98 percent of Catholic women, I am told by all of you, use birth control to determine the size and timing of their families. So again its a women's health issue.
Precisely why heretics like her need to be excommunicated immediately, preferably Becket style:
Abortion is a sacrament for the leftist antireligion -- ritualistic child-sacrifice on the altar consecrated to the human will. So says Joseph at Arimathea (h/t Kristor):
Last month before the March for Life, I was thinking about an idea that I have encountered in recent years that abortion is a sacrament for the Left. Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life notes that Ginette Paris published the book, The Sacrament of Abortion, in A.D. 1992, wherein she supports abortion as a pagan affirmation of life. I was surprised that the idea has its origin on the Left, but I should get used to the perversity of this world. Although the prophet Isaiah proclaims, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!,” one must not forget that the wicked delight in wickedness.
Upon reflection, however, I think that the Left’s position is remarkably consistent given human nature. Consider sacrifice and its place in human society. Sacrifice is pretty much a universal human phenomenon. Man gives up something dear to his gods. Crudely, this act is seen as a transaction wherein the sacrificer seeks to appease divine anger or curry divine favor. The more philosophical understanding is that by sacrifice man makes clear to himself and to everyone the proper order of being, where lesser goods are given up for greater ones. The act of sacrifice to the gods demonstrates vividly to the human soul and to the human community the appropriate hierarchy of the world; it is an impressive (as in impression making) act that proclaims the community’s ranking of values.
As Joseph notes, the idea of abortion as a sacrament actually originates on the left.
Courtesy of the Public Religion Research Institute:
A majority (55%) of Americans agree that “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” Four-in-ten (40%) disagree with this requirement.
. . .
Roughly 6-in-10 Catholics (58%) believe that employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception.
So supporters of this moral abomination are actually slightly overrepresented among Catholics.
The chickens are coming home to roost in holy mother Church. As Dr. Feser notes (and has anyone else noticed that his tone is getting more polemical with time? I love it!):
For decades now, the majority of Catholics have been ignoring the Church’s teaching that the use of contraceptives is mortally sinful. Even priests who accept that teaching rarely speak about it from the pulpit. Theologians and professors in Catholic colleges and universities who reject it are for the most part allowed to teach and write against it unmolested. As a result, it is widely assumed that a Catholic may in good conscience dissent from the Church’s teaching. It is also no doubt widely thought that many churchmen are embarrassed by this teaching, and expect it someday to change. The bishops have made no serious effort to counteract these perceptions. Though they often issue bold statements regarding prudential matters about which they have no special competence -- economic policy, immigration policy, health care policy -- and have been extremely vigorous in promoting a strict abolitionist position on capital punishment that Catholic teaching does not actually require, they do not seem to think it urgent to correct the vast number of Catholics who flout a basic moral doctrine, the teaching and enforcement of which is the bishops’ special responsibility. How surprised should they be, then, when those hostile to the Church’s teaching judge that Catholics will “roll over” for policies like the one now issued by HHS?
. . .
It goes without saying that the bishops have also done very little to discipline those Catholic politicians who publicly and obstinately promote policies which the Church teaches are gravely immoral. Only a few individual bishops have dared to state publicly that those Catholic politicians who promote abortion or “same-sex marriage” ought not to receive Holy Communion. But no such politician seems to have taken these admonitions seriously, and even the most conservative bishops seem to regard the harsher penalty of excommunication as unthinkable. How surprised should they be now that one of these Catholic politicians -- Kathleen Sebelius -- has moved on from promoting abortion "rights" to actively persecuting her fellow Catholics, while other Catholics in the administration (such as Vice President Joe Biden) stand by without protest?
The great apostasy is here -- has been here for some time.
Surely you've heard the news: the Church is up in arms over a new mandate that would force them to purchase insurance coverage for a variety of illicit and objectionable crap.
What's the end game here? Probably nothing. The Church's fecklessness on the issue of contraception has purchased widespread heresy on the part of the laity and a culture of dissent among its lower clergy. There'll be no fighting in the streets, as Bill Donohue promises, and if there is, it will be American Catholics burning their own churches.
Some (though not all) atheists seem to be under the impression that the Euthryphro dilemma is a slam-dunk for atheism.* God commands murder, after all, and murder's bad, so God must be bad. This must mean that Christians are wrong about God's nature, so they're probably wrong about God existing period; after all, they've clearly never given the issue any thought. (How easy it must be to be an atheist, to be satisfied with such superficial thinking).
As I wrote once before, the error here is in the assumption that morality is something distinct from God -- something, in fact, superordinate to God, so that God is subject to it, as well. But if there is something greater than God, than God has some unrealized potentiality: thus he is not perfect, thus not unqualified being, thus not God. Goodness, whatever it is, must not merely be present in God in the sense that it is present in us humans, as one aspect among many; it must actually be God, and God it, or else God is not God. Likewise, God's divine simplicity means there is no real distinction between the fact of goodness and the moral injunction to obey it: the two are fused. Good is its own authority, in Him.
In other words, the error is something like the error atheists in make in presuming the natural world to be all there is with respect to epistemology. In this case, they presume that the natural law is all there is with respect to ethics. As I wrote before,
. . . is natural law absolute? Perhaps in a world without God, it would be: there would be nothing beyond nature, so of course natural law would be inviolate. Which rather makes the atheists' objection circular: God doesn't exist because He commands immoral things, and those things must be immoral because God doesn't exist.
But natural law is "natural" precisely because it arises from nature; and nature is necessarily subordinate to God, since He created it and is all that sustains it in being. Thus, even the highest of natural goods is subordinate to the lowest of supernatural goods.
(Actually, they don't assume this, as they don't even believe in natural law. They assume Christians believe this.That they don't doesn't seem to bother them).
God, I said recently, is thought to be all-good not for evidential reasons but for logically necessary ones: because goodness in a theological sense is convertible with being and God is pure being, thus pure goodness (for a fuller treatment of this, see Dr. Feser's take on the "dilemma"). So whatever God commands is necessarily good, in that He is incapable of evil. It doesn't follow from this that a thing is good because God commands it (it follows from this that there are some things God, being all-good, simply cannot do)**, but rather that anything which God commands must be good. If natural law appears to contradict some divine command, it is only because the natural law is an expression of the divine will in an imperfect context. Thus the general expression of divine will in natural law must always give way to its more specific expression as revealed directly by God Himself.
So what are we to make of the situation, then? If moral goods relate to natural law and natural law arises from human nature, it follows that God is not subject to them. So there is no sense in accusing God of violating them; it is simply meaningless jabber, akin to calling me, an American, a criminal because the content of my blogging sometimes runs afoul of Swedish hate crime laws. So what if God commands you to kill someone? Then you would have a case of divine law conflicting with natural law, and as natural law always gives way, you'd be obligated to carry out the act. (Really, would your refusal affect some significant change? He could easily wipe out all creation simply by willing it; what difference does it make if, in some particular case, He deigns to act through a subordinate instead of directly?)
The problem, ultimately, is very like the "problem of evil," which is to say facially weak: if God is thought to be good as a matter of metaphysical necessity than there is simply no use pointing to some datum that appears to contradict it, because the contradiction cannot go beyond appearances unless it can be determined that there is no possible good which some commandment serves. It is therefore not necessary to pinpoint exactly what good a given divine commandment serves (although this is very often possible, as in the case, for instance, of God's command to the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites). It is, rather, sufficient to point out that there is at least one conceivable good which that command would serve.
*Actually, when I talk about the "Euthyphro dilemma," I'm talking about the pop-culture misapprehension of it as understood by most atheists, who tend to be ignorant of philosophy. As James Chastek points out, what is actually discussed in Euthyphro is not whether God/the gods are good, but how best to define piety.
**Since God's nature is existence itself, it follows that the justice of His actions are bounded only by the demands of reality itself. For instance, since God cannot create anything such that He is not its creator, it follows that everything which exists owes Him gratitude, obedience, and love, and that He moreover cannot except anything from this because there is no way He could have created anything otherwise. So God cannot command a person, for instance, to hate Him. Likewise, I believe it is reasonable (though I don't know if anyone else has reached this conclusion) to say that He could not utterly destroy being, by which I mean not merely cause death of the body but utterly remove a thing from existence: this would be evil in its purest form, the affectation of total nonbeing, and thus something of which God would simply be incapable. Hence, the disposition of souls who reject God's invitation to communion is not destruction (as the annihilationists hope) but exile (i.e., to Hell).
How is the "problem of evil" regarded as a problem at all? The claim that God is omnibenevolent is not evidential but metaphysical: He is good as a matter of necessity. Theodicy, properly understood, then, is simply an endeavor to reconcile the fact of evil with the necessity of God's omnibenevolence (a thing so necessary that even to say "God's omnibenevolence" is, strictly speaking, a redundancy). The problem of evil depends for its force on the claim that there is no possible reason why an all-good God would tolerate any evils. So it suffices to show that there is at least one possible reason why, even if we can't know for certain if it's true.
We may, for instance, suggest that the toleration of evil is instrumental: we may say God allows certain evils because they cultivate virtues such as self-sacrifice, courage, patience, or temperance, which would not exist in the absence of those evils. Or we can suggest that evil, being convertible with imperfection, is a necessary feature of any entity that is not God, who alone is perfect.
Or (and I think this is the proper response) we can simply point out that "all-good" does not mean "actualizing every possible good" any more than "all-creating" means "actualizing every possible being" (a fact pointed out by Just Thomism's James Chastek); it suffices to say that all the goods which exist are owed to God (just as all the beings which exist owe their existence to God).
I understand there's something like an argument out there along the lines of "atheists claim they disbelieve but disbelief in God is still a belief, so they're incoherent" (or something). Our associate pastor made a similar argument the opening night of our RCIA course when he declared that atheists' disbelief in God is incoherent because disbelief requires an existent object. (Being Filipino and, evidently, a Fregean, he phrased it less coherently than that).
This is a bad argument. That's all. What is objectionable about atheism is not whether it constitues faith or doubt but the object of its faith or doubt -- not its fervency but its falsity. A weakly-defined or weakly-held atheism is no less objectionable than a militant one.* Who cares whether it's better to say that atheists don't believe in God or to say they believe there's no God? Is there any interesting implication regarding the outcome of such a linguistic squabble?
It's one of those silly and completely inane bits of BS, which I'm baffled anyone thinks sophisticated. It's similar to the typical Christian-turned-atheist conversion story they all feel the need to share, along the lines of "something bad happened to me once so God must not exist!" No one cares, yuppie. Let it go.
The reason I bring this up is that it appears to be a main theme in an atheist video advanced by a YouTuber named QualiaSoup. Pretty well done video, by all accounts, and an able presentation of (what passes for) the rationale for atheism, although initially it seems he might bristle at being called such. Nor, however, does he permit himself to be called an agnostic, and here he ceases to be terribly engaging: agnosticism, he says, is a specific epistemic attitude, and his belief (or lack of belief, he insists on saying) does not even go so far as to encompass that. Well, we'll see about that.
The reason I say this isn't an engaging argument is because it relies on a linguistic malformation common to the vulgar use of the English language today: the presumption of distinction between "knowledge" and "belief." There is, of course, a distinction in the loose sense that they refer to different things; but they refer to different things in the also-loose sense that my throwing brick at a window is different from the window shattering. Knowledge and belief are not untethered from one another, an argument I made earlier. Belief is simply the assent of the will to something apprehended by reason. I believe the sky is blue because I know the sky is blue. I believe I have ten fingers because I know I have ten fingers. And agnostics withhold belief because they regard the question as simply unanswerable -- because their reasons apprehend (albeit improperly) that the question is unanswerable. A person who says "I believe in UFOs" isn't expressing a belief he thinks is irrational: he's generally convinced by (what he sees as) the evidence that UFOs exist. And a person who refuses to assent to something he knows to be true, such as the battered woman who insists that it'll be different from now on, is not doing anything noble: they're simply delusional.
Anyway, QualiaSoup gets to what he actually believes at around three minutes into the video, when he declares that the theistic assertion of God's existence is "irresolvable" because "no procedure available to us could reliably establish the existence or non-existence of such an unscientific entity." What he means here, of course, is that no scientific procedure exists (he doesn't ever acknowledge that there are plenty of metaphysical procedures available to us to reveal this truth, namely syllogistic logic, so it's reasonable to question if he's even aware of them). And he believes this because he's a positivist. Which he means he does, in fact, approach the question with a particular epistemology -- one that is so fundamental to his worldview he does not even acknowledge it by name and, presumably, never bothers to ask whether it's actually true.
The problem with positivism, I've said before, is that it's incoherent. The denial of nonscientific knowledge leads invariably also to a denial of scientific knowledge for two reasons. One, science cannot establish its own validity: there's no scientific experiment you can conduct that would validate the scientific method. Two, that means the only other method available to you of establishing the validity of scientific knowledge is a metaphysical axiom which is itself unscientific. So positivism winds up refuting itself -- and that which refute itself cannot be possibly true. You can get around this if you make an unpricipled exception to your own belief system, and you may be content with that, but why should anyone else be satisfied with the incoherent patchwork mess you've concocted?
So this strange breed of confused, hybrid agnostoatheism is, evidently, all atheism and no agnosticism. He proves this immediately afterward, when he declares that "God (the being said to exist in biblical times) exists" is "demonstrably false." He declares there are "many problematic qualities" we're asked to accept about this God that proves its falseness, but then provides perhaps the stupidest sample of what those "problematic qualities" are: "No being can be regarded as perfect," he says, "if it needs to be worshipped."
Agreed! Such would be a contradiction in terms. God, being perfect, has no imperfections in need of realization and therefore no "needs." So we should not presume to worship God because we think He needs to be worshipped. We should worship Him because he deserves to be worshipped, and moreover, because it is good -- that is, consistent with our natures as created beings who owe their creator a debt of gratitude and obedience -- to worship Him. The argument as expressed by QS is stupid and he is right to call it such. But he is wrong to call it a "problem" for theism because no one, to my knowledge, has aksed anyone to accept that argument. Anyone who did, I'd regard as ignorant. This is quite remarkable since we're evidently supposed to believe that this belief no one believes is not only a problem for theism but is representative of all the kinds of problems theism faces. Well, if that's the worst we have to deal with, then I suppose we're well-off!
It doesn't seem to occur to QS to question this argument. If "God is perfect" and "God needs worship" are irreconcilable, isn't that just as likely to be proof that one of the two statements has been improperly formulated than that the whole idea of "God" is bogus? Indeed, he doesn't seem to be aware what theists actually believe, nor does his ignorance so much as trouble him. It's as if he's never really encountered any theism more sophisticated than the postings of his silly pseudo-Baptist friends on Facebook.
QS goes on to claim that "a lack of belief in gods is the default position." Let's ignore for a moment the historical evidence that this is not, in fact, true, and simply grant him the benefit of the doubt that he's trying to establish some sort of epistemic norm: that one should not assent to something not known to be rational. That's a perfectly defensible position. But it's not as if there are no arguments for theism -- there are only arguments one might refuse to accept because of unquestioned and basically irrational nominalist and positivist presuppositions. That doesn't make him a neutral or disinterested party, nor is proper for him to pretend as much, because nominalism and positivism are themselves the assertion of a particular metaphysical worldview. When one says, then, that I must provide scientific evidence for the existence of God, one is essentially asking me to do the legwork for them of inserting God into a preexisting existential paradigm that denies there is anything knowable that cannot be known through the scientific endeavor. In fact, such a task is impossible, not because God doesn't exist but because that paradigm is false and irrational.
Around 8 minutes in, QS loses me entirely. He proceeds to complain (with a grating, plaintive whine) that atheist fervency is a response to Christian name-calling provocation. To this, I say: eh. Take a look at the last century's treatment of Christians, especially Catholics and the Orthodox, at the hands of atheists and then have the temerity to complain that they regard atheists with suspicion and contempt.
A full treatment for the case for theism is beyond the scope of this post. You can find a simple one in Bonald's "Finite and Unlimited Being" -- and atheists, be warned that the man's an astrophysicist and very likely smarter and better-versed in matters scientific than you. Suffice it to say that there is no really good reason to treat QS' breed of bland and thoughtless scientism as even a respectable position to hold, much less the default one.
*Except where militancy causes one to, say, go nuts and start killing people.
EDIT: An anonymous commenter e-mailed me to suggest that the belief that God "needs" prayer may actually derive from too heavy an investment in science fiction and fantasy, where the meme appears to be common, especially in the writings of Terry Pratchett. Given the non-zero correlation between atheism and literary escapism, it sounds plausible to me.
39 years ago today, the Supreme Court invented a bogus and metaphysically baseless right of women to unilaterally slaughter their own children -- a "right" taken advantage of the tune of 50 million corpses. May God honor and avenge their blood.
Assuming Muslim Tim Tebow would be as high-profile as Christian Tim Tebow, they'd probably regard him with suspicion and contempt as he prostrates himself on the sidelines facing east, touching his forehead to the turf. And probably, in this alternate universe, some Salon columnist would be asking, "What if Tim Tebow Were Christian?" and he would be adored by the leftist establishment instead of slathered with its hatred.
Evidently, we're to regard Christians as hypocrites for not feeling warm-n'-fuzzy about Muslim athletes. Why should they, though? Christians worship Christ, not generic displays of piety. It's precisely this that makes them not hypocrites and their religion not merely the empty and insubstantial theatrics their secular enemies accuse them of being. Why should they feel anything but unease toward the practitioners of what they see as a false religion? No one reasonably expects anything else from Muslims.
Here's a better question: what if Tim Tebow were Christian but America was Muslim? Would the social reaction to him be analagous if the roles were reversed and it was Christian America reflecting on Muslim Tebow? I think we all know the answer to this.
It occurred to me recently how utterly futile it is to try to understand God analagously. While writing a brief essay about man, God, and the order of being -- specifically, while trying to assert that a man is duty-bound to worship and obey God -- it occurred to me to use an analogy: existence is like God's house, and surely we can all agree that when you stay in someone's house, you have a duty to be grateful to your host and to abide by his rules? But the analogy simply fails beyond a certain point, because the modern could always say, "Yeah, but if I don't like my host's rules, I can just go stay somewhere else, or live in the streets. What am I supposed to do, go and exist in a different order of being if I don't like this one? God doesn't give me that option. What a fascist!"
The retort misses the point; but then, it's not the modern's fault. The analogy simply fails to convey the nature of man's obligation to God.
Not long before, I was arguing with some atheists about the nature of our moral obligations; specifically, I argued that God's commandment to the Israelites to commit genocide against the Canaanites was not evil but good: that the commandment made the genocide morally praiseworthy where it otherwise would have been damnable, and their failure to carry it out all the way, as God wanted them to, did not merely produce bad outcomes (namely the corruption of the Israelites with the worship of false goods) but was reprehensible in itself. It's not that whatever God commands is good just because God commands it, but that whatever God commands must be good as a matter of metaphysical necessity. The analogy I used was such that if the state commands an executioner to carry out the sentence against a guilty prisoner, the executioner has not thereby murdered the prisoner: he was acting in accordance with the command of a legitimate authority. The atheist's retort was, "So all those Nazis who murdered children were A-OK? Snortchucklesnort."
Once more, he misses the point. Yes, there's an asymmetry between executing a prisoner and killing a child. But there's also an asymmetry between the state and God. The state's capacity to command men to kill is qualified. God's is not. Here, again, the analogy fails, not only quantitatively, in scope or degree, but qualitatively, in kind. God's authority is not merely the state's authority writ large. It is something else entirely.
And another story: the thought occurred to me in the shower this morning (where all my awesome thoughts strike me; I think it's a womb thing) that nearly every society historically has had some conception of the divine. Liberals like to say that the radical differences between these conceptions proves their collective falseness (the "One God Further" objection, ably refuted by Edward Feser here and here). But I thought the fact that such conceptions exist in the first place is evidence that they are all on to something. The various polytheisms and ancestor cults and whatnot are all instantiations of the Form of the Divine; their divergences are accidental and thus irrelevant. But can even the Form of the Divine be understood as anything except an instantiation of the Form of Forms -- the principle of actuality which God, being actus purus, pure being, actually is?
I think the failure of atheists to apprehend religious truth is a failure to transcend analagous modes of thinking. Call it spiritual autism or pneumopathology or whatever you like. I can hardly even think of a good analogy to describe the inadequacy of analogies. It's not that we can't see the forest for the trees; it's that we can't see the forest because we are the trees. I think, ultimately, this is why God identified Himself in such a baffling way in his self-revelation to Moses in the early chapters of Exodus: "I AM WHO AM." If I were to say, "My name is X," I would really be saying, "I am a human being, the name of which is X." In other words, my identity is meaningful only with reference to the greater form of which I am but one instance. God cannot be understood thus: He is not an instance of any form; He is the Form from which all forms derive. He simply is what He is.
Making sense of the coming catastrophe.
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