Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005 A curious insight Lawrence Auster makes a fascinating point about the Second Vatican Council, that a poisonous philsophy crept into its description of humanity which was fully adopted by John Paul II. He quotes Gaudium et Spes and discusses its buried meaning, he writes, ". . . the understanding that the advent of Jesus Christ had permanently altered human nature. All men were now linked with Christ, regardless of whether they followed him or not." "Now every person was Christ-imbued, simply by virtue of being human." The effect of this is manifested in the view of the Church that "Man, secular man, is both god-like and oppressed, and it is the mission of the Church to serve and protect him." Perhaps this helps to explain my own distaste at Sunday Mass in the various prayers which are devoted to making the poor unpoor. The underlying assumption being that we must make the poor prosperous before we can expect them to repent of their sins and become Christian. In fact that we have to solve every social ill before we ask anyone to devote their lives to Jesus. That it is social ills themselves that prevent people from coming to Christ. I often hear about our "preferential option for the poor" as if that means something great and momentous. And we must pray for world peace as if human nature is about to change if only we will it strongly enough (the fallen world will miraculously become unfallen if we only try harder to make it so, and this can be done without reference to Jesus but to better social engineering by sincere people). I have to agree with Lawrence in a number of his posts that John Paul II did not seem to insist that Jesus was essential to salvation when promotng ecumenism; that his later globetrotting seemed more for the sake of his popularity and pleasure than in evangelizing the nominal Christian and the lost and searching. I felt his preaching reflected cant and spiritual boilerplate and I never felt that John Paul would have understood me personally if he'd had the chance. posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:59 PM | Tuesday, April 05, 2005 It never ends Chutzpah, that is. Nancy Pelosi is going to Rome for the funeral (along with Sen.s Kerry and Kennedy). Catholics, of course (if you can call them that). Do you think they will spend one second wondering if they could be wrong about abortion or a multitude of other things which scandalize the Church? No, that second shall not be spent in introspection, repentance, or simple human feeling for the moment -- death of a man and confrontation with eternity. You want to think that even the basest of politicians have an inkling of grace, sincerity, and fellowship with reality, but it's hard to imagine in some cases, isn't it? "The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God." I don't have the sense that the above mentioned people have much fear of God. They don't strike me as people with contrite and broken hearts. (Whereas I do believe that Bush is such a soul. A man who discovered what a vile being he was and sought salvation and redemption.) posted by Mark Butterworth | 11:21 PM | Physics 4 U One of the follies of 20th century astronomy and physics was a belief that the solar system was created from an accretion disk of matter left over from previous solar explosions which aggregated into planets over time as the sun formed. But more recent theories point to a clear and more obvious notion that planets are formed by fission. That is, they are spit out of the sun at various intervals. (In fact the distnace between planets suggest a clear scale of time by strangely uniform progression of distance.) Evidence of fission is presented in recent discoveries of planets around nearer stars. The planets are usually huge gas giants (bigger than Jupiter), and so near to their suns to be incredible if it was an accretion disk formed by gravity (since the giant sun's gravity should have sucked all the nearer matter into itself). Here is an article on a more recent discovery that may be disputed due to the methods of gathering data. Some theorists claim that the Moon is a product of fission from the Earth, and the Pacific Ocean basin is a proof and artifact of that; and the resulting hail of meteors is something we continue to suffer from (the Moon showing the effects much more). I urge thoughtful people to keep an open mind about the universe and how it operates. We are finally beginning to get more and more evidence that contrary and divergent theorists may be closer to the truth than so many hidebound followers of academic fashion. Aside. Too many 20th century theorists believed that nature could not be represented logically in terms of image or idea. This was a gross fallucy -- the idea that reason made no objective sense. If you cannot rationally imagine reality from the macro to the micro, you cannot really know it. All that is, except God, can be imagined, conceptualized, and drawn into a shape. Mathematics is not the only language of physics. Logic and image are equally useful, and if they fail, then physics has failed to be true. posted by Mark Butterworth | 10:36 PM | Courage in Canada means misery From Kathy Shaidle's blog I got this link to a Dr. Kempling who addressed a UN commission on human rights. The litany of abuses against people of conscience is chilling and more so when you come to learn of this guidance counselor's punishment by the state. This is soviet/fascist style repression that is no exaggeration or joke. The kind of aparatchiks who are enforcing these vile rules smack of little Hitlers of the left whose contempt for reason, honor, and decency simply boggles the mind. Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." Graffitti on the wall in the movie, "O Lucky Man" said, "Revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals." Well, you can see that revolution and the drug addled taking place in Canada these days. I have seen it in my own city at school board meetings, at state elections, at the city council, and in the administration of schools -- people who know so much better than the people how everything ought to be ordered and don't mind if they do. My soul enflames with rage and recoils in horror at these demented tin gods, their overarching egotism, and invincible regard for their own infallibility. posted by Mark Butterworth | 9:55 PM | The stuff that matters A new CT scan from Phillips. It is a remarkable jump in medical tech. I can't imagine what the world might be like when my daughter is fifty (if life progresses in a normal way without Armageddon or something). posted by Mark Butterworth | 9:40 PM | The Pope is dead. Long live the pope! A number of panegyrics written for the late Pope John Paul II have been referring to him as “the Great”, and fully expect him to be sainted by the Church in the future. Yet, when I look at the record of this pope over the 27 years he headed the Church, I have to wonder about his achievements. Exactly what was it that John Paul II is being given credit for? Along with Reagan and Thatcher, he is credited with helping to bring down Communism in Europe. He can be said to have ended “liberation theology” as it was being promulgated by Marxist priests in South America and elsewhere. Also attributed to him is a powerful reaffirmation of Church teachings on life and sexual issues, and a braking effect upon the permissive liberalism taking place in the West regarding liturgy, texts, and pastoral practices. Taken all in all, much of what he has been acclaimed for was accomplished early on in his papacy. Can anyone think of any other particular achievements apart from the extensive globetrotting in the last 15 or 20 years? There are a few encyclicals: the outstanding Gospel of Life and works regarding the Theology of the Body come to mind; but we should also keep in mind that popes aren’t expected to do a great deal since their job is primarily that of preserving and maintaining. Nevertheless, there appear to be many opportunities which have been missed. An effective reform of the clergy to curb sexual abuses and destroying the system of protecting priests along with expulsion of homosexuals did not happen. Accountability of the clergy not just to bishops but to parishioners did not occur either, and leaves priests in position to embezzle, misuse funds, and abuse their power. The lack of vibrant ministries in the parishes and dioceses to serve the laity and evangelize the world must be laid at the head of the church, also. Beauty or lack of concern for it in art, music, architecture, and worship was given short shrift. The Church also became a rubber stamp for annulment of marriages. Whether this is good or bad, I can’t say, but there seemed to be no clear policy. Nor were the many Catholic schools and universities brought more into line as places where Catholic teaching was respected, explicated, and nurtured, along with insistence on moral standards and behavior in faculty and students. (Not presenting The Vagina Monologues, for example, or offering forums for pro-abortion politicians and speakers, nor counteracting the climate of sexual permissiveness and acceptance of perversion.) One has to wonder what it was that John Paul concerned himself with over the last 20 years or so in his day to day work. From afar, it looked like he holed up in his apartment, said mass, held audiences, but hardly knew what was going on at ground level nor ran things with a clear vision of what he wanted the parish church to look like. A great many people loved the Pope, and as an inspiring figurehead, he served their faith; but I never warmed to him personally (even though I sincerely wished to), and so I never took his presence as especially comforting or inspiring, and therefore looked for a kind of leadership that he didn’t seem interested in expressing. The American Church is incredibly torpid. If you travel from parish to parish you find little enthusiasm or spirit for the work of God. I blame it entirely on the priests. They do not lead and they will not get out of the way of those who can. There seems to be no bottom to how ineffective a priest is allowed to be. Male faithful have been either driven out of the churches or emasculated so as to be tame and inoffensive. Our churches are being run by women abetted by wimpy priests. The level of preaching in the church is so abysmal that a new word describing what’s below horrible needs to be invented. The Roman Catholic Church continues to treat the Mass, the most beautiful worship in the world, as a form of penance in which we are punished for attending and taught to endure rather than ennoble. John Paul II could not have cured all these ills, but he could have set a tone that looked to cure these things little by little. He did none of that so far as I can tell. I believe that he became so self-indoctrinated in the holiness of the Church that he thought the Church could not really fail believers at all. But there is a competition, not for believers, but for people willing to commit, serve, and evangelize. The Catholic Church may well lose the race to create energetic faithful to the growing Protestant evangelical churches. I fully believe that Billy Graham has brought more people to God than the Pope ever did. And there are now hundreds of Billy Grahams expanding ministries throughout the world, creating churches where people actually care if you come and join them. And these folks are doing it without all the trappings which lend so much weight and dignity to the person of the Pope. They are offering people joy, hope, fellowship, and a voice. I do get a little weary of some waxing poetic about John Paul’s leadership, personality, and charisma. It was hardly unique. I have seen a great many men in much smaller spotlights who I would have thought as or more capable than the Pope. The problem is that position or office can magnify to the point of distorting everything out of proportion. For example, no matter who is pope, millions will insist that he is great and they love him. Respect and admiration simply comes with the territory. Whoever the next pope is, it will be rather amusing to see how crestfallen so-called liberal Catholics will become when they discover that he has no intention of changing any Church teachings to suit them. There is a whole class of people in the church who actually believe that the Church is going to see things their way one day and the walls of Jericho will tumble down and a new millennium come. posted by Mark Butterworth | 2:07 PM | Friday, April 01, 2005 And you thought it was just a pet peeve Daylight Savings Time is soon upon us again, and I hate it. I have always hated it especially as a child shuffling off to school in the darkness. But John Miller proves that DST is not only crazy, it's a killer! posted by Mark Butterworth | 9:58 AM | |
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