Why I Don't Fret Much About Atheists

If you're already a fan of Bad Catholic, you'll know he delights in making atheists' heads explode.  If you read my last post about his new organization, 1Flesh, you know they're taking on the task of showing the world that Humanae Vitae was right.

The timing couldn't be better.  With the hullabaloo over Obamacare and the HHS mandate, the Fortnight for Freedom vs. the so-called War on Women, people are hungry for answers on what exactly the Church teaches on contraception, why, and what reasonable arguments are there on the subject.  It's no surprise, then, that 1Flesh has gone viral.  Just a few days into the official launch, the site's had so many hits, they're sprawling for a server big enough to handle it.  Their Facebook page, as of this writing, four days into its announcement, has over 2300 likes.  The world is listening.

Needless to say, the world, the flesh, and the devil aren't going to take this lying down.  Haters gonna hate.


In fact, they've already started.

You've probably been expecting this.  In fact, some small part of you has probably been kinda hoping for it.  Come on.  You can admit it.  Some small part of me wanted it, too.  I think it's kind of hard-wired in us, sometimes, to want to ride forth into battle for Truth, Justice, and the Latin Rite.

VOTR Bonus Points if you've seen this movie!

On the whole, though, I'm not really big on arguing with atheists.  With some exceptions, I see no point in it, other than the sheer joy of battle, which is risky to your spiritual health.  As St. Escriva said, it's not wise to waste time throwing stones at the dogs who bark at you along your way.  Oh, the Gentiles are raging again?  Ho-hum.  Been there.  Done that.  It's the same old song and dance (cue Aerosmith).  It amounts to, "Come down, and we will believe!" (cf. Mark 15: 32)


And that's just it, isn't it?  The whole of our faith, its single most important claim, is that Jesus Christ literally, physically rose from the dead one Sunday morning in A.D. 33.  That is the hope in which we are called.  For this hope, we do things that otherwise would seem counter-productive, if not downright masochistic.  We accept and bear our crosses and trials with patience, bless those who curse us, do good to our persecutors, return good for evil, forgive injuries and ask pardon for our own, always putting our own self-interest last.  At least, we're supposed to.  If you don't believe in the hope of a resurrection - what unbelievers call the "pie in the sky" - why wouldn't you baulk at such moral teachings?  St. Paul saw this clearly:

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.  Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.  If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied (1 Cor. 15: 16-19). 

Either God exists, revealed to us His will through the Scriptures and a teaching Church, and will come to judge the living and the dead unto eternal reward or punishment,

-OR-

Christianity is by far the single greatest crime against humanity ever conceived, and must be destroyed at all costs.  It logically follows.  Debate in these cases, then, comes down to first premises.  You've got to be far more skilled than I to get anywhere in situations like that.

So I cut the honest atheist of good will a lot of slack.  As I've said elsewhere in these pages, faith is a gift.  We can't achieve belief on our own.  And this is why we leave the judging of people up to God.  We can discern the objective matter of a deed, but only God knows the extent of anyone's culpability.  Some of the atheists who hate us because some of us first hated them.  You will usually do more harm than good to a soul by telling him he's going to hell.  Most people today are already in hell.  If you want to evangelize people, start by getting them to admit that, then show them the Way out.

That's for the "honest" atheists, mind you.

There is, of course, another species of atheist.

These are the ones you see and hear about the most.  I suspect they're a great, loud-mouthed minority, like planes that crash, or self-styled pro-lifers who think we can show killing babies is wrong by blowing up buildings and shooting doctors.  A lot of outsiders think most of us are like that.  Let's not make the same mistake about others.

For a small minority, though, these folks sure do get around.  I've not had any here yet, but the blog is young.  (Heck, I don't even get spam yet.)  I don't argue with this type, because they're not interested in debate.  They don't want to improve their understanding, nor do they wish to enlighten others.  They just want to pick a fight.  

It's Envy incarnate:  people who can't stand anybody else being happy, and feel they have a right and/or duty to "bring them down a peg or two."

Traditional catechetics teaches that Envy of Another's Spiritual Good is a subspecies of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.  Such sins are all but unforgivable, for it is hard to repent when you reflexively sneer at Mercy itself.  Appeals to reason cannot prevail here.  Even prayer can be doubtful.

There is a sin which is mortal;  I do not say that one is to pray for that (1John 5: 16).

Such people may not believe in God, but they serve a god.  The god who is always most powerful when his existence is denied.

The Simple Faith of Satan, Part 3: WE ARE CHURCH! YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED! RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!

In the last part of this series, we discussed some of the confusion that arose in the wake of Vatican II.  What the Church had intended merely as an upgrade, many people interpreted as an all-out reboot:

Which may lead many of the faithful to ask,

WHO IS THE CHURCH?

(AND WHO ARE THE BRAIN POLICE?)

It's not the first time we've had an identity crisis in the Church.  The first one came to a head about 1800 years ago, with the Arian Controversy.  In those days the question wasn't so much who the Church was, as who Jesus Christ himself was.  Finding and formulating the right answer took over a hundred years and four ecumenical councils.  Bishops with armies fought it out over this.  The result was the doctrinal definition that most (though not all) Christian denominations today accept:

That is to say, Our Lord Jesus Christ has two separate, distinct, and complete natures (one human, one divine), but is nonetheless one Divine Person.

Now, that's what we call a mystery, and not in the Sherlock Holmes sense.

The whole two natures thing is a difficult balancing act, and as a result, it's easy to focus on one to the exclusion of the other.  Thus, the pre-conciliar Church tended to stress Christ's Divinity to the exclusion of His Humanity, the clergy over the laity (remember when we talked about Clericalism last time), subsidiarity over solidarity, and souls as individuals rather than as part of the Church as a whole.

Vatican II set out to correct this imbalance, but many in the Church, particularly those in positions of power,  wound up overcompensating.  Salvation became a collective affair,  spirituality became human sentiment, almsgiving became social work, and instead of having the Gospel preached to them, the poor got something closer to the Communist Manifesto.  And our religious went from looking like this:

 . . .to looking more like these folks:

As a matter of fact, I have a lot more respect for today's Pagans, Wiccans, etc. who are at least honest enough to call themselves what they are than people who call themselves Catholic and subvert the definition of the, to the point of making it mean all but its opposite.

Case in point.  Fedora tip to Catholics Against Catholics for Choice for this .

Hence, for example, the current difficulties with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a "subsidiary" of what Father Z. calls the Magisterium of Nuns, one of the myriad heads of the Hydra of dissent (remember, Antichrist has seven heads).  This is not to let renegade bishops, priests, and monks off the hook. (WTF? Time was, you couldn't get Germans to stop following orders.  I'm thinking it's that overcompensation thing again.)  They're scandalized by the suggestion that Catholic communities, dioceses, and theologians should be, you know, Catholic Catholic, as opposed to their own inferior brand.  Naturally, this doesn't make a lot of sense.  LarryD at Acts of the Apostasy (a refugee from my home diocese) imagines how it'd play out in the real world.  But reality's never been these folks' trip.

Dr. John Zmirak described this re-branding phenomenon in terms of the meme, "All Your Church Are Belong To Us."  I like to think of it more in terms of the Borg. (Definition here for the uninitiated.)  The individual means nothing; you're part of the collective, whether you want it or not.  Just look at their hymns.  Mention "Soul of my Savior," or "O, Lord, I Am Not Worthy," and they'll react like vampires in sunlight.  Those hymns are all but banned.  Today it's all about US.  We Celebrate; We Remember; We Are Companions on the Journey; We, We, We, We, All the Way Home.

Your parish has been assimilated.  Resistance is futile.

And since we're all the Church, and we're all equal before God, nobody else can tell us what to believe . . .

 . . .or how to behave . . .

 . . .and we can redefine the faith to suit our personal needs, because it's all about WE.

One of the biggest re-definition battles seems to be in regard to the Church herself.  We often use the term, perhaps somewhat unfairly, as interchangeable with the hierarchical clergy.  Defined in the broadest meaningful sense, the Church is all of us, the baptized, "the whole universal community of believers" (CCC, Paragraph 752).  We are all a part of the Mystical Body of Christ.  This distinction matters because there are still many laity in the church today who bear the scars of high-handed Clericalism in the past.  After all, as St. Paul tells the Corinthians, the eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." (1Cor. 12: 23)  The clergy, therefore, cannot say to the laity, "We have no need of you."

On the other hand . . .

He also says, if the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body.  And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. (1Cor. 12: 15-16)

So, the next time you hear somebody say, "The Church is not the hierarchy," or "We're all the Church," you'll know you're being fed a partial truth to mask the taste of a bitter lie.  Yes, the Church is more than her hierarchy - much more - just as an army is more than its officer corps.  But it's the officers who call the shots.  Furthermore, impersonating an officer is a crime, and attempting to run things when you're not an officer is mutiny.

What's that?  You say the Church isn't an army?  Guess again!  Haven't you ever heard of . . .

What do you think all those Old Testament wars were there to teach us about.  It's spiritual warfare.  The world is the theater, and our enemy is the devil.  You know, the first one to say, "I will not serve?"

Fortunately, their days are numbered.  If the dissenters today are louder and angrier than they've been since the '70s, then like the devil in Revelation 12: 12, it's because they know their time is short.  There's a new generation of Spiritual Warriors out there.  They went through basic training with Blessed John Paul II, and now they're getting AIT with our current CINCEARTH, Benedict XVI, the Pope of Catholic Identity.

 . . .while the average member of the LCWR is 73.

And while they're having their little Sabbat conferences where they discuss “moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus . . .” 

they fail to notice that the real Spirit of Vatican II is finally standing up.  And Jesus and His Church are already moving beyond them.

I think I've said my piece on this for a while, but I'll keep monitoring the situation, and we'll do Parts 4, 5, and 6 as needed.  In this case, the resistance is far from futile.

Drawing Down the Lunatics

I've heard my share of Christian witness, some of it quite interesting, and/or deeply moving.  One of the things that irks me, though, is the unfortunate tendency of the born-again to utter the hapless phrase:  " . . .and then I found Jesus!"

Always, I find myself thinking the same thing:

Faith, Hope, and Charity are what we call the Theological Virtues, because not only do they point us toward God, but they also proceed from Him.  Contrary to popular belief, it's not about the quest of Man for God; it's the quest of God for Man.  What's the first question God asks in the Bible?  "Where are you?" (Genesis 3: 9)  God always makes the first move.  This is why Jesus says, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." (John 6: 44)  [BTW, you'll notice I finally got off my lazy duff and got out my RSV-CE for citations.  I haven't banished the Douay, but this one's a bit less Shakespearean and a bit more ecumenical.]

There's a brilliant post on this today from Bad Catholic.  Check ye it!

We can't build our own stairway to heaven.  Play your old Zeppelin albums backward all you like; you'll only succeed in trashing your needle (ask your parents, if you don't get the references here).

You'll never convince some people, though.  The Gospel of Self-Help is a business too big to fail, it seems.  Even now, rest assured, an ex-Amway salesman from Hoboken has found the astonishingly simple answer that's eluded all the great minds since the dawn of civilization.  As we speak, he's in the basement, making an infomercial to promote his tapes, promising you instant salvation, on your own terms, in the comfort of your own home, by tapping the latent Answers Within YOU!

 . . .which is unfortunate, because analog tapes are obsolete and have gone the way of the dinosaurs.  So should the notion that you can make yourself happy, good-looking, and successful just by telling yourself that you are.  In the end, you climb toward Heaven, not to get with God, but to be God.  And we know where that ends, don't we?

Yep, back in our last post, with good old Phaëton, taking the sun out for a spin.