection? That seems to be what the law says, isn't it? Kill a pregnant woman, and you can go down for two murders, but if Magic Mommy kills the baby herself, it's OK. Imagine this: Little Miss Pro-Abortion, after a life spent battling for "choice" and wearing pink pussy hats, finally wants a baby and gets knocked-up when she's 35, a result for which she spent thousands of dollars in IVF money. All of a sudden, that "clump of cells"1 gets a name and deserves a baby shower with cake and beautiful balloons. That there is "magical thinking" if I ever heard any. Princeton's Peter Singer thinks parents should be able to kill their kids after they're born, too. I mean, hey, why not? A kid can't live without mooching off of others, right? And if the kid is unwanted by Mommy, the magical god-creature who can wish human beings into and out of humanity, what do you have against it? Don't bring up adoption as a response; pregnant girls can go that route, too, but the pro-death crowd still insists that infanticide is the answer.
 


This newborn was found covered with ants,
discarded and left to die because she was born female in India.

 
   


And here, a University of Tennessee college student argues for the murder of 2-year olds because they don't express themselves well. Why not 3-year olds? Why not have the ability to speak in complete sentences, with perfectly pronounced R's, as your criterion for who should live and who should die? What I love best about this video is his typical liberal arrogance. It rolls off him like a dark, dense fog that he seems to see as dazzling in its luminosity.

 

The segue into the matter of abortion2 was made to make this point: the law is a teacher. Our laws shape our culture. And culture isn't something one can just "change the channel" on. It isn't like a TV or radio station; it's more like the air we breathe. Someone's ideas of the True, Good, and Beautiful WILL inform and shape the laws we have. So what makes you think that Christians have no more of a right than secular-minded people do to shape what those laws will be? Hell, a large percentage of you atheists aren't even content to even just leave Christians alone. Catholic hospitals have to offer contraception and abortion. We have to use nonsensical pronouns in many areas of the world or get fined ridiculous amounts of money. Christian bakers have to bake cakes for gay weddings  (not, mind you, "Christians have to serve homosexuals". The issue is not and has never been a matter of Christians not wanting to serve gay people. If a gay guy wanted a birthday cake, I doubt any Christian baker in the world would refuse him! The issue is cooperating in bringing about a gay "marriage," which is a violation of the consciences of many Christians). Oh, and if a Christian calls bakeries owned by homosexuals and wants a cake with wording supporting traditional marriage, guess what happens? (As an aside, the push for gay "marriage," an idea that's about 5 minutes old, is based on a number of lies -- e.g., that marriage is primarily about luv, that gay "marriage" is about "equality" even though a gay person could always marry someone of the opposite sex just as a straight person could, and a straight person also couldn't marry someone of his own sex just as the gay person couldn't, thereby showing perfect equality, etc. Further, the legitimate concerns gay couples have -- e.g., about insurance and hospital visitations -- could've been dealt with without having to turn marriage into a joke.)

Anyway, when it comes to law and culture, the Christian has thousands of years of History, thousands of years moral thinking produced by some of our greatest minds (well, aside from Dawkins, Hitchens, and Maher), and, it's absolutely arguable, sound sociological and psychological principles on his side. Also on his side is being able to assert that his worldview is the one that built Western civilization with its universities, hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, great cathedrals, incredible technologies, etc. His worldview is the one that inspired the most beautiful art the world has ever seen and heard, from Gregorian chant, Bach, and Mozart's Requiem Mass to the works of Da Vinci, Bernini, and Raphael.

The modernist secular worldview has been building for a mere 500 years, becoming increasingly more inane, insane, and dangerous as time goes on, as is evident in the acceptance of usury, the vile and bloody French Revolution, the early 19th c. revolutions in Europe, slavery in the West, the treatment of the poor during the Industrial Revolution, the ridiculous Victorian view of women that led to the 1960s madness, World Wars I and II, the hundreds of millions slaughtered for the cause of Communism, Nazism, etc. And what does its art look like? "My Bed," rotting sharks, and Ke$ha's inspiring, life-affirming ode to existence, "Die Young."
So-called "Enlightenment" thinking undergirds all that rot, and is embraced by those who push for endless sex (fornication, bestiality, homosexual acts, threesomes, incest, pedophilia, polyamory, etc.) and death (abortion, euthanasia). Sex and death -- the two concerns of the lowest of beasts. If you don't find it "problematic" that atheism results in a reduction of civilization to nothing but the two great concerns of worms, then you are out of your mind.






Footnotes for this section:

1 "Fetus" means "offspring," not "clump of cells," by the way. "Embryo" means "fetus in utero at an early stage of development." Don't fool yourself by thinking that using Latin words makes killing babies OK.

2 More about abortion:
How Abortions Are Performed
What Abortion Looks Like
10 Very Surprising Quotes From Abortion Doctors
Leading Physician Confirms Unborn Children Feel Excruciating Pain During Abortions
Expert Tells Congress Unborn Babies Can Feel Pain Starting at 8 Weeks
Science, Embryonic Autonomy, and the Question of When Life Begins
41 Quotes From Medical Textbooks Prove Human Life Begins at Conception
Unborn Babies Learn Language in Womb, as Early as 30 Weeks
Fascinating Research Demonstrates Unborn Children Can Learn
Unborn Babies Can Dream in the Womb
New Study Shows Unborn Babies Can Recognize Faces While Still In the Womb
The Life and Death of Baby Walter is Changing The Abortion Debate
Woman Laughs Ahead of Her 9th Abortion and Then Sees Her Aborted Baby
Abortionist Quits When Baby Keeps Breathing After Abortion: “Her Chest Was Moving Up and Down”
Holocaust Survivor Describes Seeing an Abortion Clinic: “A Death Factory is the Same Anywhere”
New Study Proves Feminists Wrong: Women Say Their Abortion Was Not Liberating
Pathologist traumatized after seeing 3-pound aborted baby with expression of ‘horror’ on his face
Suicide Rate for Women Having Abortions is Six Times Higher Than Women Giving Birth

If you're a woman reading this and have had an abortion, or if you're a man who's pressured a girlfriend or wife into having an abortion,don't despair and don't hate yourself. There is healing from this, believe me. Face the Truth and grieve what you've done, but know that forgiveness is yours if you want it!





Religion is (insert a negative adjective here)

One of the most exasperating things Christians encounter is the attack on their Faith that begins with some bold assertion that includes the hidden premise that all religions are the same. "Jesus is nothing but a myth! He never even lived!1 Religion is just so stupid! If it were to disappear tomorrow, the world would be better off!" is one very typical example of the many types of this sort of attack. In response, I say:

1) Religions are not all the same, and one would have to be mentally-challenged to not see that most obvious of facts.  I mean, seriously, if you can't tell the difference between Islam and Christianity, or between Buddhism and Hinduism, you're blind. Throwing out such a vague line about the evils of "religion" is akin to saying something like, "Food is stupid! People choke to death! And think about liver and onions! It's a disgusting dish! If food were to disappear tomorrow, the world would be better off!" Before you start in with "but food is necessary to life, and religion isn't," see point 2:

2) Has it never occurred to you that the religious impulse is culturally universal and that that fact must have some cause and function? It's a fact that all over the world and all throughout time, man has turned to religious thought to explain why he sees what he sees and in order to find meaning and purpose. Maybe your trashing "religion," with no qualifications, and mocking the religious impulse isn't scientific at all in that it ignores reality (human nature) -- and maybe it's highly dangerous. What do you propose in its place? And as you answer, know that science cannot ascertain meaning and purpose; that's not its goal, and no tool of science is capable of doing such. Further, it cannot -- it is definitionally unable -- to ascertain what is Good or Beautiful.

Maybe you're not bothered by the idea of those you love (whatever that means) being nothing but "glorified monkey meat," in essence, beings who'll die and turn into dust to be seen no more, but most people aren't built that way. Almost no one is. Given those facts, is it really wise to, mindlessly and with no selectivity, quash what you see as "fairy tales," those mere "stories" the religious tell themselves in order to find a reason to get up in the morning? Why would you want to position yourself as the Shiva of religious thought, the Great Destroyer who ruthlessly and with great pleasure tries to take from people the source of their peace of mind rather than act as a benevolent person who thinks he's more educated and aware than those poor suckers who need their fairy stories, but understands their "silly" need and wishes them no harm? Seriously, what the Hell is wrong with you?

And maybe you're the high IQ, introverted type, someone who's not dealing with psychological "issues" such as a great sense of underlying rage or a propensity to fall into deep depression, not given to addictions or "acting out" in anti-social or self-harming ways. Well, good for you! But not everyone is like that; in fact, I'd guess that most people aren't. Take away from them a sense of purpose and a moral code that keeps those passions in check, and you're asking for big heap trouble. Maybe you are chugging along doing OK-fine with your books and your computer at hand, and are content in picturing the universe and humankind as inherently meaningless. But what about that 16-year old boy who's been bullied half to death, doesn't fit in, has shitty parents, and no one to turn to? What about that girl in her early 20s who's dealing with having been sexually abused by her grandfather, the results of her behaving promiscuously because of that abuse, an unwanted pregnancy that stems from that promiscuity, and, odds are, a lifetime of ensuing poverty? What about that 40-year old guy who's just gotten dumped by his wife, has had his children, home, and half of his income taken from him for the next 20 years? Now imagine all of these people believing that  life is inherently meaningless, and seeing human beings as of no more intrinsic value than rats. Have a clue yet? Do the terms "going postal" or "school shootings" ring a bell?

You might be thinking, "Well, doing such a thing would be awful." But you don't have a single, solitary philosophical leg to stand on in saying that as an atheist. Why shouldn't that 16-year old bullied kid go ahead and take revenge by shooting up the school? Some possible reasons:
  • Because you don't like the idea? So what? The kid who goes through with such a plan obviously liked the idea just fine. What makes your likes and dislikes more compelling than his? Do you think the Columbine shooters did what they did because they didn't want to do it?

  • Because he'll "grow out of" his despair someday? So what? He "grows out of" his teenaged angst and --- then what? Finds an economic niche for himself in the world, earns enough to attract the attention of a nice bit of evolved monkey-meat of the opposite sex, and has a 1.6 evolved monkey-meat kids who'll be gone in 18 years if they're lucky enough to find jobs? What meaning is there in all that? What are the odds of that happening? How do the odds of that remote and tenuous reward pay off relative to the immediate reward of sweet, sweet revenge and the ability to make a grand statement that tells the world, "I exist! I made an impact!"?

  • Because you wouldn't want such a thing to be done to you? Well,
     
    1. He's not doing it to you; he's doing it to his classmates.

    2. Even if he were doing it to you, your desires don't make for a compelling moral argument at all. Stalin wanted a lot of things, too, and millions of dead people (Christians, which is why we don't hear about them) were the result.

    3. Even if he were to do it to you, it wouldn't mean anything morally anyway, would it? It might mean something to you, subjectively, on an emotional level, or maybe it'd mean something to your glorified monkey-meat family after you were extinguished, but why would it mean anything to him? More importantly, why should it mean anything to him?
       
    4. Because of the categorical imperative idea? Because if everyone were to behave in that way, there'd be no human life left? Again, so what? Besides, many on your side express the idea that a big human die-off -- say 4 or 5 billion or so (including neither the ones expressing the idea themselves, nor their glorified monkey-meat "loved" ones, of course) is a good thing. Ted Turner, who has five kids and owns fifteen ranches, wants to institute a one-child policy for everyone else, bitches about how "too many people use too much stuff," and wants to reduce the world's population to 2 billion. Bill Gates wants to reduce world population by -- and you tell me if you understand this at all -- vaccines, better healthcare, and reproductive health services. (I understand that last bit about "reproductive health services" -- code for contraception and abortion -- but wouldn't vaccines and better healthcare increase population?)
Anyway, by your thinking, his life has no objective meaning, and neither do the lives of his classmates. So who the Hell cares? Why should he care? Why would you care? Should you care? If so, why? Because you don't like suffering and think it's "bad"? Well, as so many of your kind are fond of telling Christians, your dislike of something -- say, the idea of your loved ones disappearing forever after death -- is just a fear-based response that is philosophically worthless.

3) In my experience, vicious attacks against religion qua religion by the Professional Atheist types usually come down to one of two things: a) their belief that if something isn't mathematically quantifiable, it is stupid to accept it as true (tell that to Gödel), and/or b) becoming religious and consistent would require their having to change (or at least try to change) behaviors they don't want to change. The former is covered in the section, "Scientism, Materialism, and Other Ways of Knowing," and the latter is covered in the section, "What's your pet sin? Or what did your parents do to you?" Check them out...


Footnotes for this section:

1 What's sadly hilarious is that a good percentage of the atheist types say Jesus never existed at all -- while another percentage says He did, but was gay. And another percentage says He did, but was transgendered. And another percentage says He did, but was married to St. Mary Magdalene. This sort of crap goes on and on and amounts to one thing: Jesus either didn't exist at all (in spite of the Historical evidence, such as textual evidence from Tacitus, Josephus, Lucian, Pliny the Younger, the Talmud, etc., the actions of the early Christians, the actions of the early post-Temple Jews, the Shroud of Turin, etc.), but even if He did, He was anything but what the people who actually knew Him said He is. Peter, Matthew, Mark, Luke -- the people of the early Church -- walked with Him, ate with Him, followed Him, but somehow didn't pick up on the "facts" that He was a gay, transgendered radical feminist Who didn't exist, but was married to St. Mary Magdelen.

Christ set up the Catholic Church Himself, on the rock of St. Peter, the first Pope (his bones are buried at the Vatican), who was followed by Pope Linus, who was followed by Pope Anacletus, who was followed by Pope Clement, etc., and onward, to the awful Pope Francis (to see the list of Popes going back to St. Peter, see this page). There is a lineage there, and every Catholic priest has been ordained by a Bishop who was ordained by a Bishop who was ordained by a Bishop who, going back 2,000 years, ultimately was ordained by one of the 12 apostles, who were ordained by Christ Himself.

Anyway, in addition to all the aforementioned theories about Who Jesus is, there's also the "Christianity is just a big 'shroom trip, man" idea. Seems as if any ridiculous idea will do -- but Christianity, with its Historically traceable direct lineage going back to the men who knew Christ personally, won't do at all. Collectively, Christ-haters and Church-bashers are a joke.


The Atheist View of the World



Christian =/= Protestant

If I had a nickel for every time I had some version of the following thrown at me:
 

You believe that homosexuality is sinful! Well, why don't you read your OWN Bible and stop eating shellfish?
 
First of all, the Catholic Church doesn't teach that "homosexuality is sinful" so you're off to a bad start. The Church sees homosexuality as a disorder, no more "sinful" than clinical depression is (I grant that many Christians use very sloppy, unfortunate language when talking about this topic, and many of us are upset at what's being taught to our children, how Christian businesses and schools are legally forced to conform to anti-Christian thinking and practices in order to exist, and, so, can get a little mouthy and ticked about it. Because of all that, someone's wrongly thinking that the Church teaches something different than what She actually teaches is understandable to a point. On the other hand, the Church does have a number of catechisms, and one'd think it'd be obvious that if someone wants to find out what the Church teaches, he'd turn to catechisms and magisterial documents, not to Lurlene down to the Pick-n-Save.).


That aside, you might be able to pull such a routine on Protestants, who believe in the concept of "sola scriptura," or the "Bible alone" as the rule of faith. When you're talking to a Catholic (or an Orthodox), however -- you know, the type of Christian who belongs to the Church that's been around for 2,000 years and whose roots go back thousands of years more to the ancient Israelites -- instead of a member of the 8-year old Bob's Church O' Jaysus on the corner -- you're making a fool out of yourself. Cherry-pick a Bible verse, and I'll ask you if you've consulted Aquinas's "Catena Aurea" to see what the earliest Christians had to say about it. Chances are you haven't and don't know what you're talking about.

Catholics don't see the Bible alone as the rule of faith. There are three pillars of the Catholic Church -- i.e., three things by which we can know what to believe when it comes to religious Truth: Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church). All three of these must be consistent with one another, and be consistent throughout time (e.g., what was taught as dogma a thousand years ago is just as true today). Catholics know that the Old Covenant has been fulfilled with the New Covenant. The positive divine law manifest in the old Mosaic laws are not the same as eternal divine law and natural law, and those Mosaic positive laws have no moral force whatsoever now, having been fulfilled and perfected by the laws governing the New Covenant. And Catholics know that Christ set up a Church and gave to that Church the authority to teach and interpret Scripture (the Church is the very source of Scripture, not the other way around). So, just stop with the old Leviticus and single Bible verse-based arguments; you're showing your ignorance.

Also, as an aside, not all Protestants are fundamentalist evangelicals, the type you see on TV screwing people out of money by preying on their ignorance and desperation. Not all Protestants are brainwashed Israel-worshiping people who are perfectly happy to send their sons to die for wars Netanyahu, AIPAC, and the Washington neo-cons of both parties want. But as disgustingly misled (and as politically dangerous when it comes to foreign policy) as that latter type of Protestant is, most of them, in my experience, are basically kind and giving people, "good ole boy" and "nice gal" types who deserve a helluva lot more than your Christian-bashing nastiness.

The overall point is this: "Christianity" isn't synonymous with "Protestantism." Catholics aren't Protestants and don't believe as Protestants do. We don't believe in "the Rapture"; doing things to bring on the end of the world so we can go up to Heaven while everyone else suffers on earth; worshiping Israel; that all you have to do is say the "Sinner's Prayer" and you're saved forever; that people get sick because they deserve it (necessarily, anyway); that people are poor because they deserve it (necessarily, anyway); that smoking, drinking, and gambling are sins in themselves; that the United States is chosen by God to push democracy all over the earth; that the G.O.P. is some sacred entity; that people choose to be gay; that "rugged individualism" is the way (we see the family as the key structure of civilization -- preferably the extended family -- not the "rugged individual" as in pure libertarianism, or the "collective" as in socialism); etc., etc.

Bottom line: if you're American, and what you think you know about "Christianity" is what you've gleaned from Protestantism, televangelists, or Hollywood movies, then you don't have a clue about what classical, traditional Christianity teaches.



Christianity is anti-science

Because of "the Galileo affair," it's "common knowledge" that the Church contradicts and even hates science. That "common knowledge" is utter bullshit.

Galileo (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) wasn't censured because of his cosmology1; he was censured for not proving his cosmology while presenting it as fact and, most of all, for going beyond making scientific assertions and crossing over into theology. Copernicus (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543), who also held to a heliocentric universe, dedicated his book on heliocentrism to Pope Paul III, who greeted the work with great interest and gratitude. Galileo, who came after Copernicus, was a jerk and insisted on delving into the realm of theology, which he had no authority or expertise to do.

So the "common knowledge" that Galileo presented a brilliant and proven idea to the Church, but was treated like dirt (by being confined to a palace) because his assertion "contradicted Sacred Scripture" (a collection of Books that the Church reads very differently than Protestants do) and threatened the Church's psychological hold on the people is a big, fat lie.
 
So, Galileo aside, whence comes this idea that the Church hates science? It's a ridiculous notion given that it's the Church, along with a handful of ancient Greeks, that invented science. It was a Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, who came up with the modern scientific method itself! Check out this long list of Catholic priest scientists:


-- and keep in mind that those are just the priest and religious (monks, brothers, friars, nuns, sisters) scientists and doesn't include lay-Catholic scientists, like Pasteur, Cassini, Pascal, etc.

History isn't the source of this wrong idea, so what could be? My guess it that it comes down to three things aside from Galileo: 1)  anti-Christian prejudice rooted in materialism, 2) anti-Christianism rooted in a strawman view of Christianity born of Protestant televangelists and Hollywood propaganda, and 3) evolution, the idea that all life forms we see are the products of "slime" X time rather than of any design.

As to:

1), see the section "Scientism,
Materialism, and Different Ways of Knowing" on this page;

2), see the section
Strawman Christianity: Thanks, Hollywood! Thanks, Televangelists!;

3),
I assure you than no educated Catholic (or any sort of educated Christian in general) denies the mechanisms of evolution (natural selection, sexual selection, genetic mutation, genetic drift, genetic draft, gene flow). The question of origins, though, is another matter, and here's the deal (and if you think it isn't, prove otherwise!): those who see evolutionary mechanisms as the sole cause of man's very existence can't prove their assertion using the tools of science any more than a Christian can use the tools of science to prove that God made man.

That man derived from some primoridal slime is neither a testable hypothesis nor something that can be observed. Ergo, it is not something that can be subject to the tools of science.



The evolution question is a helluva lot more complicated than people on both sides want it to be. In order to talk about evolution in any way that goes beyond a screeching match, the term has to be defined: by "evolution," is it meant just the above-listed mechanisms which no reasonably-educated person denies? Does it refer to the idea that all life on this planet arose from just one randomly-caused "primordial organism" or from a very few such randomly-arising life forms? (please note that any idea of Earth having been "seeded" by aliens from other planets just pushes the question back and to another place)

If that sort of clarification isn't made, people on both sides of the discussion will be misunderstood and come off as ridiculous to the other side, and the discussion will be fruitless at best.

When talking about evolution to Christians, ask yourself if it is truly unreasonable and stupid to posit that there is a God Who brought about all of this order and complexity -- and whether that line of thought is more unreasonable and stupid than the secular version of things taught today as if it is all scientific fact rather than theory.

For ex., if Ockham's Razor (William of Ockham was Franciscan friar, by the way) means anything to you, compare these two stories:

Story One

God created the universe and all in it, ex nihilo. He made this universe with physical laws that govern how things operate, and we can use the scientific method to determine how they do so. Natural selection, sexual selection, mutations, genetic draft, genetic drift, and gene flow affect man and the other animal kinds He created, and we can study to learn how these creatures have changed over time. Though not the only tool in the human toolbox, science is a remarkable one that has allowed us to understand God's physical laws and to invent technologies that alleviate suffering and make life longer, healthier, and safer.


Story Two

OK, class, here's how it goes: There was nothing, not even time itself, and then, somehow, there was something.2 Then this something exploded somehow, for some reason, and the universe was formed.

In one area of this universe is our solar system, and on one planet of this system, conditions were somehow such that, somehow, nucleotides and amino acids formed. These nucleotides, somehow, formed into RNA which somehow carries information which came from nowhere.

Then, somehow, through the mechanisms of evolution, these primitive organisms changed over time. Some of them, somehow, became more complex and included DNA as a conveyor of their genetic information which came from nowhere -- this DNA essentially acting as code without a Coder, something seen nowhere on earth ever outside of assertions of fact involving the origins of life.

Though random mutations are almost always harmful to organisms and are relatively rarely evolutionarily successful (i.e., they are not adaptive, not naturally selected for, and not sexually selected for), new genetic information, acquired from nothing, coming from nowhere, somehow resulted in ever-increasing complexity, eventually even resulting in organisms that became, somehow, sexually dimorphic. In sexually dimorphic organisms, at the same time female parts were randomly developing and somehow, for no apparent reason, being naturally and sexually selected for, male parts were simultaneously developing in other organisms of the same kind and, somehow, for no apparent reason, also being naturally and sexually selected for. In the human female, for ex., though the female gamete is useless without the male gamete, ovaries developed to produce and store these gametes. Simultaneously, Fallopian tubes randomly developed to transport the ova. The uterus, again through random mutations, developed to provide a destination for a fertilized ovum to implant itself and grow. The vagina also developed to provide the means for the male gametes (which may or may not have already been developed at this point) to enter into the female body. Neither the gametes, nor the ovaries, nor the Fallopian tubes, nor the uterus, nor the vagina were beneficial and should have been selected for without all of the other parts being in existence, and without the presence of a complementary male organism of the same species with his own functioning reproductive system, but all of these parts came about nonetheless.

Once two organisms of one kind became sexually dimporphic with strangely coincidentally complementary sexual parts, the organism with the female parts that somehow got selected for, and the organism of the male parts that somehow got selected for were somehow also able to find each other and to successfully reproduce! Or, to put it another way, "And lo, their randomly-caused, independently-developed reproductive systems magically came together and worked to make more of their kind!"

That the fossil record isn't littered with the millions and millions -- or even tens and tens, or even one -- of those in-between fully male and in-between fully female organisms of all -- or even any -- of the sexually dimorphic species, shouldn't bother you;
nor should you have any concerns about the dearth of evidence of organisms with the then newly-forming sexual changes that weren't successful in evolutionary terms, and, so, died out. This is a sacred idea, a matter of dogma, and no questions or doubts will be tolerated. If you question any of this is any way, you will no longer be considered a scientist, you will not get your degree, and you most definitely will not get tenure. In addition, you will be ruthlessly mocked as stupid, and be given no mercy whatsoever. So, repeat the mantra "this happened over millions of years" as if it's a prayer so that the "Time is Magic" idea is ingrained into your mind and explains away any doubts or questions. "Time is Magic! Time is Magic! Give a monkey a typewriter, and, if you wait long enough, he will produce the plays of Shakespeare! In the case of sexual dimorphism give two monkeys typewriters and they will both produce the plays of Shakespeare, with one writing in English, and the other in French, and then they will get together and collaborate to write all of Dickens's works as well."

This process of sexual dimorphism was repeated millions of times, somehow. Either that, or there was one original sexually dimorphic species that came about as just decribed, and that species then later evolved into the millions of other sexually dimorphic species we see today, with enough of their intra-species random mutations -- said mutations almost always having a negative effect on an organism's ability to survive and reproduce -- being successful, and with those mutations involving the reproductive systems happening in a complementary way in both the males and females of those species at the same time. Somehow.


Aside from sexual dimorphism which involved at least two different organisms independently and randomly mutating such that they acquired complex systems containing individual parts that shouldn't have been sexually or naturally selected for at each stage, and those two organisms finding each other, resulting in the remarkable coincidence that those complex systems were complementary and successful together, such complex systems developed in other ways, as well, giving rise, in the end, to systems that allowed for such things as sight, hearing, etc. E.g., there's no need for an optic nerve without the complete visual system, but optic nerves evolved and were somehow selected for anyway. There's no need for cones and rods without the complete visual system, but cones and rods evolved and were somehow selected for anyway. Same goes for the iris, the retina, the cornea, the occipital lobe of the brain, etc. None of these parts was valuable on its own, but, somehow, they all came together and made for something spectacular. This phenomenon happened over and over again, within a given species (e.g., the development of the organs of hearing, sight, touch, etc. in one type of organism) and across species (giraffes, alligators, and binturongs all have these sorts of systems, and these systems are different in each of these species in many ways).

At least some of these organisms also developed, somehow, consciousness, self-awareness, the ability to engage in abstract thought, use tools, and to feel emotions.

And one of these organisms, man, developed as well, somehow, the need to know of and feel a sense of purpose, of meaning, to understand why he exists at all, what he should be doing while alive, and what, if anything, happens after death. A universal religious impulse evolved -- an impulse that we now know is silly and redundant given the chronological superiority we have by having been born in the 20th century rather than, say, the 13th. This religious impulse must have once served an evolutionary purpose, but no longer does -- at least not for the Good Scientists -- i.e., scientists who engage in scientism rather than science, who see science as the only tool worth having. As to the religious, say as personified by a Protestant good ole gal, like our "Lurlene down to the Pick-n-Save," perhaps she and those like her are just not as evolved as the Good Scientists. The fact that the Lurlenes of the world will generally have many more children than the Good Scientists shouldn't be seen as evidence that goes against the idea that the evolutionary purpose of religion is no longer needed and that maybe scientism is maladaptive! We have degrees from Ivy League Schools and the Lurlenes don't. We have social prestige, and Lurlene works a cash register! While we attend wine and cheese soirees, Lurlene plays Monopoly with her family! Just remember that and our evolutionary superiority becomes evident!

And while I'm on the topic of evolution, I don't want to hear anyone in this class bring up the concept of general racial differences. We all know that race is nothing but a social construct. The fact that a population that evolved under circumstances X, Y, and Z will, over time, come to have different characteristics than a population that evolved under the very different circumstances of A, B, and C applies only to non-human animals. Somehow. If you think you see a difference between a native Ugandan and a native Swede, you are not only not being a Good Scientist, you are a ruthless hater who needs to be shut up and made to disappear from academia.

The same goes with regard to any talk about differences between men and women. In spite of all that sexual dimorphism stuff mentioned earlier, men and women are exactly the same, with the same general aptitudes and interests. Not even things like menstruation and pregnancy reveal a thing about sexual differences given that a woman can believe she is a man and therefore, in fact, BE a man, yet still menstruate and become pregnant. A person's sex gender is precisely and only whatever he they feels it is at any given moment, totally divorced from biology and the needs of an ordered society.
The only scientific difference between men and women is that men are evil oppressors, and women are good victims, where "evil" and "good" are defined by whatever Good Scientists and SJWs pull out of their collective ass.

Further, though there is no real, ontological difference between human animals and non-human animals, there is all the difference in the world when it comes to how we must think and talk about them. This will be evident not only with regard to the topic of race, but also when it comes to things like carbon footprints, overpopulation, global cooling global warming climate change, how we perceive ant hills vs. cities, etc. Though a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy, humans are bad, and non-humans are good. Somehow. Saving sea turtle eggs is good, but thinking it important to save unborn babies is bad. The more elephants the better, but humans should die off by the billions. All of the Good Scientists agree with these assertions to some degree, from Bill Nye to Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom you can recognize as Good Scientists because they're on TV.


For realz now, which one sounds more "magical" and improbable? Which one makes more sense? Which one fits Ockham's idea the best? Which is more beautiful and more psychologically fulfilling? Which is more intellectually limiting? In what possible way does Story One impede advances in science, as we're so often warned is the case? Why is one treated as the idea of idiots, of those who "hate science" and are illogical? What sort of bigotry is this?





There was nothing, and then, after the Magical Ingredient of Time, there was this.


Check here to see learn about the over a thousand scientists who "either hold a Ph.D. in a scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computer science, or one of the other natural sciences" or who are medical doctors that serve as professors of medicine, and who agree with the following statement: 'We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.'” Go explore Dr. James Tour's Youtube channel and shake your brain up:

Now, some reading this might be thinking, "But putting God into all this makes it unscientific! Teaching Story One even as a possibility can't be done in the classroom! Haven't you seen 'Inherit the Wind'? Pretty soon, we'll have toothless banjo players teaching science! Haven't you seen 'Deliverance,' either? Idiot!" But that's not true on either count. There is order in the world, there are such things as irreducibly complex systems, evolution as it pertains to origins is not a scientificaly testable assertion, etc. Those are scientific facts, and relating scientific facts is obviously not unscientific. Letting a class know that there is evidence of design says not one thing at all about the Designer (other than that He -- or She or It, if you prefer -- exists and designed, obviously). Going beyond such an assertion of fact, of a probability, is where science ends and theology begins. But before that point? Well, truly, if you can't see the difference between these statements,
you're hopelessly lost and/or radically dishonest:

Statement A:
"There are problems concerning evidence (such as the fossil record), the inability to observe, and testability with regard to the theory that all life sprang from a common, randomly occurring source. And there is evidence for design in the universe, such as irreducible complexity, sexual dimorphism, the incredible order we see, etc. But going beyond statements that posit the possibility of design is beyond the scope of science and, therefore, this class; at this point, science ends and philosophy and religion begin."


Statement B:
"Get out your Bibles, kids, and turn to Genesis!"




Dr. David Berlinski, formerly a researcher in molecular biology at Columbia University, a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France; author of works on systems analysis, the history of differential topology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics; and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Listen to more Berlinski at Youtube.


And don't go thinking that scientific achievements will dry up if people go around believing in God. History shows otherwise, and the exact opposite seems to be the case. Listen to this man talk about new discoveries that've come about precisely because scientists approached their fields with design in mind.



At this point, some reading this might be asking the standard, "But where did GOD come from, hmmmm?" as if you're scoring some grand point even though the question is more akin to snarkily asking, "But why can't a triangle have four sides?" God, by definition, is eternal and beyond the ability of science to quantify Him. God, as the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause, doesn't "come" from anywhere; He is Being Itself; that's why He's God (in the Old Testament, He profoundly refers to Himself as "I AM.") It is the physical world that is bound by physics. It is physical bodies that must obey the laws described by Newton. God, though, is Spirit.

And while I'm at it, understand this:

PREMISE: God exists and is, by definition, omnipotent, able to do anything that doesn't contradict His Divine Nature, His own goodness, and Logic.

PREMISE: IF God exists, THEN He can work outside of the laws of physics of which He is the Author (i.e., He can perform miracles).

ERGO, talking about the miraculous as impossible, and treating assertions of miraculous happenings as "proving" that the idea of God's existence is stupid, is a tautology, a fallacy.

A sample of such an argument: "Virgin births don't happen. Nowhere on earth do they happen! Can you even point to ONE and back it up with SCIENTIFIC PROOF? No, you can't! Therefore, your god is just a character in a ridiculous fairy tale! I'll stick with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, moron!" This is an irrational argument that uses its conclusion as part of the argument itself. Just stop.

Then there's this:
What you consider a mere "lack of belief" can be attributed to any insensate thing -- for ex., a booger. Your worldview amounts to being able to say, "I just believe what boogers believe!" What a genius you are. You argue as if asserting there's no God is not positively asserting anything, that the burden of proof is on the religious at all times, that the atheist has nothing to prove. But that isn't so. Your asserting that there is no God (rather than your saying you simply don't know if there is a God or not) is positively asserting that the universe and life came about as a result of chance, that there is no final arbiter of what is True, Good, or Beautiful, etc., all empirically unprovable notions. You are asserting that there is no ultimate cause, no "Actualized Actualizer," behind existence and change ("movement" -- not just in space and time, such as the rolling of a ball across a floor or the begetting of generations through time, but in terms of the characteristics of things, like the existence and ripening of a melon). God in this philosophical sense must be grappled with and not be conflated with belief in any religion's particular understanding of God or "the gods."

Finally, in addition to all that, Dr. Jordan Peterson makes an argument, based on totally Darwinist premises, that religious belief makes sense:




Footnotes for this section:

1 Re. Cosmology: As an aside, cosmology is being turned upside-down once again. A preferred direction is being detected in space -- and that direction seems to have us at the center. So maybe Tycho Brahe was right and Galileo and Copernicus were wrong. Besides, using the theory of relativity as a premise, we can use the earth, the Sun, or even poor demoted Pluto as "the center" mathematically and it all works out. Do searches on "'axis of evil' AND 'cosmology'" or "'preferred direction' AND CMB'". Some papers about this topic.:

 
Rong-Gen Cai and Zhong-Liang Tuo at the Key Laboratory of Frontiers in Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have re-examined the data from 557 supernovas throughout the Universe and recrunched the numbers.

Today, they confirm that the preferred axis is real. According to their calculations, the direction of greatest acceleration is in the constellation of Vulpecula in the Northern hemisphere. That’s consistent with other analyses and also with other evidence such as other data showing a preferred axis in the cosmic microwave background.

That will force cosmologists to an uncomfortable conclusion: the cosmological principle must be wrong.

From Phys.org:


According to the cosmological principle, there is no special place or direction in the universe when viewed on the cosmic scale. The assumption enabled Copernicus to propose that Earth was not the center of the universe and modern scientists to assume that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. Due to the cosmological principle, scientists also assume that the universe is “homogeneous” - having a uniform structure throughout - and “isotropic” - having uniform properties throughout.

But a few recent studies have found the possible existence of cosmological anisotropy: specifically, that the universe’s expansion is accelerating at a faster rate in one direction than another. In the most recent study, scientists have analyzed data from 557 Type 1a supernovae and found, in agreement with some previous studies, that the universe’s expansion seems to be accelerating faster in the direction of a small part of the northern galactic hemisphere...

...But as Cai and Tuo note in their study, the case is far from closed. In contrast with the current results, some previous analyses of Type 1a supernovae data have not found any statistically significant evidence for anisotropies. And many other data - such as that for the cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy statistics, and dark matter haloes - strongly support the assumption of homogeneity and isotropy on the cosmic scale.

Yet considering that the cosmological principle is one of the pillars of modern cosmology whose fundamental importance is difficult to exaggerate, threats to its credibility won’t be taken lightly. If the cosmological principle turns out to be wrong, it would dramatically change the way we look at the world.

From arstechnica.com:

Over the centuries, astronomers have provided increasing evidence that Earth, the Solar System, and the Milky Way don't occupy a special position in the cosmos. Not only are we not at the center of existence—much less the corrupt sinkhole surrounded by the pure crystal heavens, as in early geocentric Christian theology—the Universe has no center and no edge.

In cosmology, that's elevated to a principle. The Universe is isotropic, meaning it's (roughly) the same in every direction. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the strongest evidence for the isotropic principle: the spectrum of the light reaching Earth from every direction indicates that it was emitted by matter at almost exactly the same temperature...

...We observe the relics of recombination in the form of the CMB. The temperature of the Universe today is about 2.73 degrees above absolute zero in every part of the sky. The lack of variation makes the cosmos nearly as close to a perfect thermal body as possible. However, measurements show anisotropies—tiny fluctuations in temperature, roughly 10 millionths of a degree or less. These irregularities later gave rise to areas where mass gathered. A perfectly featureless, isotropic cosmos would have no stars, galaxies, or planets full of humans.
    
To measure the physical size of these anisotropies, researchers turn the whole-sky map of temperature fluctuations into something called a power spectrum. That's akin to the process of taking light from a galaxy and finding the component wavelengths (colors) that make it up. The power spectrum encompasses fluctuations over the whole sky down to very small variations in temperature. (For those with some higher mathematics knowledge, this process involves decomposing the temperature fluctuations in spherical harmonics.)

Smaller details in the fluctuations tell cosmologists the relative amounts of ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy. However, some of the largest fluctuations—covering one-fourth, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth of the sky—are bigger than any structure in the Universe, therefore representing temperature variations across the whole sky.
    
Those large-scale fluctuations in the power spectrum are where something weird happens. The temperature variations are both larger than expected and aligned with each other to a high degree. That's at odds with theoretical expectations: the CMB anisotropies should be randomly oriented, not aligned. In fact, the smaller-scale variations are random, which makes the deviation at larger scales that much stranger.

Kate Land and Joao Magueijo jokingly dubbed the strange alignment “the axis of evil” in a 2005 paper (freely available on the ArXiv), riffing on an infamous statement by then-US President George W. Bush. Their findings were based on data from an earlier observatory, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), but the follow-up Planck mission found similar results. There's no question that the “axis of evil” is there; cosmologists just have to figure out what to think about it.

A paper called "Preferred Axis in Cosmology" (.pdf file) begins with these words:

The foundation of modern cosmology relies on the so-called cosmological principle which states an homogeneous and isotropic distribution of matter in the universe on large scales. However, recent observations, such as the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the motion of galaxies in the universe, the polarization of quasars and the acceleration of the cosmic expansion, indicate preferred directions in the sky. If these directions have a cosmological origin, the cosmological principle would be violated, and modern cosmology should be reconsidered.

And ends with these words:

The standard ΛCDM model has a great success in explaining the observations of the CMB temperature anisotropies, as well as the galaxies distribution and motion. The standard model of cosmology is based on the assumptions: the validity of Einstein’s general relativity, and the cosmological principle. This model can explain most large-scale observations with unprecedented accuracy. However, several directional anomalies have been reported in various observations: the polarization distribution of the quasars, the velocity flow, the handedness of the spiral galaxies, the anisotropy of the cosmic acceleration, the anisotropic evolution of fine-structure constant, including anomalies in the CMB low multipoles, such as the CMB parity asymmetry. Although the confidence level for each individual anomaly is not too high, the directional alignment of all these anomalies is quite significant, which strongly suggests a common origin of these anomalies.

If these anomalies are due to cosmological effects , e.g. the alternative theory of gravity or geometry, the non-trivial topology of the universe, the anisotropic dark energy or the particular large-scale fluctuation modes, they indicate the violation of the cosmological principle. So, one should consider to build a new cosmological model to explain the large-scale data.

And then there's the fact that astronomers are finding an order to the Heavens that has a less than .1% probability of occuring by chance. From "Alignments of radio galaxies in deep radio imaging of ELAIS N1" by A. R. Taylor P. Jagannathan, found in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 459, Issue 1, 11 June 2016 (online here):

Abstract: We present a study of the distribution of radio jet position angles of radio galaxies over an area of 1 square degree in the ELAIS N1 field. ELAIS N1 was observed with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope at 612 MHz to an rms noise level of 10 ľJy and angular resolution of 6?arcsec × 5 arcsec. The image contains 65 resolved radio galaxy jets. The spatial distribution reveals a prominent alignment of jet position angles along a ‘filament’ of about 1°. We examine the possibility that the apparent alignment arises from an underlying random distribution and find that the probability of chance alignment is less than 0.1 per cent. An angular covariance analysis of the data indicates the presence of spatially coherence in position angles on scales >0$ $_{.}^{\circ}$$5. This angular scales translates to a comoving scale of >20 Mpc at a redshift of 1. The implied alignment of the spin axes of massive black holes that give rise to the radio jets suggest the presence of large-scale spatial coherence in angular momentum. Our results reinforce prior evidence for large-scale spatial alignments of quasar optical polarization position angles.
 
2 Don't even think about throwing at us Lawrence Krauss with his "A Universe from Nothing " nonsense book about invisible, expanding space bubbles. He thinks he posits a universe from nothing, but then changes the definition of "nothing" to "an approximation of nothing" which he characterizes as "a physical quantity."



Scientism, Materialism, and Other Ways of Knowing

The scientific method is just one tool among many in humanity's toolbox (one of the greatest tools, in my opinion as a lover of science). That some people seem not to know this is pretty incredible, but it's a fact that some don't -- or at least talk as if they don't. If something can't be quantified, stuck under a microscope, viewed through a telescope, etc., then it's deemed as non-existent or, at least, unimportant by some people. This view of the world is called "materialism" or "scientism," and people afflicted with it tend to think of themselves as ultra-geniuses, as superior to their supposed intellectual lessers who accept as true things that aren't scientifically quantifiable.

But quantum physics tells us that the material isn't at "the bottom" of things; consciousness is required. Listen to this mp3 about that.

The biggest problem with scientism, though, is that science can't answer questions about meaning and purpose. It might, for ex., be able to measure the things we deem to be "beautiful" and predict what sorts of things we'll put into the category of "beautiful," but it can't tell us why we deem anything as beautiful at all, or explain the meaning of "beauty."

Science can't tell us what is good or bad, either. Making moral judgments is simply not the purpose or within the purview of science. But that doesn't mean that beauty or right and wrong aren't important and don't exist.

In traditional Christian thought, while reason alone can lead us to accept the existence of God as, say, the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause, etc., reason alone cannot lead us to accept that God is Triune, that Jesus is His Son, that His mother was immaculately conceived, etc. These are matters of divine revelation, not natural knowledge. But given that God, by definition, can do the miraculous, none of the above things are illogical or unreasonable; they're simply beyond the ability of science to deal with.

Given this, you might be thinking, then how the Hell are we expected to believe in such things as the resurrection of Jesus Christ? The Shroud of Turin, the evidence of History, the early Church, the Gospels, a phenomenological approach (reasoning back to God given the nature of man), etc., aside, the answer is this: it is God Himself Who, directly or indirectly, gives us this knowledge through divine illumination, and once you know something and experience something, whether by divine illumination or from some other cause, you then know it is true. Obviously, our senses can be tricked, and we can be in error about things we think we know. But there are also things we know we know, and logical, thoughtful people are usually able to differentiate between, for ex., something they may have dreamed and something they most definitely experienced in the real world. Different types of experiences also make different sorts of impressions that affect how clearly we know them, too. For ex., you might not be able to remember what you were doing on August 9, 2001, but the odds are good that you know what you were doing on September 11 of that year. And one can know, with no hestitation and yet with no proof whatsoever, that one loves one's children, for ex. and that sort of knowledge, and the certainty of it, is different from the sort of knowing demonstrated when answering a question like, "Are you sure that Albany is the capital of New York?" Well, if you are divinely illuminated by God Himself, you know things in ways that are intense, clear, and sometimes ineffable (for the less intellectually gifted, such knowing might be even more difficult to articulate and convince others of). Those who haven't experienced such illumination simply do not know because they haven't experienced it. And the problem with some atheists is that they don't understand this basic fact about the Christian experience. Worse, they treat religion purely as an intellectual exercise, as something that is either amenable to the tools of science or which should be treated as ridiculous (albeit, some Christians are sloppy in their thinking and talking about all this sort of thing, too. Undoubtedly, most Christians, like most people in general, have IQs of ~100.).

Some Christians are mere "cultural Christians" -- self-proclaimed Christians because they were raised that way -- just as how, today, most Millennial-aged people blindly accept liberalism and materialism because that's what they've been taught to believe. But many who were raised Christian have gone through long periods of doubt and then come back to the faith after study and only received divine illumination later in life, and others are Christians because, as former agnostics, they believed that the religious impulse is important and meaningful and it affecteded them personally, have seen the effects of disbelief on people and societies, have studied, and then have been divinely illlumined by God.

When it comes to the latter two types of Christian, you're not going to argue out of his faith someone who is divinely illumined, who has experienced God and is made to know things he can't prove to be true according to the scientific method, I assure you. That person's having experienced God, and his soul having been infused with the gift of faith, obviously doesn't make what he knows a good argument for you to believe what he believes. But it does make a good argument for him to believe what he believes, and no amount of your calling him an idiot makes what he knows something he no longer knows. If I hit you across the face with no cameras around, leaving no marks, etc., you'd know damned well that I hit you across the face even though you can't prove it. No amount of someone's telling you, "but you can't PROVE you were hit across the face, so you're just talking shit!" is going to change your mind about what you damned well know to be true. This is the way it is for the mindful Christian, and if you sincerely want to know what the Christian knows, then just sincerely ask the "If-You-Are-There-God" to lead you to all Truth and see what happens. Your sincerity will show in the humility and perseverence with which you ask.

Until and unless you do so, don't go around doing the equivalent of telling a person who's been slapped across the face and knows he's been slapped across the face, that he hasn't been slapped across the face just because he can't prove it using petri dishes and test tubes. That's sorta dumb and really arrogant, isn't it?

And don't pretend that anything worth knowing is something that is necessarily scientifically quantifiable, or that we can't know anything unless it's scientifically quantifiable. Everyday experience should show you otherwise:



Know, too, that, at its core, acceptance of Christian doctrine is a matter of faith. It's not blind faith. It's not unreasonable faith. It's not any sort of faith that contradicts logic. It's an acceptance of the authority of the Church built by Christ, an acceptance of truths revealed by the Church and which we can know through the study of history, an examination of psychology, sociology, human nature, such phenomena as the Shroud of Turin, etc.

At this point, some of you might be thinking something like, "OK, but Muslims are religious, too, and they believe what they believe, too, and Mormons talk about that 'burning in the bosom' and such, so what about that?" What about that is this: the religious impulse -- the need for meaning, the desire to bind (religare) oneself to the transcendent -- is a part of human nature, an aspect of man that we Christians believe is built into him by God. Those who haven't been made aware of Christian Truth still have that need for meaning; they still have a religious impulse. Manifestations of that impulse will be shaped by their environment such that the average guy growing up in Saudi Arabia will turn to Islam, and the average guy raised in India will turn to Hinduism, etc. -- the same way that we all suffer from hunger, but folks in China might eat rice while those in Mexico eat tortillas. But this doesn't mean that all religions are of equal value any more than all foods are of equal value. And it doesn't mean that all are equally true or nonsensical, or that none is true; it's just human nature acting out in the world as it is.

But here's the thing: in traditional Christian thinking, reason is of paramount importance, and reason and the Faith can never, ever contradict each other. The religious impulse is natural and good, but that doesn't mean that all religions are good. The desire to eat is good; eating poison is not good. That some people eat things that are bad for them doesn't mean that hunger doesn't serve a purpose. And a defense of the religious impulse or of "religion" qua religion isn't a defense of the irrational; quite the opposite, and as was said earlier about (traditional) Christianity, the Faith and reason do not and can not contradict each other.

Now, some aspects of the Christian Faith are beyond reason alone, but they won't contradict it. For ex., Christ's having turned water into wine is a miracle, beyond the scope of science, an act that goes beyond the normal laws of physics. But God, being God, can do the miraculous. Therefore, there's no conflict with reason (see the "Christianity is anti-science" section above).

Islam, on the other hand, posits all sorts of unreasonable things, even a god who is capricious, who can contradict his own nature. The Muslim god can do evil, for ex., while the Christian God cannot because He is Good and can't not be Good. The Christian God cannot contradict Logic. In fact, in Christian theology, He is Logic -- the Logos, the Divine Order. (John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Logos [the Word], and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.")

Then there are the person of Muhammad, and the Person of Jesus. The former is a pedophile who'd froth at the mouth, roll around on the ground as if demon-possessed, and have "visions" that resulted in the terror-ridden religion we all know. Jesus, on the other hand, is admired even by those who aren't Christian at all. He taught a message of love, taught against hypocrisy, used beautiful parables that showed the importance of the will, etc.

There are the psychological and sociological effects of a given religion. Islam is brutal on women, is spread by the sword and has been since its inception, and one who leaves Islam is to be beheaded. Post-Temple Judaism (which is a totally different religion than the religion of the Old Testament) is a profoundly racist religion, one that sees ethnic Jews as a different species than the "goyim" who exist to serve Jews. It sees Jews as having a "divine spark" while "Gentiles" have the souls of brute beasts. It pushes a brutal circumcision rite on male babies, etc. Christianity, on the other hand, while pushing a few things that are wrongly seen as "awful" today (as in since about 5 minutes ago) -- e.g., being against gay "marriage" and abortion, etc. -- is the religion that built Western civilization, the most effective, beautiful, advanced civilization ever. Unlike Islam (and early post-Temple Judaism, by the way), in Christianity, forced conversions are totally against Church teaching (which isn't to say that forced "conversions" weren't attempted on blessedly very rare occasions -- and not on the part of clerics. Charlemagne, for ex., went through the motions of forcibly "converting" a few thousand Saxons. But his doing so was against Church teaching. Charlemagne wasn't the Pope and wasn't "the Church." This basic sort of idea should be remembered when studying History. It's beyond ridiculous that the Church is so often blamed for what some individual Christian -- or "Christian," as the case may be -- did. Unlike Islam or post-Temple Judaism, traditional Christianity has a central authority, a place where "the buck stops." What must be accepted to be Christian -- at least traditionally -- is easily determined through magisterial texts).

While Muslim women in many areas are forced to walk around wearing the equivalent of tents and can be divorced at their husband's whims, Christianity raised the dignity of women from pagan Rome's views to one in which women could own property, engage in business, couldn't be forced into marriage, didn't have to worry about being thrown out and divorced at a man's whim, weren't pressured into leaving their babies to die from exposure on rocks, enjoyed the benefits of chivalry, etc. Catholic women ran monasteries and hospitals, have churches named for them, taught mathematics at universities, led men in battle, are honored in art, etc. Mary, the Mother of God, is seen as the very greatest of all of God's creatures.

Though Muslims preserved Greek texts found in Christian areas they conquered (which texts were later re-introduced into Western Europe; they still existed in Eastern Europe without Islam), Islam is incompatible with science, as can be seen by looking at the veritably stone-age Muslim civilizations that exist in the world today. The Catholic Church, though, not only pretty much invented modern science, it values science highly (particularly astronomy). It isn't afraid at all of reason, logic, and the findings of (sound) science.

In Christianity, the two great commandments -- the commandments that encapsulate all moral thought -- are "love God, and love your neighbor." God is seen as Love itself, not as a petty tyrant as in Islam, or as an entity who can be tricked as in post-Temple Judaism.

Politically, traditional Christianity honors the right to self defense, the concept of a Just War, and the principle of subsidiarity, a very sound and human approach to human power. As shown by even the ancient writings of St. Augustine, it sees the Church and State -- the "City of God" and the "City of Man" -- as separate realms, with the former, ideally, informing but not equating to the latter, making theocracy impossible. While recognizing the virtue of piety and the reality of man's nature, which includes his desire to live among people who are like himself, the Faith itself is for everyone, no matter his race. Contra what Pope Francis -- a very bad Pope who has more in common with George Soros than Pope St. Gregory the Great -- says, the Church traditionally has a sound view of immigration, a view described by the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on "Migration" like this, "[r]estrictive measures [on immigration] are also justified on grounds of health and morals, and on the general ground that a national family has a right to say who shall join it," and She does so while also teaching against the idea that any race is more or less beloved by God or due more or less charity than another race.

Economically, the Church honors private property, free markets for wage and price-setting, encourages voluntary labor unions who organize to protect their interests, and teaches against usury -- the mechanism which, along with such tricks as fiat currencies, fractional reserve banking, and the Federal Reserve -- has allowed so much wealth and power to accumulate into the hands of so few, and ultimately allowed them to buy or have inordinate influence over the channels of our culture (the media, acedemia, politicians, etc.)

To wit, ideas have consequences, and traditional Christian thought leads to a sane and happy social order. It makes sense. The same can't be said for brutal Islam, post-Temple Judaism and its racist exploitation of non-Jews, Hinduism with its caste system, etc. Look at the condition of nations where non-traditional Christian religions or political ideologies predominate! Want to live in Iran? How about India with its Ganges corpses and lack of toilets? Maybe you prefer pagan Nazism or, worse, atheistic Communism which killed many, many more millions of people (Christians) than Nazism even dreamed of?
Note how so quickly down hill the West is falling in terms of social order the further away we get from traditional Christian thinking!

In other words, you have to look at the different religions and their effects as a whole -- i.e., in terms of:

  • their assertions of religious Truths and the evidence for and effects of those assertions;
     
  • their psychological effects -- e.g., does a given religion tend to make for suicide bombers or people who run soup kitchens? Does it lead people to feel more contentment and peace or does it cause them to become warlike (Islam) or to veritably worship their own group while exploiting out-groups (post-Temple Judaism)? Does it lead to self-examination or to seeking enemies?, etc.;
     
  • their sociological and political effects: If everyone in a given area practiced a given religion, what would the place be like? Would the arts and sciences flourish? Is liberty valued? How are women and children treated? How are the weakest among them treated? What makes for a just reason to go to war (in Islam, it's to convert by force, subjugate and tax those who don't convert, and behead those who don't go along with either. In modern Judaism -- well, they typically get others, especially the United States, to do their fighting for them, and mostly for the cause of hegemony over lands owned by other people. In traditional Christianity, wars must be purely defensive, winnable, etc.);
     
  • their relationships with reason and science;
     
  • the types of people honored in the various religions -- e.g., compare Muslim "heroes" (invaders and conquerors), the Jews' lying Simon Wiesenthal, and Christianity's Mother Cabrini, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc.;
     
  • the histories of the various religions. When doing so, be careful to sift out propaganda, of which there is much against Catholicism, and avoid making the incessantly-seen error of mistaking "King So-and-So" or "Spain" or "France" with "the Church" or "the Pope." If you read about something dastardly a Christian did, check to see how the Pope at the time responded to it. Also know something about the doctrine of papal infallibility -- what it means and does not mean;
     
  • how the different religions treat unbelievers. In Islam, they are to be subjugated, and beheaded if they refuse; in post-Temple Judaism, they are, ultimately, to practice the Noahide laws (and beheaded if they break one of those laws) and become servants of the Jews, and in the meanwhile, it is kosher to cheat and pray curses against them, etc.; in traditional Christianity, they are to be loved and taught the Truth even as Christian societies protect the common good and defend themselves against any potential pernicious influences, such as usury (for ex., read about the Spanish Inquisition)
     
  • their treatment of human weakness: In Islam, homosexuals are thrown off of rooftops, thieves have their hands chopped off, victims of rape (not the rapists!) are murdered, a daughter who has sex outside of marriage can be killed to preserve the family's honor, etc. In post-Temple Judaism, in practice, the only real sin is harming or betraying other Jews (e.g., turning them in to the police if they do wrong), and non-Jews are there to be exploited, to obey "the Noahide laws," and to be killed if they fail to uphold those laws. In Christianity, sincere contrition always -- always -- leads to forgiveness even as society acts to defend itself against human evil (e.g., a thief who is truly contrite can be forgiven by God and others and be treated with human dignity and love, but he will still be locked up to pay his debt to and defend society).

When you look at the world's religions as a whole, it's pretty obvious that (traditional!)1 Christianity stands alone as the religion that is not at all like the others.


Footnotes for this section:

1 The word "traditional" must be emphasized when talking about "Christianity" these days. Not only has Protestantism changed the popular view of "Christianity," but even the human element of the Catholic Church has undergone a revolution, having been infiltrated by enemies of the Church. Vatican II -- or at least "the spirit of Vatican II" -- has wreaked utter havoc on the Church. Read about all that here.



But -- neurology!

What a dearth of imagination it takes to smugly thrust brain scans at someone and go on about correlations between scans and behaviors, the presence of tumors and changes in personalities, and other such things, treating it all as proof that the mind is nothing but neurons connected by neurotransmitters and such. Never minding the question of which comes first (scan results or the behavior/characteristic in question), to be consistent, such a person would have to see a motherboard as all there is and all that matters if a busted CPU disallowed the running of a program or made the running of a program wonky. Stop and think about it for a minute.




Whoah, you can't judge me. Read your Bible, idiot!


Here's what the Catholic Church teaches about judging others. Clue: it doesn't at all involve refraining from making moral judgments about human actions. Cherry-picking Bible verses (a Protestant game. See the
"Christian" =/= "Protestant" section above) and using them radically out of context to attack Christianity is a deceptive practice. Stop doing it.




Hypocrite!!!!

A hypocrite is someone who pretends to be what he isn't, or pretends to believe what he doesn't; it isn't someone who has moral standards and fails to live up to them sometimes due to weakness. Catholicism teaches that we're all sinners, and has done so for 2,000 years now. This isn't new. Further, any Christian who knows the Faith knows that his being divinely illumined and on the path of salvation is in no way a matter of his own achievement; it is a gift of grace -- a gift offered to everyone. Spiritual arrogance has no place whatsoever in a Christian's life. This isn't to say that some self-proclaimed Christians aren't arrogant. But those who are so are exhibiting behaviors that aren't virtuous in the least.

Unlike Muslims who think they impress their god by blowing themselves up and taking as many people with them as possible, and unlike post-Temple Judaism whose practitioners see themselves as, in essence, possessing "sacred DNA" that makes them better than the "goyim," Christians approach God with humility and gratitude.


No educated, virtuous Christian thinks he's perfect or better than a Muslim or a Jew (even though he knows his religion is true and Islam and post-Temple Judaism are not); quite the opposite.
Traditional Christianity teaches Christians to "face their shadows," to examine their consciences, to recognize when they've screwed up, and to make amends -- including making amends to God by going to Confession (which, by the way, requires sincerity and the resolution to try to sin no more in order to be valid -- in order to "work." IOW, the old trope out there about how Catholics think they can do anything they want and then just tell a priest about it, get away with it, and keep on doing it is yet another big fat lie told about Catholicism).

For ex., catching a Christian looking at porn for illicit purposes doesn't mean you've found a hypocrite (unless he denies ever doing it or presents himself as superior to other, fellow sinners); it means you found a being who is human, who's weak, who screwed up, needs to repent, and should try not to do that again.

If you want to see some real hypocrites, talk to people who push the "life sprang randomly from a primordial soup" idea -- and, at the same time, deny that general racial or sexual differences exist. Or see what the "Antifa" people are up to -- a group that claims to be fighting "fascism" while throwing bricks and M-80s at people's heads, burning down buildings, trying to prevent the free exchange of ideas on college campuses, and totally ignore the definitionally fascistic merging of the government and the corporate world. Or cast your eyes toward those feminists who demand equality when it comes to CEO positions, but aren't clamoring to get an equal number of female trash collectors or ditch diggers, who don't want to sign up for Selective Service, don't want to pay their own way on dates, etc. Then there are the dual citizen Israeli-Westerner folks who vote for laws in Israel that uphold Israel's Jewish character, holidays, ethnicity, etc., and fight against immigration there all while voting for policies that disallow Christian nations from preserving their character, culture, and peoples, and voting to have Western lands flooded with Muslims. Or talk to a limousine liberal type who's all for unlimited immigration -- but not in his backyard and who doesn't have to live with the effects of such as "the little people" do (e.g., lowered wages, job scarcity, higher taxes to cover the increased education and health costs, low-trust heterogeneous neighborhoods, higher crime rates, etc. See, for ex., how Mark Zuckerberg, who's constantly pushing for immigration importing cheap labor for the corporate types, is suddenly all about building walls when it comes to his precious property in Hawaii).

As for me, I much prefer to be around human beings with moral standards and human weaknesses rather than human beings with no moral standards and human weakness.



Religion is the cause of all (or most) wars! It's killed more people than anything else!

Really? Which religion caused WWI? WWII? The Korean War? The war in Vietnam? It was atheistic Communism that has killed more people in the 20th century alone than were killed during all wars throughout all of History put together. Most people won't hear anything about the millions more Christians slaughtered by those possesssed of Communism (led by Jewish Bolsheviks) than Jews were killed by paganism-loving socialist Nazis, of course. I'll leave it to your imagination as to why this is so, but whatever the case, the ridiculous idea that "religion" (again, with no qualification, as if all religions are the same) is the cause of all or even most wars is Historically obtuse.

Most Westerners who go on about how "religion causes all wars" seem to have the Crusades in mind. But it wasn't "religion" that started those wars; it was a religion. It was Islam; the Crusades were purely defensive on the part of Christians.  Read about it here:  http://www.fisheaters.com/crusades.html




What's your pet sin? Or what did your parents do to you?

A thought experiment:  Imagine Christianity, but then take away its teachings about how sex belongs inside, and not outside, of marriage.

Would you still be attacking Christianity if its stance on sexual morality weren't an issue? The other moral laws -- e.g., against stealing, murder, lying, etc. -- likely make sense to you, right? And, if you're like most and are aware of History, you respect that traditional Christianity invented universities, hospitals, etc., that it cares for the poor, sick, and orphaned. You likely find the "stuff" of traditional Christianity beautiful -- the cathedrals, stained glass, statues, Gregorian chant, polyphony, sacred paintings and icons, etc. If you know anything about History, you're probably glad about how the Church raised the status of women in a huge way, too. You likely dig the Church's teachings against slavery and racism,1 and probably even find the Person of Jesus Christ to be a sympathetic character.

My sense is that most people who constantly attack Christianity would find another hobby if all the "sex stuff" weren't an issue.

But what if traditional Christianity's teachings about sexual morality are right? I challenge all here to read this short but powerful online book, "The Garbage Generation." Seriously, read it and think about it long and hard. And watch the video on the introduction page as well. Isn't it clear that Pope Paul VI's warning about artificial contraception, made in the encyclical Humane Vitae was absolutely true?:

[A] man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Look around! See how the pressure on women these days isn't to look nice, or even beautiful, but to look "hot." Notice how her sexiness -- which to most men, is gone by the the time a woman reaches the age of around 30 to 35 -- is treated as the sine qua non of a woman's value. See how pressured women are to look and be as slutty as possible.

Look at the effects of our "hook-up culture" -- STDs, broken hearts, shame, incredible loneliness, millions and millions of children raised with no fathers, abortion. Hook-up culture coupled with outrageously unfair divorce and custody laws have given us a generation of men who are saying HELL NO to marriage because they know that, for them, there's likely nothing to be gained and everything to lose by getting married now. For a man, marriage now means handing over his balls to a woman and just hoping she doesn't use our unjust laws to crush them by taking his kids, house, car, and half of his paycheck for the next 20 years, thereby making sure he has to make all of the sacrifices of marriage while getting none of the benefits of marriage after he's been dumped -- all while the exact opposite is the case for women: after dumping a guy, women still get the benefits of marriage (material support from the man, the house, car, kids, etc.), while having to make none of the sacrifices of marriage. And, besides, women are "giving out the milk for free" thanks to the "sexual revolution," so why should a man make the gamble of marrying at all? And if a pregnant woman doesn't want to name an individual man as the biological father walking wallet, the welfare state steps in and acts as "Daddy."





Those of the feminist persuasion might be thinking that men don't care about marriage and children anyway, but if that's what you're thinking, you don't know men at ALL. Most men want what most women want: to have a trustworthy, sane spouse to love and grow old with, and to have children and grand-children. Even from a purely evolutionary perspective, having children is pretty much our biological purpose. The MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) guys aren't going that route for kicks, but for survival given the reality of our divorce and custody laws, and modern female fickleness and selfishness -- a selfishness that is taught to Western women as the ideal.

I highly encourage you to read a book written by Nora Vincent, a lesbian who went "undercover" as a man to learn what she could about what men are actually like. The book is called "Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man", and it's not only fascinating, it's heartbreaking. So many women, led by the man-hating feminists who dominate our cultural institutions, really have no idea at all about what men are like, how truly noble most of them are, how generous most are, how much they suffer, how they value loyalty in ways that most women can't even imagine, what sorts of intense pressures they have on them because they are men and how hard it is for them to deal with those pressures, just how nasty and bitchy so many women are when dealing with men, etc. At the end of the interview below, when asked if she thinks women understand men, Nora replied with, "Not at all. No clue." And when asked if she likes being a woman, she said she likes it even more after her experiment because being a woman brings more privilege.





Between the freely available sex and the insane divorce/custody/support laws mixed with the welfare state, men are being shoved out of family life altogether. Single women are having kids with no men around, a phenomenon that, as the above linked-to book, The Garbage Generation, will tell you, is the root cause of so many of our social problems. If that isn't the height of selfishness -- to consciously choose to get pregnant with babies who'll have no father -- then what is?

Who won the sexual revolution? Not kids. Not women. Not men. No one did. The Church was right. And we now have a few generations of people who think of sex as having nothing to do with procreation, which is, in reality, its very biological purpose! Sex, to them, has nothing to do with children and raising families; it's a hobby, pretty much nothing but a dance with a happy ending (at least for the men involved; most women don't have orgasms from casual hook-ups).

Even masturbation and porn -- typically thought of as having no moral, psychological, or social consequences -- are a lot bigger deals than most people think. Really think about this stuff: A Science-based Case for Ending the Porn Epidemic. See also Your Brain on Porn and No Fap.
 





Lust is a pretty all-consuming passion, and when it's fueled by an endless supply of porn and a culture that has tossed aside traditional Christian morality, it's a problem that snowballs. If a man's life is such that he's spending hours a day searching for porn, if he is effectively impotent because he's so desensitized from it all that a real woman doesn't measure up and can't get him excited, if his mind is so "pornified" that no woman would want to marry him and have to sexually compete with the thousands of digital women in his head, then that man has effectively removed himself from the gene pool and has made himself genetically worthless and ineffective in terms of duties and obligations. That's exactly what the enemies of Western civilization want: a bunch of politically and culturally useless eunuchs who are so busy downloading airbrushed images of digital women that they can't be bothered to build families, work for the common Good, and defend their people. The enemies of Western civilization produce porn and package it as a harmless expression of "freedom," pushing sexual libertinism, but in reality, it is mental slavery, one large piece of the puzzle that results in the death of the family, and, therefore, ultimately, the destruction of Western civilization. Watch this video and think about it:




The Church was and is right about sex and its rightful place in marriage. Period, the end (and, by the way, doing it the right way by keeping it in marriage makes for the best sex. According to studies, Catholics have the best sex of all).

Aside from not wanting to give up rutting like bonobos -- which for some strange reason, are always being thrown in our face as creatures exemplifying how humans ought to live in spite of the fact that they eat shit and cannibalize each other -- even their own babies -- the other phenomenon that has some people railing against the Church is Daddy issues. God is Father, Pat hates his/her earthly Dad (or never had one to begin with), and, so, Pat hates God. Or maybe you, as an atheist, just haven't reconciled your Oedipal issues and want to "kill Daddy" so you can be the boss. Maybe, instead of the Christian's embrace of religion being a matter of mere wish-fulfilment, it's the atheist's refusal to believe that is a result of psychological projection and desire.

Donna Steichen, in her book "Ungodly Rage," talks about radical feminsts who are self-proclaimed Catholics -- i.e., people who claim to be Catholic, but who don't agree with what the Church teaches and want to change pretty much everything about Her2 instead of their moving on down the street to the Episcopalian joint that has everything they want. She discovered one big commonality: most had miserable childhoods, often marked by fatherlessness and/or sex abuse.3 Instead of dealing with it, they direct their rage at another target. Want to have some "fun"? Read what the feminist Kate Millet's sister has to say about what drove her sibling. It's typical for feminists. As a group, they're miserable people who want to spread their misery around.

To paraphrase Rick James, displacement's a helluva drug. So is projection. My challenge to you, if you're a Church-hater, is this: check yourself. Figure out what's really bugging you, face it, and deal with it. Don't blame God for your disappointment with Dad.

Finally, remember the atheist accusation that started this page -- that Christians only believe because they want to? Maybe atheists don't believe because they don't want to. Maybe they just want to be "free" to fuck anyone at any time and anywhere, indulge in hedonism, and act out their rage against Daddy (Antifa anyone?).


Footnotes for this section:

Anti-Slavery and Racism Encyclicals:

Pope Eugene IV, 1431-1447 Sicut Dudum
Pope Paul III, 1534-1549 - Sublimus Dei
Pope Gregory XVI, 1831-1846 In Supremo Apostolatus
Pope Leo XIII, 1878-1903  In Plurimus
Pope St. Pius X, 1903-1914 Lacrimabili Statu
Pope Pius XI, 1922-1939  Mit Brennender Sorge 

2 Catholics refer to the Church as "She" because the Church is seen as "the Bride of Christ." The Church is a Platonic Idea, one with an earthly manifestation. "The Church" Herself is one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic" (the "four marks of the Church"). She is unblemished, without error. Her human element, on the other hand, is imperfect, filled with people -- including priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and, throughout History, Popes -- who can do some pretty wretched things. The miracle about it all is this:  throughout the Church's 2,000 year History, no Pope has ever presented something as a teaching that must be held by all Catholics everywhere anything that contradicts other such teaching. Even a Pope like Pope Francis, a liberal, politically ignorant man who's causing a lot of damage to the human element of the Church, has not presented as dogma anything that mars the Church's record of pure teaching. If you want to know what the Church teaches, don't turn to the New York Times, habit-less religious sisters who march for feminism, priests who push for incessant change, etc.; look to the Catechisms and Encyclicals, and learn how to recognize teaching that is presented as dogma or as teaching that must be held by all Catholics. Contrary to what liberal-minded types want the world to believe -- including liberal types who are self-proclaimed Catholics -- some mindless uttering of Pope Francis, made during an interview on an airplane, does not "Church teaching" make. If a Pope says he prefers Frosted Flakes to Wheat Chex, no Catholic is bound to prefer to eat Frosted Flakes. Further, Popes can sin. All of them have, in fact; they're human. The first Pope, Pope St. Peter -- the Simon Peter of the Gospels -- even denied Christ three times. And some Popes sinned a lot, were simply not good Christians. See, for example, Pope Alexander VI. But even the most sinful Popes have not presented error as dogma. Christ protects His Church, even in spite of some seriously bad, weak, not-too-bright, and/or outrageously sinful Popes (and know that, along with some bad Popes, we've been blessed with truly wonderful ones -- many more great or good Popes than bad ones). That Christian doctrine has been preserved by the Church for two millennia in spite of all that is indicative of something wonderful.

3 Single motherhood and the sexual abuse of children go hand-in-hand. From Jeremy Summut's "The New Silence: Family Breakdown and Child Sexual Abuse" (pdf):

The 2010 US Fourth National Incidence Study of Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4) found that compared to peers in two biological parent married families, children who lived with a single parent with no cohabiting partner were five times more likely to be sexually abused; children who lived in a step-family (with married biological and non-biological parents) were eight to nine times more likely to be sexually abused; and children who lived with a single parent with a partner in the home were 20 times more likely to be sexually abused.

Step- and single-parent families accounted for only one-third (33%) of all children in the United States but accounted for more than two-thirds (66.8%) of all children who were sexually abused. The over-representation of 'broken' families implies that if all children in the United States lived with both married biological parents, the rate of child sexual abuse could be halved at least.




But there's evil in the world!

People who say that because there's evil in the world, God either doesn't exist or else He's a tyrant clearly haven't thought things through. Read here about the Christian view of theodicy, the "problem of evil."





Christianity is nonsense because Spanish Inquisition


If you're typical, almost everything you think you know about the Spanish Inquisition is wrong, wrong, wrong. See this page -- and read it with some sense of History and respect for the intelligence and integrity of those who were born long ago. If you read about History thinking that anything less than accepting abortion, thinking gay "marriage" is good, asserting that there are 59 "genders," pushing the idea that there's no biological basis for traditional sex roles, etc. is stupid -- well, just forget reading about History altogether and cut to the chase by telling yourself, "Everyone born before I entered into the world was an evil 'fascist'" and be done with it: 




Christianity is nonsense because priests are pedophiles

Did you know that pedophilia is not typically the problem when it came to clerical sex abuse? Wouldn't know it after hearing the late-night talk show hosts and stand-up comedians with their pedophile priest jokes, would you, though? That said, there is most definitely a problem of clerical sexual abuse in the Church, but it's not a problem of pedophilia; it's a problem of homosexual ephebophila and hebephilia, that is, the sexual abuse of physically sexually mature teenaged boys. And it's caused by precisely those same men who try to change Church teaching, condone what the Church doesn't condone (acting on homosexual desires, divorce, contraception, etc.). In other words, the problem exists in direct contradiction to Catholic teaching, unlike the Muslim rape problem, which is directly condoned by the Quran. Read about it all here:  




Why doesn't the Vatican sell off everything and feed the poor?!?


Here's why:  http://www.fisheaters.com/vaticanwealth.html



 
Strawman Christianity: Thanks, Hollywood! Thanks, Televangelists!

I was once watching the remake of the totally creepy movie "Coma." In this movie -- actually a little mini-series -- is a hugely evil institution that keeps human beings alive and in comas so their organs can be harvested and medical experiments can be done on them. In one scene, the directress of this institution -- an institution that stands against everything the Catholic Church teaches -- was shown praying the Rosary. Truly surreal. What they did was the cinematic equivalent of making a movie about the life of Mr. Rogers -- you know, the PBS show guy -- and randomly throwing in a scene of him rolling around in bed with 5 hookers after shooting up some cocaine and booty-dancing to Cardi B. Most people would be wondering, "where'd that come from?! WTF?" But that scene in the Coma remake is typical for Hollywood fare.

That is how the powers that be, the enemies of Western civilization, do it. They use film, TV, music, and other forms of art to portray the Church in ways that are not only just innacurate, but so hideously innacurate and over the top that it's almost shocking. They'll do it in very insidious ways -- e.g., having a villain wear a Crucifix for no understandable reason whatsoever, or mentioning, as a totally irrelevant aside, that the serial killer in the movie used to be an altar boy.



The Bad Guy in "Mystic River" holds his hand in a very unnatural position just so you can see his ring with the Cross on it. You'll see in a later scene that he has a necklace to match. Look for this sort of thing; you'll see it all the time.


Christians are depicted as being stupid, hypocritical, puritanical, tight-assed, superficial, judgmental, boring, uncreative, uncool, cheesy morons with no aesthetic sense. Many are portrayed as completely insane (the mothers in "Carrie" or "Psycho") or as sociopaths (the serial killer in "Se7en"). Priests are invariably shown to be alcoholics, womanizers, or pedophiles. And every year at Christmas and Easter come the documentaries on the History, National Geographic, or PBS channels that attempt to show how "ridiculous" Christianity's religious claims are (watch for it! You will see it!)

This sort of thing is incessant. It's a given. Every minimally alert Christian knows that if he's watching a movie or TV show made after the mid-1960s and a Christian character shows up, that character will almost undoubtedly be completely unlikeable and deserving of any bad thing that happens to him. The only exception is the rare, kindly "nun" (actually a religious sister, but Hollywood doesn't know the difference) -- the type who doesn't believe what the Church teaches, preferring to attend feminist rallies instead (she, of course, wears a habit even though she's the exact type of religious sister who wouldn't dream of it in real life). Gone are the days of "The Bells of St. Mary's," "Angels with Dirty Faces" or "Meet John Doe," that's for sure.

Meanwhile, of course, people of other religions, especially Jews, are portrayed as awesome, brilliant, kind, exotic, cool, etc. The Jewish family is invariably shown either around a table engaging in intellectual conversation coupled with Italian-esque emotionalism and liveliness -- or being rounded up for Dachau -- by some Nazi wearing a Crucifix, of course. Hey, by the way, want to know who voted for Hitler in Germany? Here are two maps. The first shows where the Catholics lived in Germany; the second shows who voted for Hitler:


Catholic areas shown in black



Hitler voters shown in black

Wouldn't have guessed that if you bought what the ADL is selling, would you?

Anyway, back to the story about how the media constantly attack the Church: Ever wonder why Hollywood does this? Ever wonder to what degree your perceptions of Christianity are flavored by how the media mangle its image?

I absolutely grant that a relatively small percentage of ephebophile (not pedophile) priests have damaged Christianity's reputation (way out of proportion to the actual numbers. See "Christianity is nonsense because priests are pedophiles" above), as have Bishops who did not deal wisely at all with the problem (which most certainly did exist and, sadly, thanks to Pope Francis's undoing of Pope Benedict XVI's work, still exists).

And there are some Christians who are not that bright. Of that there is no doubt; I know a number of them (along with many Christians who are truly -- literally -- geniuses. And I also know a lot of atheists who accept the politicaly-enforced modern dogmas and who are idiots. And I know many liberal professional types who push those dogmas for a living and are idiots. In all this, it's smart to not mistake raw intelligence for wisdom, sanity, common sense, or level-headedness. At all.).

And then there's the problem that certain Protestant sects do a ton of damage in the U.S. with their bad theology and absurd televangelists.

But Protestantism isn't a synonym for Christianity (see
"Christian" =/= "Protestant" ). Protestant sects have been around for 500 years, with many of them being not much older than your toothbrush; Christianity has been around for 2,000 years, and is rooted in the Old Testament, which is thousands of years older yet. But for many Americans, when they hear the word "Christian," the likes of this stuff come to mind:





Why? Because that sort of madness and Hollywood's lying bullshit are typically all they "know" about "Christianity." And for those who were raised Protestant and left it behind, finding it wanting, all they typically know about "Christianity" is whatever their preacher-man said about it, a man whose theology isn't any older than 500 years at most and, in the U.S., likely included dispensationalist nonsense, the inhumane "Prosperity Gospel" heresy which is the Beatitudes turned inside-out, etc., etc.

Both types need to learn some History and expand their awareness. (If you're Protestant, see this page for some rebuttals to some basic Protestant assertions)

The Catholic League issues yearly reports about how anti-Catholicism is manifest. Check them out. And as you read, ask yourself why Judaism isn't treated in this way. Why do the powers that be go way out of their way to deny the obvious by calling Islam a "religion of peace" constantly bash Catholicism?:


2015 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2014 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2013 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2012 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2011 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2010 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2009 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2008 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2007 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2006 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2005 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2004 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2003 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2002 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2001 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
2000 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
1999 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
1998 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
1997 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
1996 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
1995 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM
1994 REPORT ON ANTI-CATHOLICISM



A challenge to all atheists and agnostics

For real now: read through all the above and question yourself. Then watch the following videos:














A book I highly recommend:


"The Gentle Traditionalist,"
by Roger Buck

Further reading: