TRUTH AND TOLERATION Sin



IN PURSUIT OF PILATE’S QUESTION INTRODUCTION: Like a string of pearls, though some may be diamonds some stone, these forty relatively short essays hopefully hang together on one common thread, Pilate’s question to Christ recorded in Chapter 19 of St. John’s Gospel, “What is truth?” Perhaps a pearl a day is just what the doctor ordered. Enjoy! TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I. TOLERATION MISUNDERSTOOD PART II. THE SLIDE TOWARD SECULARISM AND RELATIVISM PART III. RELATIVISM AND THE DALAI LAMA PART IV THE EUCHARIST AND INCLUSIVENESS PART V THE MEDIA, RELATIVISM, FAITH AND THEODICY PART VI MY NAME IS “I AM” PART VII A SHORT LOVE STORY PART VIII THE WAY AND OTHER WAYS PART IX A GIFT HORSE AND THE PROPER USE OF CHOICE PART X SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY LOOK IN THE GIFT HORSE’S MOUTH PART XI THE BIRTHDAY PROBLEM AND METAPHYSICS PART XII A METAPHYSICAL BIRTHDAY PRESENT PART XIII REASON LEADS THE WAY TO REVELATION PART XIV THE GREAT GIFT HORSE: AUTHENTIC LOVE AND LIFE IN ABUNDANCE PART XV HE”S ALWAYS ON THE PORCH PART XVI PRODIGAL SON LITE PART XVII THE NATURE OF THE BEAST PART XVIII THE COSMOS VS. MONISM, AMAZING GRACE VS. AMAZING DEBAUCH PART XIX THE STORY OF PELAGIUS-MR. OPTOMISM PART XX LOVE, FREEDOM AND THE HIDDENESS OF GOD PART XXI THE CLEARING EFFECT OF REVELATION ON RELIGION AND SUFFERING PART XXII JESUS, THE RESURRECTION AND LIFE PART XXIII REVELATION AND NON-REVEALED RELIGION PART XXIV BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM PART XXV COMPASSION AND THE GOOD SAMARITAN PART XXVI PLURALISM AND DIALOGUE PART XXVII NEW AGE ENDS AND DUST IN THE WIND PART XXVIII WHY? A REVIEW PART XXIX THE CHURCH, THE NEW AGE AND NEW MORALITY PART XXX MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS PART XXXI THE HARD ART OF LOCKHEART TO THE RESCUE PART XXXII OF MARRIAGE, PAIRRAGE AND POPULATION PART XXXIII FREIDAN’S COMFORTABLE CONSENTRATION CAMP PART XXXIV IMAGINE, RELIGION VS SECULARISM, CENSORSHIP PART XXXV GUILT, EVOLUTION, REASON, THE WRONG ROOTS AND RIGHT ROOTS OF OUR RIGHTS PART XXXVI A CASE IN POINT: ROE AND DRED SCOTT PART XXXVII FORGETTING THE ROOTS OF SAFTY AND FREEDOM PART XXXVIII I’D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA-1925 PART XXXIX THE NEW CHURCH AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH PART XXXX THE 40TH PEARL I. TOLERATION MISUNDERSTOOD Most, though not all people, are finally coming to realize after centuries of strife that ethnic, political, philosophical and religious diversity is part and parcel of the human condition and mutual toleration of these differences is obviously essential for survival. Hopefully we have learned that much by now but a question arises, where does truth fit in? Must the serious pursuit of truth be shelved in the name of toleration, peace and the avoidance of conflict? Must it be buried with the hatchet? Must all views be placed on an equal footing in order to avoid strife and the whiff of inequality and intolerance? This is not an easy thing because as much a part of us as our diversity is our very human striving after truth in everything from science to philosophy and religion. It is difficult for many to dismiss the very concept and desire for truth with Pilate’s sneering retort to Christ and its implication that there is no such thing or that its attainment is beyond our grasp. But must the noble striving cease lest it be our undoing? If truth is one and its pursuit essential to what we are, what are we to do about diversity and the multiplicity of beliefs? Can the achievement and attainment of truth coexist in peace with equality and diversity or must one suffer at the hands of the other? Can truth and diversity live together for long? As we work and move in the direction of a better understanding of the truth especially in the areas of science, philosophy and religion, must not diversity along with equality in these areas diminish? How do we placate those who take offense? We know toleration must be preserved and respected. Our survival depends upon it. We know we must not return to a time when it was thought that error or dissent in the realm of politics, philosophy and theology had no rights because we now know from principles originating long before they were formularized in our Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights that people holding to error or to dissenting opinions and beliefs certainly do have rights. Yet, if we take that most fundamental of philosophical-political questions and ask the origin of these human rights, rights such as life or liberty, we are seeking the truth, a truth, however, about which there is great disagreement. Must the search for the truth in this and many other sensitive areas cease in fear of upset or out of respect for diversity? It is simply no good, indeed dishonest and mentally suffocating, to dodge the issue and back off controversy by holding that all views and opinions are of equal validity or that truth and error whether in important or unimportant matters are subjective and dismissible concepts with no basis in reality. That currently popular dodge, often marching under the name of inclusiveness or diversity, submerges thought into a sea of relativism that endangers any progress in these matters. Obviously we cannot shelve debate on the truth or error of important questions in the name of tolerance and peace and remain human. It is not in our nature as thinking beings to do so. And there is real danger of losing what has been gained by the generations before us over long periods of time and through great mental effort. To cite just one illustrative example, upon the correct location of the roots and origin of the human right to life and liberty could rest their continued viability. Whether these rights originate with governments or beyond governments is a vital question. In what way are these rights inalienable? These matters demand answers. We must proceed toward them with reason, faith, hope and belief that through bitter experience humanity has of late become mature enough (this is a big gamble admittedly as a brief look at popular TV and media entertainment amply illustrates) to assimilate the answers without jeopardizing the need for toleration. As truth be known, it comes down to this: all opinions may not be equal but those individuals holding them are. And here’s another must. The search for truth must be done with toleration protecting all views even the most erroneous short of public endangerment. This is quite a challenge and a test of our faith in history, experience, education and time doing their work. The search for truth may inevitably impinge somewhat upon diversity but it cannot be allowed to impinge upon toleration if we are to survive. II THE SLIDE TOWARD SECULARISM AND RELATIVISM The necessity of toleration and the fear of upsetting it cannot be allowed to dampen the search for the answers we all so fervently wish to find in a great many fields. Some of the answers to the important questions that were very firmly placed in our founding documents have recently been challenged. For example, the Founding Fathers of the American Republic, for all their experimentation, held that there were eternal truths revealed incrementally in history but not dependent on history or government for that matter. The source of these truths, the unalienable right to life and liberty, for example, were derived from or as they put it were endowed by the Creator. That’s a plain answer much jeopardized today by the rise of a radical secularism and in some quarters an aggressive atheism. Recently President Obama addressed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 33rd Annual Awards gathering. In his remarks he made reference to the Declaration of Independence. When he got to the line, “endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights,” he omitted “Creator.” He repeated the exclusion on a couple of other occasions before public questioning induced him to cease the censorship. The president’s motivation is still unexplained as he maintains a Christian faith but his surgery effectively cuts loose from very secure mooring very important and basic rights with consequences that could well be outright dangerous. If not the Creator, who? Government? And if endowed by government, still “unalienable,” that is, impossible to take away without due process? Who holds the hammer? The secularist especially of an atheistic bent is almost forced to say “government” or the people themselves. Either answer presents serious problems for inalienable rights. The danger lies in the proposition that what gives can take. Though the threat from advancing secularism cannot be ignored perhaps an even more pernicious and related trend is the ease with which some people slip into a default mode, older than Pilate’s question and declare there is no such thing as truth. They hold, in spite of what the Founders believed, that there are no real answers to the important life questions we all ask for everything is relative. You say tomato, I say tomahto. Such relativism as that is tolerable in the inessentials but it can become downright dangerous in important matters. It can ultimately be as destructive to human rights, happiness and fulfillment as the rejection of toleration. Of course, the effect on our ancient pursuit of truth is disastrous. Truth and toleration must coexist and relativism must be avoided simply because truth and toleration are essential to human happiness and survival. Whatever kind of world it would be, where there is no truth but rather everything in the name of toleration is equally true, it would not be human. Truth exists independently of what we think or believe and it cannot be contrary to truth. And, it is discoverable. You might call that a basic and essential act of faith upon which all our knowledge rests. Take it away and we are doomed, no more Homo Sapiens but quite the contrary. Science can find it with difficulty in the laboratory, philosophy and theology, perhaps with even more struggle, in the laboratory of reason, logic and perhaps, as will be examined later, revelation. That last item will need much examination but in fact all these areas of endeavor are often helped by intuitive aid as Einstein and many others freely attested. Is there really much difference between a strong intuition and a self-evident truth? Here, for example, is a self-evident truth, not a mere opinion, in the realm of religion: all religions may be false but they cannot all be true. Certainly, this holds as fact if truth in one and the principal of contradiction upon which our sanity and science rests is valid for, as everyone knows, the world’s religions contradict each other in vital areas and in these areas of contradiction they cannot all be right. Going further, it is hopefully self-evident that there cannot be no gods, one god and many gods, that God cannot be the same as the material universe and different from it, that the universe cannot be eternal and created in time, that God became a human being or never did. In these, as in so many areas, as truth advances diversity of necessity must decline. This is generally true but it sometimes has happened that as truth is attained it sometimes reveals new areas for thought and differing opinions. For example most physicists accept the “Big Bang” as true but many new questions arise as to what existed before it since it is not possible for something to arise from nothing. The arena of diversity and its debilitating cousin relativism in at least some areas of belief must shrink with the establishment of truth. Though this is to be expected the best and most well-intentioned people often resist it out of fear of a return or even a growth of intolerance. It appears that our all-important and recently acquired appreciation for the vital importance of the toleration of diversity in thought and opinion along with inclusiveness can in some cases have unhealthy side effects. In some cases it can lead good people to work at preserving differences instead of letting the advance of truth do its unitary work and such an attitude can rather easily slip into the dangerous relativity mode. Such a mode of thought makes a shambles of the very concept of truth, even of self-evident ones. But we have reason to hope that the protection of toleration and diversity and the avoidance of relativism can be achieved without downplaying the importance of the truth. It’s a balancing act but a vital one. III. RELATIVISM AND THE DALAI LAMA Unfortunately that hope was not advanced by comments made not long ago in a speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the Dalai Lama maintained that “no one (religious) tradition is superior to another.” This raises the point mentioned before. Is it really possible for such varied religious traditions to be all equally valid? After all, they come up with very different answers to the basic questions mentioned earlier concerning the nature and existence of God and even the purpose of life. Though the possible answers are not that numerous they are varied and they all cannot possibly be right. It is only if they were all completely off the mark that the Dalai Lama’s remarks could have any validity and that of course was far from his intended meaning. That would mean no god, no future life, no purpose, no plan, all mindless accident and chance and although some strands of Buddhism are close to that position it does not reflect the thinking of the average non-philosophical practitioner including the Dalai Lama’s. Neither he nor most people believe that, to use the musical equivalent, the “Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about.” For those hoping or believing that science has backed up this nihilistic position, they will be disappointed for in fact science is increasingly going in the opposite direction being compelled to do so by the complexity and mathematical beauty of the laws governing nature. It is a direction that most of the world’s ordinary clear thinking people have long gone. The mass of humanity, though understanding that God cannot be proven by laboratory experiment, has long understood that disbelief in God is unsustainable indeed irrational in the face of a rational universe with rational laws. Yet, concerning God, the religious traditions that the Dalai Lama had in mind do indeed have very differing views on such basics as the nature of God and an after life. Such differences should not be swept under the rug in the name of toleration, pluralism, peace, understanding, diversity, equality and inclusiveness. The search for the truth in these important matters must advance even while mutual respect is maintained and cherished. The Dalai Lama’s honest, well-intended though not well thought out relativism is not conducive to a better understanding of the human situation and may even damage the cause of toleration in the long run. Can we not manage to balance and sustain both values? The Church, as we shall see, answers “yes.” The dangerous and growing relativism epitomized, unintentionally without a doubt, by the Dalai Lama is, unfortunately, by no means confined to the religious sphere. When Drew Faust became President of Harvard University she announced, “truth is an aspiration not a possession.” Actually it has to be both or why would anyone or any University aspire to something un-possessable or unattainable? Who would want to pay huge sums, going into great educational expense and often debt, to pursue what there is no chance of attaining or possessing? It is a gage of the seriousness of the growing relativism problem that respected leaders in religion and academia have been affected by it. Indeed the infection has filtered down into religions other than the Dalai Lama’s. IV. THE EUCHARIST AND INCLUSIVNESS It is not uncommon for some Christian churches, especially those that believe the notion that all of Jesus’ teachings and actions are handily summed up in the single word inclusiveness, to advertise that they are “diverse and inclusive communities,” with “communion tables open to all the baptized.” Whether or not the communicant believes in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, for example, is not a factor with these churches though it was when Christ first broke the news about the truth of the Eucharist to His Disciples and listeners, as described in Cha. 6, of John’s Gospel. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood…” Everybody was shocked and many walked away but here’s the problem for these churches, he did not equivocate in the name of inclusiveness or fellowship or retreat into symbolism, allegory or metaphor to bring them back. He let them go. Evidently there was something being announced here more important to Him than inclusiveness, fellowship and diversity if achieved at the expense of that something. And that something was in ancient times and is now a central truth of Catholic theology namely the dogma of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist under the appearance of bread and wine. St. Paul summed it up this way, “…whoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.” But in the warm and welcoming fellowship congregations of the type being described here the teaching is now relegated to an unimportant incidental in the drive for inclusiveness. Whether the communicant believes this ancient and till the Reformation almost universally held truth of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist or not is of little import. The new non-teaching takes precedence, a table open to all baptized. It is hard to see how one can receive communion worthily if you don’t know what it is and if a church doesn’t either. A once vital truth thus gets shelved, shoved under the rug, to achieve a contrived togetherness and fellowship. This is relativism in ascendance. The irony is that in practice an open communion table does not achieve the real unity that communion aims at, certainly not the unity envisioned by Christ when he prayed in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel, “that they all may be one…” Far from it, for the dumbing down of the dogma avoids the facing of the hard questions on the real nature of the Eucharist that require the honest and cogent answers upon which any true unity must be based. In fact, a restricted communion facilitates those questions, forcing one to think about them especially when kindly asked not to receive. Here one is forced to confront the reality and demand the answers from which a real unity can flow; a unity based upon history and scripture that does not jeopardize the importance of the truth. When the truth becomes trivial, in this case whether the sacrament does or does not become the body and blood of Christ, strange things have occurred. Not long ago one such minister, in one instance at least, gave “communion” to a dog. When truth becomes relative it becomes unimportant, sometimes worse. V. THE MEDIA, RELATIVISM, FAITH AND THEODICY Relativism has become a default position for many and predictably has invaded popular television with a vengeance. The Classical and Christian confidence that mind can resolve difficulties and attain truth has been greatly weakened. Now we often hear that it’s the pursuit of the goal, truth included, the aspiration, the journey itself that’s the thing with the goal receding in importance. It sometimes seems the modern mind has given up. Famous interviewer Barbara Walters, almost sounding like the Dalai Lama, summed up the trend beautifully when she remarked, “There are so many ways of looking at life and death, you just cannot say this belief is right and that is wrong.” The thought here seems to be that multiple opinions can never be successfully reduced or resolved. In other words, because there is such overwhelming diversity of opinion, one opinion, one philosophy, one religion is as good as the other. One of them cannot be closer to the truth, to the real than another. At any rate it isn’t worth the time or effort to find out. This is inclusiveness, the elevation of diversity if you will, actually hindering the search for truth. And it shouldn’t be that way because in fact there really aren’t that many ways to look at, to approach life and death. The field is actually smaller than many like Ms. Walters envision and made even smaller by the one human in history who, like it or not, identified himself as the way, truth and life when it came to these things and by so doing reduced options considerably. If attitudes like Ms. Walters’ became widespread, what stagnation of thought would result! It would likely lead to a deadening indifference, a harbinger of relativism, and a defeat for humanity because in reality there is, as mentioned and will be demonstrated, not really as many scenarios as Ms. Walters thinks. To repeat, the self-evident truth or what should be one that “it is possible that all religions (opinions, philosophies) may be wrong but they certainly cannot all be right” should be a partial antidote to the Walter’s attitude and spur inquiry rather than indifference. Anything that dampens the search for the truth of the things we all want to know about is as much an enemy of humanity as intolerance. It is sad to think of the pessimism of commentators like Ms. Walters. What they really mean is that amid conflicting views in philosophy and religion, attaining truth is outside our capabilities, that no progress is possible and that a healthy certainty in these matters is beyond us. But the fact of life is, as most realize, we can at least move to a strong and logical conviction through reason, perhaps not of mathematical certitude, but of a logical certitude equal to the capabilities and conditions of our human state and the subject matter at hand. It’s a kind of certainty we can live with and act upon, one that can handle doubts with reason and remain certain enough to move ahead and live a life of faith hope and love. Such a certainty is by no means beyond us. Its been said that the religious mind works by negation, that is by trying one hypothesis after another until nothing is left standing except faith. With that attained faith the things of this world make much more sense echoing the prayer of medieval philosopher-theologian Duns Scotus, “This I believe but if it be in anywise possible, this I would also know.” St. Augustine put it this way, “I believe that I may understand.” But then Augustine went over the line and made the unpardonable error when asked for proof of the existence of God of inviting the questioner first to believe and all will become clearer. It was an error not repeated by St. Thomas Aquinas who along with the Church maintained that knowledge of the existence of God was within reach of human reasoning without the help of revelation. We are talking here of a judicious reason-based faith that is not impervious to natural doubts but can handle them. Doubt is part of the human condition and by no means confined to the religious sphere but so is our reasoning out of it. The result, echoing that ancient Church conviction that man’s unaided reason is indeed capable of arriving at the existence of God, is a faith that is the normal response of most reasonable people. It is by no means a mere security blanket or the grabbing at pie in the sky and those who think of it as a panacea or a form of escapism do not know religion very well. Indeed, it throws one right into the face of reality, a reality complete with obligations, strictures, and moral commands, some of them inconvenient to say the least. Here belief can be more uncomfortable than comforting. But with faith, life, death and suffering are more understandable than they are without it though not completely so. There is the vexing “Job” problem, the problem of evil striking the innocent that the person of faith has always to confront. In the Old Testament Book of Job, Job is the good and innocent person, pious and upright who loses everything including that nightmare of all parents, his children, and confronts God about it. He does not complain against God but when friends and neighbors believe he must have done something terrible to deserve all this and Job knows he didn’t he calls for a response from God. The lesson that the book’s author brings out by this story is, in the words of the New American Bible’s introduction to the book, “that man’s finite mind cannot grasp the depths of the divine omniscience that governs the world.” The problem, the problem of evil, yields only slowly to human understanding and as we shall see not completely though Christ’s later suffering and death puts it in a new and different light. On the other hand, those without faith, the atheist for example, has the immense task of trying to explain the existence of everything else that is, the why and how of it. The usual way out is to fall back on luck, chance or accident. This is the faith of the deniers of faith who prefer god chance to the God of reason. It is an explanation, as will be pointed out, highly doubtful. An explanation that logically, philosophically and even scientifically is less and less tenable and persuasive. Mark Thomas writes half humorously, “It is ironic but true. The non-believer is the greatest believer in miracles. He believes that intelligence emerged from non-intelligence by chance. He has tremendous faith in time. He believes that given enough of it something is bound to happen.” But, of course, something already did happen, time. Later we will hear from Ronald Knox with his steamer trunks. His point, time explains nothing, not even itself. The theist for his or her part wrestles with the mysterious goodness of God who allows terrible sufferings among us as we struggle to perfect our souls in this “Vail of Tears.” If a Christian he will be aided by a revelation, to be examined later and contained in the New Testament, of a God who loves us all the more for our struggle even to the point of sharing in it and in a real sense becoming a co-sufferer. The astounding immensity of that thought, previously unheard in history, is the part of revelation called “the Good News” or Gospel, telling of the Creator becoming one of us, part of his creation, to heal it, point the way to truth and life in abundance. When Catholicism was preached in the new world where human sacrifice was so much a part of the religion, the people were astounded to hear that God suffered and died for them instead of requiring them to suffer and die for God. It became clear that any suffering we do here is not for or by God nor was it brought on by human nature created good but by misuse of the only part of it that could be misused, free will. What price freedom? And, is it worth it? Here are questions the answers of which stretch into the very intention behind creation and will bear examination later but in the meantime, a look at the Creator. VI. MY NAME IS “I AM” What all this comes down to is precisely this; most men and women have rejected Pilate’s cynical, “what is truth” as if truth was completely beyond our abilities and instead have worked through the few alternate worldviews that exist to come to conclusions. With apologies to Barbara Walters, there aren’t really that many options. Most people do this by a process of elimination arriving often with prayer for help and sincere thought at the one that best fits the world, as they know it. By that process of elimination they make an informed choice. No doubt, for many people helping in that choice is the perennially persuasive good news of revelation found in the Gospels. The news that God so loved us as to become one of us and though he did not abolish our suffering and death here for reasons to be explored later, he shared in them fully and to the hilt and in the process revealed God’s love for us and the eternal life that awaits those who learn to love. This good news spread through the classical Greco-Roman world almost like wildfire and stands on its own to be accepted or rejected, but with sincere thought. It has had a revolutionary effect on billions through two millennia and still does. It cuts down the options considerably. Revelation takes up where powerful but imperfect reason falters and because of its limitations could not penetrate all the way to ultimate truth. In the words of Etienne Gilson, “A man seeks the truth by the unaided effort of reason and is disappointed; it is offered to him by faith and he accepts, he finds it satisfies his reason.” Put another way, disordered reason is reduced to order by revelation. St. Anselm echoing Augustine and Isaiah talked of faith seeking understanding or as expressed by others “unless I believe I don’t understand.” Reason alone can accomplish great things but tended after a while to wander and get lost. After notable advances Greek philosophy had stalled by the forth century before Christ. Reason needed help and revelation supplied it. Our intellects are equipped to know truth but even the best of them are clouded. They need assistance from Truth in order to recognize truth in areas where laboratory science is not equipped to go. Revelation greatly aided both the work of reason and the advance of philosophy. The revelation being discussed is found in the scriptures of the Jews and Christians, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Right in the beginning, in Genesis, a vital question was answered. Is the universe eternal or did it have a beginning? Today with the Big Bang we have the answer recently supplied by science but long before that, relying on unaided reason, the schools of Classical Greek philosophy had settled on its eternality. But Genesis was quite clear for the opposite. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth,” By thus giving unaided reason the break it needed, philosophy began its advance again with marvelous results to be looked at later. Thus revelation profoundly modified the conditions under which reason worked. As magnificent as was the Greek accomplishment in philosophy, pure reason was prone to err. St Anselm believed that God helped because the best pure reason seemed to be able to arrive at was an inexplicable eternal, uncreated, uncaused universe, one here by chance with no beginning or end with a polytheism in the form of myriads of gods who are part of it and philosophies often with strong pantheistic leanings. Reason responding to revelation understood the world as presented in Genesis quite differently, its start was the gift of being from Being, the gift of existence from He who exists and is Himself pure existence. The universe and our world in it were created, had a Creator, had a purpose and were not inexplicably always just there by chance for no apparent discoverable reason. The story of revelation moved ahead with the Jews. This small tribe of people was chosen to carry revelation forward when their patriarch, Abraham, said a yes to God’s invitation to become his representative people on Earth four thousand odd years ago. It required a great act of faith. How many other people if any received the invitation before Abraham and refused it we have no way of knowing but from this particular and rather minor tribe of people the pinnacle of revelation, Christ Himself, would come. Ronald Knox made a friendly jest about the whole business when he wrote, “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” About three thousand years ago they were slaves escaping from Egypt and their leader Moses wanted to bolster the faltering faith of the fleeing people. In the book of Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament, he confronts “the God of their father Abraham” in the burning bush episode and would like to know God’s name for two reasons. In this era of polytheism every tribe had its own god and they all had names. The Jews were still heavily influenced by the polytheism of everyone around them and wanted to be like everyone else. Moses knew this and didn’t want to disappoint them. He didn’t want to go back to his people in the desert empty handed. He had to get the name of God. More importantly for future developments, a person’s name gave insight into the nature of that person, who that person was. It should be mentioned here before proceeding that the term “his” for God is used throughout these “pearls” for convenience sake. It has no reference to sex or gender and as Jesus made clear later on, God is non-material. God our Father is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth was his explanation to the Samaritan women at the well in the forth chapter of John’s Gospel. Moses got his answer and it reverberates to this day. It was a name unreal and unlike any of the others and with its aid reason and philosophy was enabled to achieve great insights and make the advance that had eluded earlier efforts. The name given by God to Moses was “I AM WHO AM.” As the third chapter of Exodus puts it “God replied, “I am who am. Then he added, “This is what you shall tell the Israelites (Israel aka Jacob, Abraham’s grandson): I AM sent me to you.” Religion and philosophy were greatly changed over the centuries as the revealed name was reflected upon. The idea of some that this answer amounts to a refusal of God to reveal his name, if effect, mind your own business, is untenable in light of the whole text. The text makes it very difficult to deny that God really wishes to reveal his name and in so doing his essence. “Am” denotes existence, pure being pure and simple. The present tense has that sense, infinite eternal existence and is commonly explained as referring to God as the absolute and necessary being, the source and sustainer of all created beings. This is the great metaphysical breakthrough of Exodus. Creation is revealed now not only as a one time gift coming from the will of God the giver but as a constantly continuing gift sustained in its very existence by that will, essentially the continual gift of being from pure eternal Being. God is not anything like all the other “gods’ is the message and so beyond, so other, as to be captured as nearly as our reason can capture God, as the necessary Eternal Being, He who IS. “AM.” This is what reason working with revelation adduced. God Creator and sustainer without whom there would be nothing that is. Moses and the people got more than they bargained for as the fled into the desert and headed for Sinai and eventually the Promised Land. They didn’t forget, not completely. Classical philosophy was a great beneficiary of revelation. Under Aristotle it had arrived at notions of God as uncaused cause whose nature was pure thought. This in itself was a world above the tribal and mythological gods peopling the heavens at the time. The passage from Exodus, this great gift horse if you will, provided the impetus, the key for further advance by Christian philosophy beyond the respectable achievement of classical thought about what God is. The name “Am” itself was considered so sacred by the Jews that out of reverence for it the term “Adonai” meaning “my Lord,” was used as a substitute. “I AM” is the source of the word “Yahweh.” God was thus declaring his essence, which is to be, being pure and simple, with eternal existence necessarily implied, The unique Being. This revelation of the nature of God as Being, existence itself, has implications. The undermining of pantheism, to be examined in more detail later, was one for God’s essence was not ours or the universe’s. He was totally other, different, separate, by no means identical with or equated to the world, nature or anything else that is. But Genesis was not finished. It clearly refers to God and not “the gods. Later in the prophets it was stated again “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord thy God is one.” Still later it resonated in the Catholic Creed, “Credo in unum Deum.” Polytheism along with pantheism was put into long continuing retreat. These revealed religious-philosophical truths did not go down easily, appearing to many as utterly new, revolutionary and counter cultural. They were revealed to us, according to Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Lessing, so that with thought and reflection, by the use of mind on them, they might become rational and understood. For one thing, as Etienne Gilson puts it, “as soon as God is identified with Being it becomes clear that in this God alone is and is alone, otherwise all things are God.” Such would be pantheism, precisely what the inheritors of revelation, the Jew, the Christian, and in his way the Muslim can never hold for if all things are God then there is no God because all things are contingent, imperfect, impermanent and of a limited scope and being. The essence of everything we know by our senses is not to exist forever, in other words temporary, else they would not decay, decline, decompose or die. This is not God. God is not temporary, God purely and simply is whereas everything else is not at onetime or another. With this in mind, some philosophers of antiquity saw things differently and as a result of revelation they, like Augustine, became Christians. In sum then what, after all, is the story of revelation but a love story. The story of the overflowing and generous love of the Creator, perfect eternal Being and the ground and sustainer of everything that exists, that led to creation. That is the essential message of Genesis and the Exodus encounter of Moses with AM. VII A SHORT LOVE STORY This tremendous love story carried risk for the one creature that we know of made in God’s image because that image involves not only being but also reason and free will. God’s essence is existence, being, and closely related to it is love. Because being and love are connected for the one would not exist without the other, God who generously endows us with being also endows us with love. But to love it is necessary to be able not to love, to love or not. Love is impossible without freedom for what is forced love is no love at all. Inevitably such a story is not free of suffering, misunderstanding, failure and unhappiness. In our weakened human condition all great love combines happiness and unhappiness, frustration and satisfaction. For an earthly example we only have to look at the powerful vows of Christian marriage: “Forsaking all others, in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, in good times and bad, till death do us part,” to get the message. This all-giving love, as shall be shown, is our great purpose for being. It is our great challenge for it is a reflection of God’s love for us and part of the reason for our being. Marriage is love’s great learning arena. Most of us learn the meaning and challenge of authentic love in marriage and family. There is for most of us no classroom and teacher that compares. Sadly, many of those imbued with today’s popular mini-morality often embodied in a “New Age” mentality complete with a mini love that often substitutes co-habitation for marriage, the pathetic “significant other” or “companion” for husband or wife and surrounds marriage, if it happens at all, with no fault divorce laws and pre-nuptial agreements, may miss the whole point and much of the learning experience. Sometimes people who may disdain Christianity write their own wedding vows full of flowers, the beauties of nature, sweetness and light and even a love of sorts but seldom with the ringing magnificence and total giving, loving commitment found in the ancient Christian words. That we increasingly fail to live up to this genuine love even as some priests have failed in their vows is testimony to a failure of faith and the decrepitude of the age we live in. But we have to have the freedom to try. There is no genuine love otherwise. It seems odd that in an era when choice is cherished to the point of becoming a death-dealing calamity for millions it is suspended by people of the Barbara Walters mentality in the vital realms of God, life and death because “there are so many ways of looking at it.” But are there? Are things really as multiple and confusing as all that or are there ways to cut to the chase, split through all the foliage and thus avoid a life of suspended thought and deferred decision making about these most vital and important issues? There are and revelation points the way but can we trust it? Basically that’s the gist of Pilate’s question and the point of these essays. We already know that reason thrived on what revelation provided. That’s a good sign but we need more. We need confirmation of the truth of what was revealed in addition to the benefits to philosophy. Can revelation be further authenticated and found trustworthy? Later in essay XXII we will see that the life, death and more precisely the cogent reasoning in support of the genuineness of Christ’s resurrection from the dead provided the confirmation we seek. It comes down to the three “Rs.” As important as “reading, riting and rithmatic” are for human progress and happiness these three “Rs,” are even more so, “reason, revelation and resurrection.” The three cut through Ms. Walters maze. Reason thrived on what revelation provided and the resurrection confirmed both. This is the pearl of great price that we seek and hopefully shall find. There are obstacles along the way, often ourselves. Who said, “we have met the enemy and he is us?” This is what poet David Middleton was getting at when he wrote: “I Am That I Am” God said to Moses; But nowadays all anyone knows is “I gotta be me,” as Me proposes. That’s a danger. VIII. THE WAY AND OTHER WAYS Before we look more closely at natural revelation based on reason at work on the world around us and given revelation based on the Scriptures, it should be noted that Ms. Walters opined further that “I think one of the major problems today is people saying only my religion is right and if you don’t agree with me you are not going to heaven.” Although this does seem to be the dismissive view in general of Islam toward the “infidel” and some evangelical Christian churches that hold one must formally and explicitly accept Jesus as Lord and Savior to be saved, it is possible to hold a religion as right and true without condemning the rest as worse than useless. The issue is not as closed and shut as these hard line groups imagine. In fact the Catholic Church, the original, oldest and largest of all the Christian churches maintains that truth and toleration can abide together devoid of blanket condemnations of alternate faiths and that lives lived through beliefs different from our own are nonetheless meaningful and can be worthy of the promises of Christ. The Church holds that all people can be saved though not all paths lead equally to God. While some of the defenders of Catholicism early on including Augustine (d. 430 A.D.) wrote that people outside the pale of Christianity were simply lost (“massa damnata” he called them), the remark was directed in the heat of debate against the Donatists who rejected the leniency of the Church toward penitent apostates who had made sacrifice to the pagan Roman gods during imperial persecutions and the Pelagians who held that the help and grace of God violates our freedom. We’ll see them again later. In a calmer frame of mind even Augustine in other writings saw salvation as possible to all. Christ died for all and the Catholic teaching is that God denies no one the grace and help necessary for salvation. The Church holds that even those who have never heard of Christ can be saved and if they are it is because of the redemption affected by Christ. To all human beings is held out the possibility of being made partakers even unknowingly in Christ who alone is the way to the Father and eternal life. They are said to be of the soul of the Church but how is this achieved? The teaching comes from Christ who came to gather sinners and that is, of course, all of us. But He also said, “No one goes to the Father except by the Son.” The reconciliation of even those unacquainted with the Gospel has been referred to by Catholics from Aquinas in the 13th Century to the Council of Trent in the 16th and Vatican II in the 20th as Baptism of Desire. Essentially it is achieved by a sincere desire to find God and do his will by following ones conscience as reflected in that encapsulation of the natural law popularly known as the Golden Rule. As we better understand the Church as a vast hospital ship for a damaged but not irredeemable humanity we better understand the meaning of Pope Boniface VIII’s teaching that there is no salvation outside it. The “it” can be bigger than he knew or we thought and so indeed is the ship, known from ancient times as the bark of Peter. Christ’s redemptive grace is at work in a very broad field across time and space and multitudes, young and old, of all races and nations and various religious traditions are spiritually of the Church even if in a rudimentary fashion. The Second Vatican Council recalled St Paul’s words to the Athenians in front of their statue to the unknown god, He told them “God himself is not far from those who seek the unknown God in darkness and shadows… whom as Savior desires all men to be saved.” Paul elaborated on these thoughts in his epistles. In polite disagreement with all attitudes similar to the Dalai Lama’s, the Church did not and does not teach that other religions are revealed religions in the sense that Judaism and Christianity are or that they are in and of themselves paths or ways to salvation and life. It should be mentioned here that even before the Church became known as Catholic a little prior to 100AD it was referred to as “the Way,” and there was only one. The use of “Catholic” spread in an effort to distinguish the universal character of the Church from the esoteric, elitist and syncretic Gnostic amalgams that were appealing to some segments of the population and were definitely not the way. Though other faiths both then and now are not in themselves authentic paths nevertheless even as the Church proclaimed the good news of the life awaiting us and God’s loving saving power, His amazing grace was and is at work in the hearts of non-Christian brothers and sisters across the globe. This is the Church’s position. It rejects nothing that is true in these other traditions always maintaining however that the fullness of truth is in it by its establishment by Christ. The grace of new life was won by Christ, who is the way, the truth, the life, thus answering Pilate’s question. That hard won grace is there to help all those who show they desire it by the way they live the life of love taught by the natural law’s Golden Rule as engraved on the hearts of all people and with more heightened detail by Christ Himself and still proclaimed by the Church. As was mentioned, the Catholic Church was first called that about 100AD because it was reaching out with the newly revealed good news to everybody and trying to include everybody on every continent and nation, both male, female, free and slave, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, educated and ignorant. There were no chosen people; all peoples whether Jew or gentile were now the chosen people and in faith children of Abraham. As Chesterton wrote “Revelation was the most curiously democratic act in the history of mankind…” Indeed it was. It made God and the promise of new and eternal life available to all. Not only the Jews or the philosophers or the ascetic holy men but to us, to those who had been called the common herd. For many of the herd through the ages the Church was and is the Bark of Peter, the great hospital ship launched by Christ. He told Peter and the Apostles as they left their nets to follow him that from now on they would be fishers of men, and into the catch would go sinners down and about out but who wanted to change, go the despairing who wanted hope, go all the damaged of life asking for help, go life’s wounded veterans who sadly had wounded others but strive for sincere sorrow, sinners all including with some exceptions the captain and crew but none of them despairing. In this way the Church represents to this day the real and essential inclusiveness. For those seeking the help of God, in and out of the boat, it is blind to gender, nation, race, education, wealth, fame, everything except need, debates over the tradition of a male priesthood notwithstanding. In this way it is possible for it to practice love and toleration and at the same time hold to that powerful reality of Christ’s utter uniqueness. This understanding enables us to escape the exclusionary strictures of Islam and some forms of Christianity and at the same time the mind sapping, truth demeaning, inquiry benumbing relativism of good and compassionate people like the Dalai Lama and Barbara Walters. Mind sapping because such relativism drains out the drive to know, it aids in avoiding the thinking questions that lead to answers and often ends in an indifference to truth expressed in the idea that all religions, opinions, philosophies are of equal worth and that truth is everywhere even in contradiction. The attitude is sometimes summed up with “you have your truth I have mine.” But we really know it can’t be so and if we buy into it we live a lie, the very opposite of truth. IX THE GIFT HORSE AND THE PROPER USE OF CHOICE Fortunately, in spite of an apparent multiplicity of world religions, there are in reality no more than two basic groupings. We have religions claiming to be responses to God’s action in human history called the revealed religions with Judaism the earliest and Islam the latest, seven hundred years after Christ. Their teachings and beliefs have this in common, they derive from authors and prophets or in Islam’s case one prophet, Mohammed. Both hold God the ultimate inspirer though Mohammed’s revelation found in the Qumran is very derivative relying heavily on the scriptures of the Jews and Christians with native Arab beliefs and customs added in. Christianity is the unique one; the ultimate revealed religion in that Christians hold that its inspirer was no prophet or author but God, AM, becoming man and actually entering history as a human being. This, the dogma of dogmas, the Incarnation, goes far beyond the other revealed religions with tremendous implications. These then are the three religions claiming basis in God revealing himself to humanity through prophets and inspired authors with Christianity going beyond that to God actually becoming man. For the rest be it native religions worldwide sometimes of a very pantheistic bent or the Eastern traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, they make no claim of divine revelation but represent more the mind of man in search of meaning. They are man’s noble groping after God or some rationale for existence, for being. They have strong external polytheistic leanings and sometimes drift into various forms of pantheism too; more about them later. The traditions relying on revelation are quite different. They are all monotheistic but as we will see, not monistic. First, coming from the inspired Jewish writers of Genesis the first book of Scripture, comes the Adam and Eve in the garden story with creation, fall and the promise of help, redemption, a Messiah as the main motif. Then through the founder of the Jewish people, Abraham, and their great lawgiver Moses in the book of Exodus we move to troubles and captures and fallings away and the prophets often as God’s goads moving toward realization of the hope of the coming of the Messiah who had been promised in Genesis. The final chapter in the story, accepted by Christians but not most of the Jews is that the promised Messiah came. Christ coming about 2,000 years after Abraham, perhaps twelve hundred after Moses fulfilled the promise and then some, more than a Messiah, the Incarnation. Leaving the Muslim addition of a final prophet, Mohammed, for now, the Incarnation greatly simplifies Walters’ quest or choice in all this for its absolute uniqueness. God did or didn’t become man and if he did, ball game over, search done. Everything is truly BC and AD! There is only one man in history that believably claimed to be God. “The Father sent me.” “I and the Father are one,” said Jesus. “He who sees me sees the Father.” “I am the Way, the Truth, The Life, he who believes in me though he be dead yet shall he live and he who believes in me and lives shall never die. “ I have come that you may have life in abundance.” Astounding words and promises never heard before or since. The approximately forty times that the New Testament makes the point of Christ’s identification with God the Father and his divinity, emphasizing that he was not simply a way or a truth but the way, the truth, the life, rather simplifies things. He and his message are there for all ages and people upon examination to reject or accept. It is not as if there are a dozen people who said what Christ said. All that his remarkable and unique words and his life itself call for is open, thoughtful and serious consideration and not by any means unexamined dismissal. This is the proper use of choice and an essential reason why we are free beings rather than the highly programmed automatons that make up the rest of known living creation. Faith, hope, love and life are offered. “I have come that you may have life in abundance.” All that we are required to do, called on to examine, are these remarkable claims and decide, choose. It is no good to try to sluff Christ off as simply a great teacher as many non-acceptors and people of the “spiritual but not religious” mentality often try to do. Far from a great teacher, he and his followers were great charlatans or worse, delusional, habitual liars, demented deceivers or cynical con men if these claims are false. Buddha, by contrast, was by all indications a very good and caring man and an inspirational teacher but this is the very thing that may never be said of Christ and his early followers. If he was, like Buddha, only a man, he was at best a very bad one, more adept at leading simpletons astray than anyone in history. He is the world’s greatest deceiver or at least a very sick person, maybe a bit of both. Christ by his own words and deeds and the fact that no one in history that we know of ever said anything like the things he said and was taken in dead seriousness by multitudes, simplifies our decision making for us. We basically have a multiple choice with only two choices, yes or no. For the rest, there were indeed many good and religious men but Moses knew better than to claim he was the flame in the unconsumed bush and it would never have entered his mind to do so. He knew he was not “I AM” and didn’t pretend to be. Mohammed for his part did not misunderstand Mohammed and suppose he was Allah. He only claimed to be a prophet. Buddha never said he was Brahma. Indeed Buddha was an agnostic who sometimes sounded like an atheist. He refused to even discuss eternity, immortality or God. No! There is no one out there who ever said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” “I and the Father are One.” “Before Abraham came to be I am.” “I have come that you may have life in abundance.” It really can’t be blunter. No reticence, no relativism, but in an era rife with it, it is easy to understand how Christ jangles the pluralism and equality nerves of many as he must have the Dalai Lama’s. In one sense it is probably more pleasant to just ignore the claims Christ made but for a thinking person and that’s all of us at one time or another, how long can that go on? If confronted, considered and then dismissed the reasons for the dismissal should be rather well thought-out and solid, the more honest, the more straightforward the better. Trouble is, for many, rejection comes after abandonment of the morality Christ taught, very weak grounds indeed. Consider rather this, are Christ utterances the words of an egomaniac or a self-deluded dupe, perhaps a hoaxer, a liar, a con man, the front man for a conspiracy? You name it. For those who confront and reject his claim that he is God, the eternal Being, giver of life become man, they seem to be the only alternative choices. For those who prefer to dodge the claims and the confrontation, much easier on the nerves are the bromides and sedatives: ‘all paths lead to God.” “Christ was a wonderful teacher of goodness.” “No one (religious) path is superior.” “There are so many paths we can never know” It seems a shame to wake these sleepers up but waking the sleepers and helping the seekers is precisely what the great gift horse of revelation was intended to do and has been doing since the Old Testament Days of the Jewish Bible. Here we have the proper non-lethal arena for the exercise of our freedom and choice. No need to live a life in mental suspension, in a relativism that usually descends into indifferentism. There the pursuit of truth is often put on a shelf, up and out of the way, sometimes being replaced by the gratification of pleasure pursuits, immersion in the arts or sports or other more or less worthy time filling involvements and distractions. Up on the shelf it is also less likely to interfere with the mindless din and hair-raising tramp of tripe offered up day and night by TV and much popular Hollywood type entertainment. These things are superficially life fulfilling for many of the less demanding. God? Give us Gaga. Under the pervasive sway of the pop media, the culture sags dragging down many floaters beneath its deadening weight. To make matters worse the media actually misleads many by so mixing up fact and fiction that it sometimes takes the historically savvy to sort the mess out. Thus a channel purporting to present history can offer a fact based presentation on the Civil War such as the film “Glory,” and follow it up with a mish mash of fact and fiction about religion like “The DaVinci Code” as if both were of equal value. Those whose sense of reality be it in history or religion is heavily media influenced put themselves at an added disadvantage in the pursuit of Pilate’s question. Artist Siegfried Reinhardt made the point well in his 1959 painting, “Light,” in which Christ, holding his crown of thorns high as if a tambourine, tries to break into a distracted, confused and indifferent age to arouse it and wake it up. The subtitle taken from the New Testament, Luke, 18:8 is appropriate, “When the Son of Man comes again will he find any faith on the Earth?” Distraction and escapism can take many forms. For many back then as the painting clearly shows and probably many more now it was saturation with popular music that provided some of the distraction. Now the fog is thickened by the added blur of an established drug culture with heavy doses of sexual promiscuity with a rate of porn use and co-habitation unheard of prior to the 1960s. The resounding result of this cave in to self-satisfaction with a capital “S” on self according to Michael Franzen in his new book, “Freedom,” is not a new and unprecedented burst of happiness, fulfillment and contentment and only the fool would have expected it would be. Indeed resort to drugs and suicide has never been higher than in our era nor has the creation and spread of new sexually transmitted diseases. Far from it, statistically the happiness gage has never been lower and the loneliness barometer never higher. The discontent gets worse the harder we drive for fulfillment and happiness because we have a basic problem and it flows from the troubled depths of a human nature that is damaged and misdirected. But the gift horse is still there, rejected by some, yes, but it will never be withdrawn. As Christ said at the end of Matthew’s gospel, “Behold I am with you all days even to the end of the world.” X SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY LOOK THE GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH For most of us the important life questions demand answers. We think about them, not always but at times, especially as we grow older. Most of us don’t dismiss them as unanswerable. Our answers vary. Many see the answer in revelation. For an atheist such as physicist Stephen Hawking the key question of how or why we are here or anything is here is answered thusly, “spontaneous creation is the reason why…the universe exists, why we exist…why there is something rather than nothing.” He goes on to say “because there is a law of gravity the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.” To create is to bring into being something from nothing. Problem number one is something including gravity can’t bring itself, create itself, from nothing because it would have to exist first. The obvious problem with this theory is that gravity is something not nothing and law implies a lawgiver. From whence them? But Hawking is warming up to a vital point. If there were ever nothing, even for a microsecond, there would always and forever be nothing. Something always had to be, something always had to exist for there to be something now. What is it, gravity? But, from whence this thing gravity? To repeat, in order to create anything it is necessary for someone, something, anything to first be there, to exist, to do the creating, and to bring it about. Something has to already exist. Something cannot come from nothing on its own because to begin with there isn’t any own. There must first be an “own” an agent, something or else we are faced with the logical absurdity of something coming from nothing spontaneously on its own when own doesn’t even exist yet. Hawking’s gravity theory is practically a definition of impossible. The way out is to say that gravity just always existed. “Because there is a law of gravity,” says Hawking. God-gravity may not exactly be the God of revelation but when the metaphysics of Exodus is rejected this type of thing is often what we get. For most, it just doesn’t cut it. Some scientists like Hawking may be able to believe the impossible but not most believers. Gravity requires pre-conditions, mass for example. What generated the gravity or the mass that produced it? Or is there an eternal mass, and so on and on. No doubt, something has to be eternal. Even Hawking agrees and posits gravity. There is indeed such a law as gravity but what or who legislated it or did it simply legislate itself from nothing? Do we come down to unknowing gravity or an unthinking mass that generated it and that always existed and had in it something called the law gravity to explain existence? One of the many problems with this scenario is science knows of nothing of mass that is not impermanent. We need something eternal. Or is it more likely that the necessary, essential and eternal something we seek and from which all being comes is something thinking and eternal. But now we are inching back toward the metaphysics of Exodus, a drift Hawking would not like. So, why is there any law at all rather than no law and no thing, nothing at all? Why something? There are indeed laws and these laws and the fundamental particles they govern dictate the cosmic regularity that makes our existence possible and they are by no means explained by the Hawkins theory; a theory that could almost be called a weak dodge to avoid what so many scientists are increasingly concluding. Scientists such as Hermann Weyl, for example, who objects that mathematical physics reveals a “flawless harmony that is in conformity with sublime reason.” Hawking’s divine law of gravity is only a part of this flawless harmony not its cause. Physicist Stephen M. Barr adds, “At the root of the physical world…one does not find mere inchoate slime or dust (in the wind) but instead a richness and perfection of form based on profound, subtle, and beautiful mathematical ideas.” For these scientists the answer lies not in the chance of an unexplained gravity that no one can account for and which requires pre-conditions or an eternal mass that is in itself a contradiction but rather in intricate planning. For the atheist like Hawking we emerged spontaneously from nothing or from gravity that is simply inexplicably there and whose existence is left unexplained and unaccounted for. Scientific explanations having at this point reached their logical limit and having thus dead-ended, we are forced to say either the orderliness of the universe has no real explanation outside the most completely odds defying chance or it has. University of St. Andrews philosopher John Haldane writes in his book, “Reasonable Faith,” that it indeed has an explanation, an “extra-natural one…an agent.” And so we move back to Exodus’ “AM.” Increasingly, scientists see remarkable design, sublime reason, and beautiful mathematical laws pointing to something far beyond chance. This debate about the big questions is good, necessary and helpful and hopefully should stimulate searching thought. Again, the great subject under discussion here is a prime reason for and worthy object of mind. It is the most obvious reason, justification if you will, for our wonderful and unique abilities as thinking beings. That we arose from “nothing,” is an impossibility of course for something must come from something. Nothing can come from nothing. An instant of nothing is the death knell of everything. Here the metaphysical question kicks in, a question beyond the realm of chemistry, physics or any of the laboratory sciences. What something? What something must of necessity always exist to make the alternative, nothing, impossible? The resounding answer from revelation in the Book of Exodus as we saw was “I AM.” Our being, all being, everything is the gift of the eternal Being. In conclusion, only nothing can come from nothing. Something cannot emerge into being from nothing by Hawkings’ kind of “spontaneous creation,” or any other way. And more pertinent to this discussion, can perfection of form based on beautiful mathematical ideas arise spontaneously from dumb unthinking gravity or for that matter from nothing at all? Can Hawking’s inexplicable unthinking gravity simply exist without cause or explanation? Such a faith most people cannot swallow. We have a choice again. Is what Hawking proposes a better, more logical and convincing answer for our existence and the existence of everything else than Being, “AM?” Is the existence of intelligent beings from an inexplicable eternal unknowing gravity by sheer chance more logical or would the gift of being from Being be more likely? Truth is not relative. Where does it lie? To summarize, it seems that we have come up against another self-evident truth. It is obvious that something cannot come from nothing. If there were ever nothing, even a split microsecond of it in all eternity there would always be nothing. Put another way, something always had to exist for anything to exist now. In a rather lame substitute for what most of humanity deem God the desperate atheist of the Hawkins school posits gravity. Truth to tell, it doesn’t work well. Wilbur Mills might have said it best. “You will never see proof that God exists only all the evidence.” We will see later that overwhelming proof would make faith impossible and squeeze out to the vanishing point the free will necessary for authentic love of God and neighbor, creation’s purpose. XI THE BIRTHDAY PROBLEM AND METAPHYSICS We of course know that something always existed for the simple reason that something exists now. We exist, you and most certainly me. For sure, I exist. You might be more problematical. “Cogito ergo sum,” as Descartes wrote. “I think therefore I am,” It was nice of him to say so but I already knew it. I knew I existed. It was another one of those self-evident truths that we have to have faith in, the most basic faith of all. I am real and not a delusion, a dream in another’s mind or imaginings, the figment of someone’s imagination. Now, whether you the reader exist or anything else exists outside me is another question. However, I believe you do exist. I must have faith in my five senses and that what they bring to my mind is real and not their own conjuring. They tell me you and much else beside you and me exist, much else is out there. This is a very basic act of faith. We must believe in our senses even though they fool us sometimes. Mind can usually detect when the senses are acting up. We take on faith that things are not constructs designed by some master jokester to trick and mislead us. I know that my memory like my senses is also unreliable at times and I know that Scrooge believed that his senses deceived him, that Marley was just a piece of undercooked beef, or was it potato? Damn memory! But all in all we must believe in our senses when they tell our intellect that outside reality is really real. That it is not just the product of our senses themselves with no connect to anything outside. Some thinkers called philosophical idealists once held this remarkable belief. For them all “reality” was unreal and merely the construct of the senses themselves. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the supreme realist, and realists like to depend on hard evidence, when confronted with their ideas by his friend Boswell refuted them thusly by kicking a large stone and saying ouch! The Church has always revered realism and hard evidence. Even belief in the resurrection as we shall see depends on it. But on the other hand, without the demand for hard evidence any fiction is possible and truth can be anything you want it to be, your truth as good as anyone’s. Imaginative worlds and powers can be out there; utopias conjured up, fictional realms and principalities, space visitors, ghosts in attics and vampires in crypts. You name it! All are possible to the undemanding mind willing to believe without good evidence based on provable or at least reasonable and convincing fact yet some people choose to believe these kinds of things, sometimes the very people who reject the historical evidence for Christ. Without evidence there can be a Cheshire cat in every tree. With it there can’t. Such imaginings captured in fiction can be fun to read but what Johnson is saying is that we must primarily deal with reality not detached mind constructs if we are to attain truth. To do that we must rely on, evaluate carefully then put faith in the evidence of our senses and the conclusions of sound fact based reasoning So, here we are, we have minds far beyond anything else or any other beings that we know of. The fascinating and vital inquiry into truth, Pilate’s question, is precisely what the human mind is uniquely equipped to do and it does make good sense in this area of origins, the big questions of how and why we are here, to look closely at the only person we know of who said not “ I found the truth, uncovered the truth, discovered the truth” but “I am the truth.” Mind and Reason, working with the gift horse of revelation and if finding it cogent can find in revelation a mighty help in the shedding of light on the great metaphysical questions before us. The questions deserve a closer look. Some philosophers, Will Durant for one, reject this approach claiming that theology compromises and invalidates pure philosophy, that we must think and reason without any consideration of a possible revelation. Revelation has to be dismissed. In a sense he was a Pelagian. We can and must do it ourselves. Those who have lived through the calamities of the 20th Century brought about by philosophies like Social Darwinism, Nazism and Communism all of which denied revelation, can’t help but doubt that. And medieval man along with many others did too. Their motto was essentially, we can use all the help we can get or as they put it “credo ut intelligentium,” I believe in order to better understand. Or again, Duns Scotus in the 12th century, “This I believe, but if it be in anywise possible, this I would also know.” Belief, it went without saying, had to work with and not hinder the exercise of that first of all divine gifts, even preceding revelation, reason. Even without Exodus and the rest of revelation, the Church always insisted that the ordinary human mind working on the reality around it could reason to the existence of God. The work of unassisted reason had indeed achieved much reaching a zenith with Plato and Aristotle but then broke into confusion. The message of Exodus delivered to the world outside its first recipients, the Jews, by the Church was taken to heart with gratitude by many thinkers and philosophy began to move again. The nature of God was revealed beyond Aristotle’s dreams. Yes God was the uncaused cause, pure thought, but more. God was pure being whose very essence was to exist. “AM.” The necessary eternal being that makes nothing forever impossible “Whoever sees by faith that God is Being and creation is the gift of being by Being,” has a great advantage on the road to understanding both our world and us. Thus aided they can now see a lot more by reason than before. It was, so to speak, reason on steroids. The myriad dead-ends not to mention dead bodies left by modern philosophies from the materialism of Marxism to the social Darwinism and race ideology of Nazism, both eschewing revelation and even demeaning it, seem to confirm the medieval approach. But still we must always look the gift horse in the mouth. True faith never stills restless reason and never will nor will it discard such a gift as revelation without very convincing reasons to do so. Recently some have walked away because of sex scandals, a very unconvincing reason to do so, for the Church was promised truth never sinlessness. Even without the aid of revealed truth as embodied most especially in Christ, the metaphysician whose science is beyond the laboratories of the physical sciences and also the ordinary person who has never even heard of metaphysics but is one by virtue of his inquiring mind, both realize that Hawkins’ spontaneous creation from nothing is erroneous. The refutation can be stated in several ways. As was mentioned before, “from nothing only nothing comes.” Something always existed for something to exist now. Reverse the logic; something exists now therefore something always existed. Put another way, if for even a split second nothing existed, there would never be anything; nothing would be forever, past, present and future. There would be nothing now. Nothing would win. We would not be here. So, we have a tough problem. We have to fill up the huge gap of infinity stretching forever before we were born and came into being and stretching forever after too. We have to find something eternal to fill it or else there is going to be a little nothing and then we are not here. But we are! We win. But what enables our victory, our existence? What exists forever and prevents nothing’s victory? We are looking for eternal existence, something of or with eternal being, something that always was and always will be. Honestly, I can’t fill the bill. I was born in 1937, celebrated my 73rd birthday yesterday. That leaves me out. I presume you are out too. Even the universe with all its matter, energy and forces like gravity and its heartbeat, time itself, can’t do it. The universe had a birthday too about 13.7 billion years ago according to Ken Croswell in the Dec. 2010 “National Geographic.” And our galaxy, The Milky Way, one of billions in the universe and a rather large and old one as galaxies go is slightly younger than the universe. The whole universe started up with a big bang of a birthday and birthdays are nice but this one raises questions. Who or what was at it? We need something without a birthday. That’s what we are looking for. We know that it, that something, whatever it is has to exist because we exist, because there could never ever have been nothing because something can’t start from nothing and the universe started. Therefore we must ask, who or what was at its birthday party? Who or what set it up? What was there before the universe was born and had its birthday? What is that ultimate eternal something that must be pure existence, have it in its very essence with no cause outside itself or beside itself; eternal being that makes that awful instant of nothing happily impossible? It is not to be wondered that physics will never get to the point of answering these questions which lay beyond laboratory capabilities and are in the realm of reason, logic and philosophy and when physicists like Hawkins leave their field and attempt a metaphysical answer they can sometimes come up with highly unconvincing responses like gravity. So, we are faced with the question of questions. As far as the existence of the universe goes, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of forever. So, what was there before it? Again, what is it that exists forever? With these vital questions we are entering the realm of metaphysics and the questions here push beyond the physical sciences but there is in addition a question even more profound, more basic than those just raised that pushes not only beyond the physical sciences but also beyond even metaphysics and into the realm of revelation and the theology that rests on it. Not who or what but why? Now we are talking motive. Why does anything exist at all? Is there a motive for it all? Why is there anything? Indeed, the greatest mystery might be the why of it, why there is anything at all rather than nothing at all. Nothing seems just as likely if not more so. So then, why is there anything instead of nothing? We know there is an eternal something. There has to be. There is no escaping that but there is a lot of something elses that are not eternal including, by our physical nature, us. The eternal something is here pure and simple in itself and must be self-explaining, self-existing, but not us and everything else with us. Unlike the eternally existing essence or being that prevents nothing, we don’t have to be. Why are we and everything else here? Here we have the motive question, a question of will and to repeat, as such it goes beyond philosophy and metaphysics to that outgrowth and fruition of revelation, the theology of the Church. It is in revelation that we find the solution to the problem and what a solution it is! It’s a gift, a sort of loving, generous birthday gift. That’s what the existence of the universe and us in it is, a sort of tremendous and fabulous birthday present. And we know what’s the motive behind all true presents, generosity and love. Here the Christian metaphysician gladly accepts the help extended by revelation to achieve the most complete picture of our world available to us. Without it the why question is eternally unanswerable but with it our understanding is greatly expanded. The answer revelation gives is love. The reason for creation lies in the goodness of that necessary eternal Being who met Moses in the desert and gave him a name that reflects his essence, “Tell the Israelites “I AM” sent you to them.” The same Being who through evolutionary form and process set humanity going upon Earth as told allegorically in the earliest part of Genesis. The reason for it all is in “AM,” Yahweh, “the Lord,” God, and God’s generous love. The love is magnificently demonstrated in God’s wish to share the two finest gifts possible, the greatest gifts there can be, being and love. In essence they are the same gift. The New Testament calls God love. Since God can acquire nothing that does not already exist in him and that he doesn’t already possess in his being, this is all pure, generous giving love. He didn’t need us but willed us for love’s sake and our sake so that we could feast in love and share the love God freely shared and shares with us. Indeed, God so loved the world, as the New Testament tells, that later He, Being, “AM,” became a being, a creature, a human being, Jesus Christ, and gave Himself to it and for us out of that same generous love in order to reorient creation towards its original goal which had not been completely lost sight of but for many had become severely dimmed, a dimming that is always threatening and which the Church at Christ’s command has been fighting off for two millennia. That goal, that end, that love that lay behind all creation, he had to remind us, is not for death but for love, the gift of abundant life and fullness of being. It’s ours for the effort we make to live and reflect and share God’s love here. What a present! Happy birthday forever! XII A METAPHYSICAL BIRTHDAY PRESENT But, leaving aside for now with regrets the motive, the why question with the answer of overflowing generous love, a return to the first question is in order. The answer to the question of motivation was entirely dependent on revelation but the “what” question is much more susceptible to our unaided reasoning efforts. What is it that fills forever since the universe cannot because it evidently had a beginning? Gravity or mass or matter-energy and answers of that ilk that the materialist must cling to or cease to be a materialist are in themselves very poor ones because all material things are impermanent. They don’t last. They suffer from contingency. All material things and energies, everything composed of matter, atoms, electrons and so forth from galaxies and mountains to molecules and DNA to trees and you and me, all come and go, wax and wane, arrive and depart, grow and decay, none of it shows anything like the eternal staying power of Being. They have being, possess it for a while and then lose it, decline, decay, and die. No material things nor the forces and energies associated with them are permanent but are always in flux. They are always changing, always passing in and out of existence. How can anything like that, something so temporary that it is time doomed, fill up forever? Organic matter, inorganic matter, it all ages. William Golding the author of “Lord of the Flies,” with the big bang origin of the material universe in mind, put it in a rather poetic way: “The universe had a beginning. If there was no beginning then infinite time has already passed and we could never have got to the moment where we are.” In other words, if matter was unnaturally eternal and time being a measure of matter’s change, thus tied to this eternal matter, the time will never come for us, we will never arrive, never get here; that is if the universe was eternal. The mind winces at the thought. And I recollect Golding adding, “I offer you a simple proof that the universe had a beginning,” and then advising not to examine it too closely meaning it is self-evident if you think about it. We know it had a beginning and our time came. And by now we know that though the whole universe may have had a beginning, everything couldn’t. Something didn’t or we would not be here. There has to be something outside the universe so to speak, outside time and very different from it. Something not time doomed. In a nutshell then, we have this great span of time to fill but not infinite time just to get from the beginning of the universe to the moment where we are now, over 13 billion years, but, and here it comes, the big hurdle, there is an unimaginable infinititude to get to the start of the universe during which there cannot be a moment of nothing and obviously something not of the universe has to fill it up. What fills infinity? We are running on reason here with no help from revelation. Reason, in order to avoid God, the eternal Being, a non-contingent, non-material, non-time doomed uncaused cause, to borrow with liberties from Aristotle and Aquinas, by substituting anything material, try as we may or as people like Hawking may, will not do it because of matter’s very impermanent nature. Dismiss Hawking’s gravity and try to fill up the infinite span with something else, a chain of material causes coming and going in line or circle configuration and causing one another forever, stretching infinitely back, or some other such scenario as most materialists must do is also a dodge because these material causes, no matter how many, are still in themselves contingent and no matter how many there are they could never last long enough for what we need, to fill the incomprehensibly immeasurable infinitude. On top of that, an infinite string of material causes causing one another would have to exist without a first cause because a first would mean it was not infinite, that there had first been a void, a nothing before the beginning point. But, without a first cause the whole thing would be uncaused and we know material things don’t cause themselves to exist rather they demand a cause for themselves. Even without revelation simple logic demands an uncaused cause at work somewhere to get us to where we are, indeed for anything at all to be here, to exist now. Aristotle described God as the uncaused cause. Fifteen hundred years later Aquinas put it this way, “Now if there were an infinite regress among efficient (material) agents or causes, no cause would be first.” That would mean the subsequent material causes are uncaused and since they cannot cause themselves or give themselves existence they therefore would not exist. Nothing material would exist. This is what classic philosophy arrived at without the aid of revelation and long before science seemed to confirm their work with the discovery of the big bang. Even without the Big Bang matter screamed out its contingency, impermanence and total incapability to fill forever. And since that time we have come to know the material universe started 13.7 billion years ago. So then, if the material universe or contingent matter is incapable of filling up the infinite, what is? What fills up forever? What has always existed? An uncaused cause it would seem and that of a non-material nature for as we’ve seen, the material can’t handle the assignment. It’s out of its class. Goodbye to materialism. To summarize, nothing permanent has ever been found by the science and the search of man. Everything starts, changes, declines, decays, and demises. Matter, energy, solar systems, galaxies, atoms, nothing is Being but only possesses it for a while and then loses it and gives it up, but not everything. That would be impossible for if it was possible the danger of nothing would raise its ugly head. A split second of nothing dooms everything. That self-evident truth bears repeating because something cannot come from nothing, nothing can. The long history of metaphysical endeavor, pre-dating modern science, tackled this question and reduced it to two basic answers and we’ve been over both. The materialist, often an atheist or an agnostic and usually a secularist, must of necessity cling to the material with all the impossibilities of that answer especially its contingency and impermanence and now in the face even of science, the Big Bang. He is increasingly being backed into a corner. Almost it seems out of desperation and perhaps revulsion against the moral demands of the God of revelation, the materialist will sometimes postulate without any evidence a great many other shadow universes from which the seed of ours was born. The Hawking school favors this idea while still proposing the spontaneous creation out of nothing idea. To repeat, “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe (including ours) can and will create itself from nothing.” But the error here is the same. Something creating itself from nothing is impossible. There can never have been nothing. In order to create anything, something first has to exist. To avoid the problem some try to fill nothing with an infinite string of material universes coming and going in and out of existence ad infinitum without any first cause, in other words, uncaused and just there by chance. The illogicalities are compounded by the fact that there is not a modicum of evidence of any universes besides our own. It is pure materialist speculation to avoid what many are increasingly calling the obvious and it requires such an act of reverse faith that it is beyond the capability of most believers who are usually people of common sense. Most people see the obvious. They hold the eternal necessary something cannot be matter. It is not in the nature of pure matter to be eternal, to be anything other than contingent and passing. If not matter then what? There is only one alternative, something not matter, something non-material and eternal, something most people call spirit. They observe the material world changing, growing, decaying, stars and planets coming and going, passing in and out of existence and see this impermanence and contingency as insufficient for anything eternal and we definitely need something eternal to avoid nothing and to fill up forever. They conclude that the eternal and essential something that we are looking for must of necessity be non- material. Going further, by looking at how all the material stuff around us from gigantic galaxies to microscopic DNA molecules act and work with orderly laws of “flawless harmony” and mathematical beauty, they deduce not only a non-material existence or being but one of great power and intelligence, a “Sublime Reason,” that always existed and most call God by many names. As physicist Janna Levin said, “Why is it that there is this abstract mathematics that guides the universe? The universe is remarkable because we can understand it.” It is a fitting object of mind, our minds. So, it seems what some have called the hidden God is not so hidden after all. He (for simplicity sake we will still use “He” although as said, Christ explained that God is spirit and sexuality applies only to the material realm) has given us a macro and micro universe from galaxies to DNA molecules to contemplate and study and thus revealing himself, as we shall see, in ways profounder than even Sagan’s tablets on the moon. To avoid this conclusion and to explain the existence of thinking life in at least one part of the universe, there are those who will believe almost anything in order not to believe and avoid the gift horse. Some materialists, we have noted, call forth the existence of these myriads of universes, an infinite chain of them for which, as said, there is absolutely no empirical scientific evidence and then speculate that with enough universes the odds are good that something like us, thinking life, will pop up by chance, the Knox’s trunks routine that is mentioned below. Not only is there no evidence of such a thing but little logic either. Though Hawking denies it, it appears to be introduced to avoid the conclusion that the general regularities and particular fine-tuning science increasingly discovers are due to the work of an intelligent cause and creator. A final summation can be restated thus: a chain of contingent causes in themselves has to have a cause. They can perhaps lead into more universes though there is absolutely no evidence of it but they can’t cause themselves. There is need of a first cause. Aquinas, following Aristotle, called it the uncaused cause and agreed with Aristotle that any chain of cause and effect must ultimately begin with an uncaused cause. Any chain or regress of material contingent causes, no matter how long, needs a ground or cause other than itself in order to be. Why is it there? How is it there? Being material and contingent it has no need to be. It must root in something that has existence not from another but rather from itself. Without this first uncaused cause, no effects, no chain, nothing, nonexistence is all. Matter, whether alive or dead, is always tending toward dissolution, decay and demise. There is nothing permanent or enduring about it much less eternal or forever and simply adding to it does not solve our problem, which is to fill up forever. We have this forever gap to fill. More importantly, matter like evolution cannot even explain itself or why it exists, why it is and has being. Evolution cannot account for life because it requires pre-existing building blocks upon which to work. Nor on the moral level can it account for consciousness or altruistic moralities a’ la George Bailey. Increasingly, scientists like Oxford physics professor, Peter Atkins, have come to admit, “we simply do not know how the universe can come into being without intervention.” The intervention, the something we are looking for, what we need, needs to be for without it we are not. Its essence is existence. It has no contingency. It is unchanging, uncaused and absolutely unique in that unlike everything else its essence is to exist. It is existence itself and here we’ll use revelation for the first time as a cap. The interventor is and has to exist, his name is AM. The name conveys a Being eternal and by logical extension, powerful and intelligent. A first cause who simply is and is the cause of all else that is. But all else need not be because the essence of all else is not existence. Himself uncaused, an uncreated creator as different from his creation as eternal Being is different from being. Reason takes us far along this road and with revelation makes a smashing combination that can finally bring sense to the questions that have stayed with humanity from the beginning. This to a great extent is the conclusion many are driven to by metaphysical logic or simple common sense. Reason brings us to the existence of God. Revelation brings us to the essence of God and eventually the motive for God’s creative activity, overflowing generous love. Unaided reason could not arrive at that. Help was needed, the help of revelation. There are the Hawkings and Durants who reject that help of course but many more who don’t. Leaving the origin of the universe and turning to the origin of life and especially intelligent life, for most the chance scenario with its variations is simply too hard to swallow. The typical reaction is “fat chance.” While some in science and academic circles may grab on to it as an escape from belief and the strictures it can bring, chance as a causal explanation for the origin of the biological information found in DNA is accepted by very few serious researchers in the field of origin of life biology today. Even on the scale of billions of years the chance of chance putting together intelligent life is vanishingly small. Consider that the probability of constructing a rather short functional protein at random becomes so small as to be effectively zero, 1 chance in 10 to the 135th, according to Stephen C. Meyer in his essay “The Origin of Life and the Death of Materialism.” There is not that much sand on a beach! This irreducible complexity, the laws of physics, consciousness, all are very powerful arguments and while they cannot amount to laboratory proof of God thereby completely eliminating any need for faith, they do make faith very appealing to the logical, inquisitive and unbiased mind. The essential hiddeness of God mentioned earlier will never be entirely dissipated here on Earth to the extent that Faith, Hope and Love are made unnecessary or actually impossible for being forced. To conclude this section with a final anecdote on the concept of chance as accounting for the rise of thinking life on one of the billions of planets in the universe, many years ago Father Ronald Knox of Oxford addressed the idea this way: There are millions upon millions of travel trunks in the world. “If Scotland Yard found a body in your trunk you would not get away with telling them there are millions and millions of trunks surely one of them must contain a body. They would still want to know who put it there.” We still want to know who put us here. What’s giving us being? Where did matter come from? What’s giving it being? Chance wouldn’t satisfy Scotland Yard and it should not satisfy us.” XIII REASON LEADS TO REVELATION AND AWAY FROM PANTHEISM We have been dealing with challenging subject matter but much of it open to normal reasoning and common sense. The subject is of universal interest and supreme importance to us as human beings and we have been given the tools to deal with it namely mind with its reasoning capacity. These tools need to be commensurate with the task and they are. Like the tell tale crumbs along the forest floor of fairy tale fame, the proper study of our material world will bring us to answers far more rational than mere accident or chance. Mind properly used will eventually lead us to truth. No need for sentinels or monoliths on the moon here. Mind working on the material world around us is enough to bring us, like it did Aristotle, to the uncaused cause and when combined with revelation to the uncaused cause who is also a loving father. Faith and reason are the best two tools we have for our investigation. God, to use the accepted word, is the necessary pre-condition for the astonishing fact that we exist, that anything exists; that there is something rather than nothing. Why not nothing? Why not total blank? As pointed out, it requires nothing and seems so much easier. Yet there is something and a lot of it, a billion galaxies following the most intricate mathematical laws. In the fact that there is indeed something, it is the peculiarity of atheism that in all of this something, all this reality, the only exception to the rule that every effect has to have a cause is its claim that the something all around us, reality itself, the world, the universe, all matter is uncaused… call it spontaneous creation. Call it chance. Most call it “unbelievable,” some irrational, others unscientific still others bull. Causeless phenomena, chance if you will, would be the downfall of all science and sound knowledge and is the first poison fruit of true atheism. Might as well close the labs! And trying to replace God with evolution, as many atheists are prone to do, does not even begin to confront the problem. Far from explaining ultimate reality evolution can’t even explain itself except by that most unscientific of responses-chance! But what we find in the universe is organization and direction. They are the direct opposite of chance and shout out purpose. Nor does evolution allow for life, consciousness or even an altruistic morality in defiance of its central code of natural selection by the survival of the fittest. A George Bailey going off the bridge to save a weaker less fit person is a phenomenon that is inexplicable to evolution without the most tortuous and contorted explanations. In evolution, as E.F. Schumacher put in “A Guide for the Perplexed,” “We are asked to believe that inanimate (dumb, unthinking) matter is a masterful practitioner of natural selection.” The lesser giving the greater what it itself doesn’t have. When we come to the pantheism of the new age variety popular today where belief that everything, all reality, all nature, all matter with the energies and forces that are part of it, all the planets and stars, mother Earth, goddess Gaia, everything including us are part of one great whole and that whole is identical or equivalent to god or the closest thing to god they know, may seem superficially at least to be the opposite of the atheism but in reality it isn’t. They are very much alike for if everything is god or part of god there is no god. The pantheist is a monist hooked on the all is one theme when by now it should be obvious that all is not one by any means. The cause of creation is not part of creation. God is Being itself. Creation is not being itself but has being and that only temporarily. This was reasoned to with the help of revelation long before the big bang discovery apparently confirmed it. There was a beginning and there will be an end. But God by definition cannot have a beginning or end. God had to exist before the beginning or there would have been no beginning because nothing, the cosmos included, can come from nothing. Goodbye monism, for the essence of Being, Exodus’ “AM” is to exist, a vast difference from everything else in that everything else’s essence is certainly not existence or it would be eternal which it certainly isn’t. With everything in the world including us in possession of being temporarily as if on loan, it is an inescapable exercise in odds that nothing would have to triumph. But that will never happen. It bears repeating, as soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that God alone permanently is and all the rest is and is not at one time or another. All else, all mother nature and us have only temporary being. It is this difference that destroys monism. Our being is a gift if you will and who could possibly have known that the gift of permanent being was to be ours too if not told by revelation? That’s the good new that is the heart of the Gospels and epitomized in Christ’s words, “I have come that you may have life and that in abundance.” Monism and pantheism simply will not stand logically or scientifically. They share the atheist’s difficulties and then some. Besides the illogic, the more extreme forms of pantheism demean humanity. How demeaning is it to have intelligent creatures adore, worship or even be influenced in decision-making by non-intelligent entities? The deifying of non-thinking lesser creatures be them forces, energies, planets or stars or whatever, is not to our credit as thinking beings. In a sense this is all déjà vu. Ironically, that old materialist Lucretius who died in 55BC most clearly saw such illogic gaining a foothold in his beloved Rome as reliance on dreams, cards, charms, stars, incantations and magical rites spread among the people. What drove him almost crazy was man’s self-inflicted and degrading enslavement to crude non-thinking things. Science is not equipped to deal with ultimate reality. Reason and revelation can. When all three are abandoned the door is open to gross superstition. Such superstition is rife in our supposedly sophisticated and technological age. Judging from the spread of new age trends and the popularity of horoscopes and “signs,” of the Zodiac, crystals and other mind shackling beliefs, many seem to be doing today what Lucretius complained about over two thousand years ago. This is not exactly progress. Though we of course cannot live without nature, the Sun and our own planet Earth, they nevertheless follow laws and rules of which they as non-thinking entities know nothing. In a word, they haven’t a clue. They follow blindly and unknowingly and should not be elevated as powers of influence or divine status by thinking beings, even primitive ones. Put bluntly, mother Earth and her entourage with or without fields of energy tapable or not, are as dumb as dirt and mindless as muck. Nature has much that is exquisite no doubt but like the flowers and seeds with beautiful and purposeful design, total unawareness and consciouslessness is its status and it should not be romanticized into semi-deities. We who have mind and are aware should not forget that. This is not homocentric by any means, but simply the recognition of truth and reality. The pantheist’s problem is compounded, as was mentioned before, by the scientific fact that the universe and all in it, galaxies, forces, suns and planets, everything had an absolute beginning and will have an end. We too are thus doomed to go with it to oblivion. But maybe we are not doomed. Maybe there is hope for us. We know that something cannot come from nothing. Not to belabor the point but if as the pantheist believes what he calls god, if he uses the word, is part and parcel, identical with the energies, life forces and “streams of being” of the material world and as science tells us all this had a beginning and will have an end, the inescapable implication is that since his god, the god of the monist, is included in everything, god along with everything had a beginning and will have an end too. The problem with that as seen above is it most definitely cannot include everything. Something must have pre-dated the beginning. We are back to square one for as we know if everything had a beginning there would be nothing now. We would not be here. An instant of nothing dooms everything. The pantheist’s god being part of everything, as such is doomed. It cannot fill the bill. We need something apart, something other than all this matter and energy, all this passing phenomenon. The something that always existed cannot have had a beginning of course or a cause outside itself. As we saw, Aristotle and Aquinas called it the uncaused cause. The mass of humanity being master metaphysicians by nature if they put their mind to it and most do at one time or another, sees the need for an uncaused something apart from passing matter, that has no beginning and usually call it the eternal God or the like. And they know the Cause had to be very powerful and intelligent to bring about everything that is and it must be very different from and very separate from what He brought about. God unlike all else, unlike all material things is the essential and absolutely necessary non-contingent, non-material being, the I AM” of Exodus. But here, even with sublime reason and physical science both pointing increasingly to this same conclusion namely the existence of an ever existing intelligence, many are still conflicted because among other things the motive for it all was still missing. Why does the material universe exist at all and we in it? It is here that, as we saw, the gift horse of revelation came to the rescue and helped us escape the miasma of eternal worlds with no explainable purpose or an inexplicable spontaneous creation from nothing with no rational cause. The missing motive, the “raison d’etre” was love, generous overflowing love. That’s the closest we can come to it. With the aid of revealed truth, the application of reason can uncover profound truth. Love is at the center of the Jewish Bible and the Good News of the Gospel. Taking it all together, if the flawless mathematical laws of nature reveal a tremendous intelligence, revelation reveals a tremendous lover who said, “In the end there is faith, hope and love these three and the greatest is love.” The motive revealed! The ultimate mystery, why God created anything since he can acquire nothing, is laid open to the stares of humanity, love overflowing with generosity. XIV THE GREAT GIFT HORSE: AUTHENTIC LOVE AND LIFE IN ABUNDANCE How is love demonstrated, authentic love that is, not media land’s X-rated rendition of sex that masquerades as love? There is quite a difference between love and sex although sex in a marriage quality love is far and away sex at its noblest and most glorious. Of course, the greatest human demonstration of love is to freely lay down one’s life to save another’s. That was done and the cross of Christ became the Christian symbol of love. On a more ordinary level love is often demonstrated by giving gifts. That was done too. “I have come that you may have life in abundance.” That’s a gift horse with a mouth begging for examination. For most gifts it would be impolite to inquire of the cost or check the label. In days long ago before autos if the gift of a horse was made it would be gratefully accepted without examination or question. It would be considered very bad form, a great discourtesy, to inquire about the age of the gift even if old dobbin appeared to be on his last legs. But when purchasing a horse or anything else things are different. The buyer would want to know the soundness of the horse and precisely how old the horse was and would often ascertain the age by checking the wear and tear on the animal’s teeth, no tires or odometer being available and the use of horseshoes making a foot check very unreliable. But because horses were not known to slip on false teeth, the teeth were a reliable way to check. With the gift horse of revelation we are asked to buy into something infinitely more valuable and important than a horse and with much more serious implications. We have to look the gift horse of revelation squarely in the mouth so that our hope in its promises will not be in vain. Is that horse of eternal life viable? It is only right and proper, necessary and fitting to consider the teeth in the offer of life eternal and abundant. We want our hope to rest on solid ground. But, above all, the offer should not be shelved or ignored, as the subjects in the Reinhardt drawing seem to be doing. If the offer is rejected out of hand and as Pascal’s famous wager indicates he thought rejection a foolish choice so long as it does not empty reason of meaning, for with so much to gain thought Pascal, what’s lost by a little faith and hope. Nevertheless, the reasons for accepting revelation should be cogent and worthy of a rational thinking being. So far we have emphasized many of those reasons. There is another consideration. There are serious obligations to be considered in following Christ namely the love of God and neighbor that He demands, not requests, of us and all that that entails. The love that lay behind creation in the first place was to be reflected in that creation by the only creatures capable of doing it, human beings. We are not talking here of the trained, learned or instinctive loyalty and devotion that some of the lower animals display but the love of creatures with intellect and free will. Creatures, who can, and here’s the rub, refuse to love. This is what happened early on in that garden of Genesis and it has disturbed creation ever since. Call it the original sin. The duty to love is great but almost invariably involves sacrifice. Thankfully, Christ assured us that his yoke is sweet and his burden light. Love and God’s grace and forgiveness make it so though as human beings we know it is not always exactly easy. It should be obvious that the love here being discussed is not Hollywood sex saturated “love” as so much of the world thinks of love but authentic Christ-like love that implies sacrifice and the giving of self to the beloved, especially to spouse, family, neighbor, stranger even to the point even of turning the other cheek. It’s heroic and most of us are not heroes but God’s helping grace can at least make the goal approachable. This is humanity’s glory and greatness and about as easy as passing a camel through the eye of a needle but as Christ explained, with God’s help, a help even do-gooders need, all things are possible even real genuine love. For “my wayers” and the like, deeply involved in self-love even to the point of narcissism it’s almost impossible but again with God’s help a life can be turned around. The big obstacle here is pride. Small wonder the ancients of both the Classical and Christian periods considered pride the most deadly sin, more so even than greed or lust. Lust can dissipate and rationality return but pride is often forever. Like Dante’s frozen hell it prevents movement. It blocks change and makes conversion, to use an unpopular word, all but impossible and it blinds one to all concerns outside self. Thus it can make looking the gift horse in the mouth rather difficult. For those who do look but finding the offer unconvincing and turn it down, at least the reasons should be of the very best for the loss can be great. It makes good sense to look at the great offer of life eternal, the great gift horse, with open mind and heart and it is up to each one of us to do so, to evaluate it fairly. Pride may indeed have been a major stumbling block historically in this regard but for the handicapped generations of our epoch just understanding exactly what love is can be an additional problem. Love has been so distorted and mythologized by Hollywood as to make it beyond the comprehension of some. Because love is at the core of creation and the Gospel’s good news, St. Paul described it in practical and concrete terms for the Corinthians in his first letter to them. What follows is an attempt to apply what he wrote then to now thus distinguishing authentic love from counterfeits. Love is very closely related to the word give. It is not synonymous with sex as so much media portray it but faithful sex can be a truly noble expression of love. On the other hand, aberrant sex can debilitate and retard growth of authentic love. In a pornified, sex-saturated society, sex frequently is taken for love and often drives actual love from the field creating a mini-morality ideal for mini-people for whom making self-sacrifice for the sake of another at great personal inconvenience is almost a foreign concept. A good gage of such a society is the open season it declares on its own progeny. It is an unequal war with the more powerful destroying its own pre-born offspring usually on the altar of convenience. Abortion is not love and fifty five million abortions since Roe is a national disgrace. But grabbing all the gusto you can, can do a lot of damage. Sexual continence or purity to use a word falling from vogue, common prior to the 1960s, is currently deemed impossible. Moral robustness is not part of the present’s resume’. The permanence and commitment of real marriage are assiduously avoided in favor of shacking up, to use the older terminology. Cohabitate is the preferred term now. When a marriage does happen it doesn’t resound with the rugged love and devotion of the traditional Christian wedding vows but is rather surrounded with pathetic pre-nuptial agreements backed up by no fault divorce laws. For this kind of mini-generation with its almost 50% divorce rate, is it surprising that 25% of its newly conceived offspring usually end up in the abortion clinic slop bucket? This kind of “love” can be down right deadly. In N.Y.C. the abortion rate is about 40% and for African Americans in the city the rate is a ghastly 61? This is not the love Christ came to inculcate. Many in such a self-enshrined generation know little of his love. They are media’s offspring and can rarely get his message there. Unfortunately, they are part of an era hardly up to the real thing upon which real love and marriage is based. To such a mini-generation, the words of the traditional Christian marriage vow based on authentic love and requiring a true commitment to someone other than self are as incomprehensible as Sanskrit, ” Forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, in good times and bad, till death do us part.” That’s love! It seems to be in dwindling supply today. One reason is not hard to find. Roe vs. Wade taught well the deadly lesson involving the placing of self and self’s “choice” number one, above everything, even above life, the life of one’s own new child. This is not love, quite the opposite and America has not been the same since. The present loveless mini-morality has high costs. It leaves behind a world full of walking wounded, hurt and fatherless children if they have not been completely robbed of life by “choice,” often lonely, embittered and impoverished spouses, usually women, and many victims of STDs including deadly AIDS spread by promiscuity and drugs with costly government programs to try to contain the damage. Having thus already burdened the times, the present pop culture rallies to fight any limits on abortion at one end of the life spectrum and supports assisted suicide at the other though education in illnesses, palliative care and pain containment are more available now than ever before. They can make a life drawing to a close comfortable, honorable, meaningful and even love producing. What is often lacking is the love that makes the personal and sometimes monetary inconvenience of caring for another, even a “loved one,” more than just bearable but even love and life fulfilling. Good Samaritan type love can be very inconvenient. By avoiding it many think they can construct a lifetime full of “fun” and freedom from “burdens” meaning commitments of time, money and self to other than self. Many extensive studies show how tight the “cool” swinging secular segment of society is compared to the odious church going gang of “hypocrites” when it comes to helping others. The self –sacrifice of authentic love that such helping commitment involves is not frequently to its liking but it has a real weakness for pets and spends in the area of 45 billion dollars on them annually all the while downing bottled water to the tune of 16. 8 billion dollars a year while justifying abortion because of the lives of poverty the victimized children may have had to face! Very money sensitive, it often decries the Church’s “wealth” without examining the forms it is in, often property and buildings in beneficent use as schools, hospitals, nursing homes, leprosaria and AIDS wards where 25% of the world’s victims are cared for, not to mention orphanages and facilities for the poor and destitute and churches open to all the public, rich and poor, at no charge. Chip into the basket whatever you want or nothing. We’re describing the giving-ness that is part of authentic love. Try getting into an important museum, art show or rock concert for nothing! There is hypocrisy out there but not where many think. Most clergy, for example, get room and board and live on hardly more than token salaries. The motivation, love of God and neighbor. All this the media overlooks in favor of concentrating on the 4% who broke their celibacy vows and a hierarchy so unused to this sort of thing as to botch its handling. Meanwhile we hear of farm aid, AIDS aid concerts and such by mega stars with mega salaries that love the poor though they won’t let them into their concerts without paying. And not many live as poor as the poor old Pope living the monk’s life in his simple two room flat in the Vatican. Not knowing the strictures often attached to gifts to the Church including the sometimes binding intentions of those who gave and the purposes and works to which the “wealth” was to be put, today’s critics condemn, nevertheless, all the while frequently spending bundles on animals, rock concerts, sports events, vacations and other entertainments and diversions. Interestingly, the annual budget for running Vatican City is less than Dutchess County’s here in N.Y. State. Criticism based on ignorance or bias is not love. The idea that love may mean that we are supposed to take up one another’s crosses and burdens, to give and give, goes down hard. Donations of hard earned money to those more in need aside, the giving of time, of self until it hurts, that’s love. None of this is easy even in the best of times, which this isn’t. In this era of self- aggrandizement, for many people it borders on the impossible though how else love is to rise above mere talk, words and posturing, is a mystery. There are of course many exceptions to this bleak portrait of a morally decrepit era, perhaps more exceptions than we know and there are many exceptionally good people perhaps more than we can imagine since they seldom make it into media land or the nightly news. But the number of complicit is so vast as to more than sufficiently stain the portrait of our time. According to Government statistics kids in single parent homes are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids from intact families with both parents on the scene and 21% of American kids live in poverty. Abortion was to solve that problem, as if killing the innocent can solve anything, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions and intentions not suffused with authentic love are very dangerous, they can kill you. What you do in the privacy of the bedroom is nobody’s business? Tell it to the kids alive and in poverty or dead, the 50 million missing due to abortion. The plague of missing fathers, deadbeat fathers, burdened single women and impoverished children in this very rich nation is a direct legacy of the moral meltdown commencing in the 1960s. That meltdown, in spite of all the singing about peace, love and flowers, swept away a lot of authentic love. Theodore Hesberg of Notre Dame University said that the best thing a father can do for his children is to love and be faithful to their mother. Now that’s authentic love and a sure remedy for much heartbreak and poverty, more effective than any expensive government program. But it’s difficult and so not part of the resume of the times for many people. Difficult is not “in,” but music was and is and in the 60s “making love not war” was sung about with a straight face by thousands! In the mind of the time and the college crowds chanting it however love was synonymous with promiscuity and the promiscuity, especially the homosexual variety, helped bring us the AIDS epidemic, with a boost from the newly established drug culture, in less than twenty years. And sad to tell some of the popular rock groups at the time helped promote that culture by their songs and style. The toll in lives so far is more than 400,000 dead from AIDS with about 18,000 additional deaths each year. This is not authentic love. It is “make love not war“ type love and killing more people than the war they were chanting about and protesting. Apparently the road to hell can be paved with song too. Viet Nam, took 70,000 Americans lives. The irony is sad and painful. Sad too, wars sometimes have to be fought but Viet Nam was avoidable with a better understanding of the situation in South East Asia at the time. This is much easier to see long after the fact. But, on the other hand, no other way worked to get rid of Hitler or eighty years earlier to end slavery and save the U.S. union. And seven hundred years before that Europe would have fallen to aggressive and faith driven Islamic invasions, invasions that had captured most of Spain and penetrated into France in the West and in the East later captured Constantinople renaming it Istanbul and then advanced all the way to and almost captured Vienna had not the Christians organized Crusades to try to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land, save Constantinople and later Vienna and in general fight off Islam’s aggressive expansion. In 849 St. Peter’s itself was sacked by Moslems and Rome almost taken. It happened again in 916 but it wasn’t until 1096 that the Pope called for a Crusade. It was not a retaliatory attack on Mecca, the Moslem holy city, for their assault against Rome. Indeed Mecca was never attacked by the Crusades. Rather it was for the legitimate objectives mentioned above. There are those who characterize the Crusades as acts of European aggression or imperialism. By that kind of rational the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 was a case of American expansion and aggression. Singing about peace and love doesn’t help too much in those unavoidable situations when war is just about forced on a people for singing about peace and love doesn’t make it so. If those distant generations had sung about peace rather than fighting for it the West might well be a realm of Islam or of goose-stepping Nazis today. And, if we can handle more irony, many of those singing out against war in the 1960s were strong supporters of legalized abortion, rampant promiscuity’s deadly stepchild, in the 1970s. In effect they declared war and made war against their own. Their dream came true in 1973’s Roe decision and. by 2010 poof! Fifty million new American lives were gone. No war like that had ever been seen, Where had all the flowers gone indeed! This was not authentic love, far from it. It was authentic love however that infused the creative work of “AM,” the eternal Being who generously gave life and being to us and only asks us to love in return. It was authentic love that revealed that work and it’s meaning to humanity first to the Jews and later through Christ to all of us. The message is clear, we are here to love one another as the Father loves us, to learn authentic love and practice it. There is no better way to do that for most of us here on Earth than in the married state that Hesberg was talking about. Marriage, like all schools can be difficult but it is our best laboratory and classroom for learning the meaning of love and practicing it. Many people quickly discover in marriage what it takes to make love work. True marriage encompasses a frail humanity really learning love. Two people at first and often more later really learning to love one another even when “burdening” and sacrifice are a part of it. But millions still bring it off, this wonderful thing called marriage and family, even in this toxic society. One way to tell love is working is when you achieve more true satisfaction doing for others often at the expense of doing for self. Many work a lifetime chasing after happiness by putting themselves first and never achieve anything beyond a quickly passing elation. The irony is that the solid satisfaction bubbling often into joy and happiness comes in pursuing help and happiness for others. No doubt about it, love is often a labor of love but untold millions have and are at work making it work often in the marriage classroom. They are among the world’s great lovers. The message at the core of revelation is clear. The motive for all that is is God’s love. We are here to prove that free creatures will choose to love one another and thus overcome betrayals, abandonments, hatreds and worse. But the message is under great stress today. In the hands of quite a few, especially when faith falters, the message of revelation is a hot iron quickly dropped in spite of its promise of life in abundance. Faith falters for various reasons with intellectual doubt often taking back seat to the abandonment of the moral strictures that are part of revelation and form the foundation of authentic love in action. They are neatly summed up in the Decalogue but are as old as the human conscience. Sexual temptations, present in every age, are in our pornified time especially ubiquitous and often pushed flat into the face on a media platter. Pascal marveled even in his time at the fact that many men and women taken in by the ever popular pleasure equals happiness con-game, became indifferent to the loss of the fulfillment of their being in an eternity of abundant life, a banquet of it. Many get lost, enslaved by thoughtlessly acquired fallacious and damaging habits and ideas. They sometimes fall into a despairing sea of non-caring. But the love of “Our Father,” as Christ taught us to address the one who created everything, never gives up. Later, specifically though not exclusively in Part XXI which treats of the confirming power and authentication of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, we will examine the ways that the good news of revelation in general can be confirmed and authenticated beyond what has already been said about how greatly it advanced the understanding of the origin and purpose of our existence and enabled us to achieve more consistency and rationality in our philosophical understanding of creation than had ever been achieved before. The Greek philosophers had made some notable advances especially Aristotle’s God as pure thought and as the uncaused cause but they were far from advancing to God as pure Being whose essence is existence itself, the necessary eternal being that makes possible all being and makes our greatest enemy non-being, nothing, impossible. Many back then were also unable to rise above strong polytheistic and pantheistic tendencies coupled with the idea of an eternal uncreated universe. Bereft of revelation’s aid, it was the only way of avoiding the void of nothing that would make everything impossible Revelation and Christian philosophy, long before the big bang theory, had moved far beyond those ideas. But before pursuing a further authentication and confirmation of revelation, a deeper and closer look at “Our Father” is in order. XV HE”S ALWAYS ON THE PORCH To explain the persistence of his Father’s love for us, especially when we have become in our own view of things, “losers,” beyond repairing, beyond caring, despairing, tired and defeated, cynical, down on everything, perhaps tied to habits of life destructive to ourselves or others, unable to kick them or lift a spirit killing mind set, down on everything, the government, the world, sometimes ourselves most of all, maybe young and the “fun” is beginning to wear thin, maybe older and feeling played out but fearing that any late change would be too difficult, even smack of hypocrisy, no matter, it’s all the same to Our Father, the “AM” the eternal loving Being who created us out of overflowing generosity and love and who became a man, Jesus, to help us. For us he told a story, in fact he told several of them. They are called parables. He told of a great feast thrower who so wanted no one to miss the party that he sent his workers to the highways and the byways to beat the bushes for each and every one of us to get us to the feast on time. It was no ordinary feast but the banquet of life prepared for us from the beginning of time. He even provided time for people without the proper attire to go home and change, to take time to make needed changes in their way of living suitable for attendance at such a loving banquet. This is the authentic and overflowing love Our Father, the thrower of the great feast, the great banquet of abundant life and the determined bush beater, has for us and how determined he is to get as many of us to it as he can. That’s love! The same kind of love that created the world in the first place and that he wants us, thinking creatures made in his image, to fill it with now. Meanwhile, to help keep us imperfect and often floundering souls afloat in the rough seas of life, Christ came and launched a boat, the great hospital ship known as the Church, sometimes called the Bark of Peter. Christ, Son of the Father, identical to the Father in Being came to us, became man and appointed Peter the great fisher of men captain of the ship. Christ, truly human, truly God, great bush beater, fisher of men, great seed sewer knowing some seed will fall on stony ground, nevertheless became the crucified one who exemplified authentic love to the last degree by dying for us. There is no greater love than to lay down ones life for another. But before he died he gave us ways to always remember, to keep in mind the tremendous love that he and the Father, Our Father, who sent him has for us. For one thing, he told us to call God “Our Father” and before he went to his death he asked us to do something special in remembrance of him. To remember him in the breaking of the bread, the Mass. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he said at the Last Supper, the first Mass. And for almost two thousand years now the Church has done just that and bid everybody be there on the first day of each week to remember and say thanks. In fact, that’s what Eucharist mans, “giving thanks.” And he told parables. He knew people loved stories and they would help them remember. Two love stories in particular are especially well remembered. People took to heart and still do the story of the shepherd who loved the lost sheep so much and fearing it would be devoured by wolves, left all the others, the safe ones, to look and look and look until he found it. He was called The Good Shepherd and is often pictured as happily carrying the lost one safely on his back. We of course know who the lost one is. We didn’t have to be told that. Then there was the story of the old Father pacing back and forth on the porch, ditched and abandoned by his cool fun loving son who had taken off for the Playboy Mansion in the next county. There he had a ball, had a great crowd of friends but then things went wrong. Hard times hit, a terrible famine and recession, and the so-called friends in turn ditched him when he ran out of money. He ended up at something like the municipal dump scrounging for food with the pigs. He is called the Prodigal Son. The hospital ship is full of them. But that’s not the end of the story. The Father never stopped loving, waiting, hoping, standing on the porch, pacing day in and day out as the years went by, looking down the long road from home in the direction he last saw his beloved but lost son. For years he looked and hoped and then he saw him, a tiny dot way off. He was coming home. He was sure of it. It was he! He called out in sheer joy and happiness but there was an older brother who had never left, a good, loyal and hard working son whom the Father loved greatly too. The Father was distressed that this son was not happy also. But this son resented the return of his prodigal brother and may even have called him a phony, a hypocrite, coming home because he was broke, dropped by his friends and nowhere else to go. Yes perhaps, somewhat probably but no matter, whatever the imperfect and mixed motives, his son had turned around, he was coming home. He was overcoming that deadly enemy, pride that sadly stops so many lesser men in their tracks. That in itself said something to the Father, said a lot. There was enough love and humility in the boy to make the turn around; enough to keep him from despair, from throwing everything away; enough to keep him from going off the bridge, this the Father knew and told the other son, let’s have a party, kill the fatted calf. Yes, you guessed it. It was going to be another feast, a banquet of life and that in abundance. Evidently Our Father is very fond of parties. So, the Father saw his lost son coming back home. That’s all that mattered to the old man. The motivation may be mixed but for the Father it was enough. His love could fill in the gaps. It can cover multitudes. Our Father actually ran off the porch to meet his son struggling to return home, kissed him. The stunned kid only said “ Father I have offended you and am unworthy of your love.” Don’t throw me a party I don’t deserve it. Just treat me like a hired hand and not as your son. But Our Father would have none of it. There was going to be a party you bet, and what a party! There would be life, eternal life in abundance overflowing. The son’s decision to return home and his few words to his father whatever the human, mixed and less than perfect motives behind them might have been was enough for Our Father and with tears of joy streaming down his weathered face, the Old Man, He who IS, The Great Spirit as native Americans like to call him, he whose love created everything and was the very motive for creation and for our being, whose love wakes and shakes the hardest hearts, killed the fatted calf and the feast that will never end began. XVI PRODIGAL SON LITE Such persistence Our Father has! Quite amazing. All else may fail but not the Creator’s love. We can fail and absolutely turn down the helping hand, spurn the always-proffered love, true, but that love will pursue us right to the grave. As poet Francis Thompson expressed it graphically in his poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” “I fled him down the nights and down the days. I fled him down the arches of the years…From those strong feet that followed, followed after.” He fled but it did no good. Yet, it must be repeated, great as the love is, Our Father, the Hound of Heaven, cannot allow it to overwhelm us lest we lose our freedom to say “no.” Without that freedom, dangerous and destructive as it has been and can be, love becomes impossibly forced and forced love is no love at all. That kind of love would be the true hypocrisy. The danger with freedom is it leaves open loss, the risk that the son will decide never to come home. The addled are excused. It’s the prodigal son lite who is in the danger. He’s the one who refuses to turn around. He is often a victim of that hubris so feared by the Greeks, the overweening pride called deadly by the Christians. It swells one’s self so into one’s self as to be blinding, binding and immobilizing; no room for change, frozen. It’s the pride sometimes expressed in the self-important glow of “I’m too far gone.” Such people often think their evils are more special, long running and unforgivable than anybody else’s and they are so self important that they actually believe it. But really, as we know, all it takes is a “Father I have offended your love.” “I just didn’t know how much you loved me.” Though the Father is always on the porch waiting, it rankles Prodigal Son Lite’s proud little, almost Grinch little, heart to, as he would likely put it, go crawling back. He is likely to consider a simple apology or admittance of a mistake groveling. I will never eat crow, No turn around for me. I made my bed and will lie in it. This is the attitude. He’ll respond to nothing not even authentic fatherly love. He’ll stand alone and defiant or not at all. This is the phony existential bravura that he’s swallowed, often media and movie fed, all his life. He hardly knows authentic love at all, just the self-love and self-realization held up to him for years as the end all of life’s ideals. He knows not how to respond to the genuine article if he even recognizes it. Prodigal son lite would rather starve with the pigs than go back to the Father. Anything but submit is how his rather simple mind sees it. My way or no way, stand tall, defiant, face to the storm and other assorted self-deceiving and hackneyed hogwash. This is why pride is always ranked at the top as the dumbest and deadliest sin. It’s as if in Dante’s frozen hell prodigal son lite has locked himself up tight, immovable and immobile. He can’t make it over that hill on the road called pride to make it back home. He made his bed and Father or no Father on the porch; always-extended hand or not, he is going to lie in it. He refuses love! Pride can be that blinding. Similarly immobilizing is the equally sad and related case of the love blinding fear of hypocrisy. It is as if sorrow must be inhumanly perfect to win the Father’s hand. No doubt the hypocrite is to be disdained but fear of becoming one must not mislead us into believing we must lie to ourselves or to Our Father. The Prodigal was not required by the Father to claim his life away was fun less, that sinning was joyless, pleasure less, profitless. That is not needed. All that is needed is something like this: “Father, I had no idea of how much you loved me. I didn’t fathom your tremendous love, never realized how valuable I was to you and when people told me I didn’t listen, didn’t hear, didn’t absorb it. No! I had no idea of such love for me and how priceless I am in your sight and if I had realized it I don’t think I could ever have left you and spurned your love. If my sorrow is shallow, even in my weakness a little self-serving, please make up for it with your generous loving care for me. Help my sorrow.” Or, simply the real Prodigal Son’s “ Father I am not worthy of your love, not worthy to be called your son.” Something like that and it will be done. A deliberate decision to choose to love Our Father in return for all the love and life bestowed by him on us is very human and if difficult for some, very possible with God’s loving help. Just ask. Remember Christ who knows the depth of his father’s love for us and his own love, which is the same, revealed to us the abyss of his mercy and understanding by using simple stories. These stories are the greatest of love stories and are designed to bring out love in us, to help us reflect Our Father’s love if only a little bit. That’s primary. Secondary is the sorrow for wrongdoing that flows naturally from love no matter how weak and faulty. Like leaven, a little love can go a long way. The sorrow can be tied to feelings but it is more a realization of the mind. The feelings are incidental. If present they can be helpful in moving the mind but they can be entirely absent too. Feelings and tears are an accoutrement. If they happen fine but they are not essential for true sorrow. Some show feelings and some never do. Often they are passing and in reality they are often not a very reliable gage of sorrow. A final word about those who like to “break all the rules” and take seriously other popular media claptrap is in order. Most rules and commandments are there to encourage love or protect others from the damage caused by the lack of love. The accumulated boiled down wisdom of centuries, of saints, prophets, philosophers and thinkers and simple ordinary people who have been through it and have seen and understood, only confirms the soundness of these rules and commands as summarized in revelation and called the Decalogue or Ten Commandments. What a gift to the wise they are! They well post the road we all travel not denying healthy leeway and room for adventure but without the people damaging disasters and detours to nowhere that come with their violation. Offending these rules creates havoc and often harms others and is called sin. If a feeling of sorrow is desired but seems lacking or hard to come by it sometimes helps to look at the people hurt or damaged by our actions resulting from the violation of these rules. They are people like us, not perfect but still not deserving what they got because of our failure to achieve the love Our Father created us for and expects. This is what sin usually comes down to, unwillingness to shoulder the personal sacrifice love often requires. But when finally grasping, glimpsing the Father’s love for us epitomized not by parables alone but by the ultimate sacrifice on the cross, a sacrifice that would have been willingly made even if you or I had been the only humans who ever lived, then we can sincerely say, in the words of the old Latin Mass, “mea culpa, mea culpa,” and “Domine non sum dignus.” “My fault, my fault…Lord I am not worthy,” Father, I gratefully let your love take over and do what I stumble at doing and did so poorly. Let it heal me, and my victims too. Like the Prodigal you may believe firmly that you are not worthy of the fatted calf and the great welcome home. Our Father does not agree. There is the feast awaiting all who learned love here no matter how faltering and late in life. None of us is worthy, all have faults and failings but the Father is still on the porch waiting for us nevertheless. Don’t harden your heart. God’s help, called grace, is always there just for the asking. When in the 5th Century AD a priest from Britain called Pelagius said we must do and achieve our salvation ourselves without God’s help or grace, Augustine and the Church denied it and condemned him when he persisted. We all, saints and sinners, need the help of Our Father, a help called grace and sometimes called amazing. One great grace is the bark of Peter, the great lifeboat that is the Church. If you have left the home of faith or jumped the great hospital ship, the door is always open and the gangplank always down. Don’t look at the gift horse and turn away. It is well to recall the “Hail Mary.” It’s been a favorite prayer of the ship’s captain, crew and passengers for a thousand years or more, especially the second part of it. “Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” All have sinned and could use some of Our Father’s loving forgiveness. The poet Greg Norbet paraphrasing the Old Testament Prophet, Hosea, captured the thought in verse. “Don’t let pride keep us apart/ Come back to me with all your heart.” XVII THE NATURE OF THE BEAST Here’s a sad story but true; perhaps the saddest story ever told. Once upon a time, a long time ago, everything we wanted or desired was not only good but good for us. Our natural longings coincided with the will of God and all was well. The things we wanted were not, as the saying goes, illegal, immoral or fattening. In other words once upon a time the natural was synonymous with the good and desirable. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. The natural no longer necessarily equals goodness. The two were once the same but have become sundered. Nature, both internal, our human nature, and external, meaning the rest of nature, often gang up on us in the form of unhealthy compulsions and natural disasters. It’s a fine kettle of fish we find ourselves in. What has happened, why is it that “what nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man,” as songwriter Tom Lehrer wrote? Why are our human desires often deranged? Once, in the words of the old song, “doing what comes naturally” was perfectly safe and good. It was the way to peace, contentment and happiness. Now it can be damned dangerous even destructive and is often the formula for disaster and despair. Our desires have moved from order to chaos, sometimes-addictive chaos. In some instances we have become slaves to them and our impulses, the very thing St. Paul complained about when he wrote that often the good that he wants to do he doesn’t do and what he would not do that he does. That’s how conflicted and divided we have become! It might be said that now we no longer really have natural desires just ones bearing careful watching. Natural and good, once one and the same are no longer. Now they are sundered. Why? What happened? Professor Paul Griffiths of Duke University explained that, “we lack natural desire because our desires have been removed from their proper (and truly natural) arrangement.” The original harmony was lost to such a degree that some argue we should even avoid the typical uses of the adjective “natural” when used to modify or describe a particular human appetite because the core meaning in the context of “a harmonious response to a gift of the Creator” is gone. Henry Sidgwick concurred. He wrote, “give a special precision to the meaning of “natural” since in a sense… any impulse is natural but it is manifestly idle to follow nature in this sense,” and dangerous! So distorted has the meaning of natural become that an ethic built on it might consider theft, rape and murder as natural as love and philanthropy. The meaning of the word has become so confused as to mean almost anything you want it to. For one person, heterosexual is natural but another argues that homosexual is just as natural. It seems almost to come down to, if you like it, it’s natural. But there have to be limits some of them drawn, thankfully, by that mysterious entity called conscience and for safety sake by law. Doing what comes naturally could land you in jail. But to repeat, once upon a time, before its distortion in that primal, prideful and disastrous use of free will told about in the allegorical garden of Genesis, there was harmony. But that resounding act of defiance by our forefather, “Adam,” against the will of Our Father, the “I AM,” given Moses when he requested a name, that disaster that Catholic theology calls The Fall or the Original Sin put an end to it. Much of the natural and the good permanently parted company in that clash of wills. The natural and our very nature as part of it, that once coincided beautifully with the will of our loving Father, no longer does. Now they are very often in conflict, at war so to speak. This is the tragedy of the Fall. The meaning of natural originally was obviously very different from many of its current meanings but why? To reiterate, something went terribly wrong to accomplish that tragedy and bring about the present great derangement. For a long time the Church has called it Original Sin and it along with the Resurrection are often termed its easiest dogmatic teachings to demonstrate. The fallout from the damage done to our natures by the Original sin is all about us every day. Just look around or pick up a newspaper. No doctrine of the Church is more obvious, apparent or easily demonstrated. The human race seems to have long been aware that something had early gone wrong. Almost every culture has something along the lines of an early fall from grace story, a garden once lost long ago. Three millennia ago the writers of Genesis using the parable of the allegorical apple assessed the problem as an early act of defiance and disobedience. The original hope for the right use of free will had been dashed in the clash. Man had used it in some way Our Father had commanded not to. The motive often given is pride. But the original goodness of human nature was affected and damaged, its original natural God given inclination to the good enfeebled and impaired though not annihilated. The idea of annihilation became central later on in the Reformation’s erroneous teaching of total human corruption and depravity resulting from the Fall. The Church maintained in the face of this assault, as it had always done, that the original goodness of our nature was wounded, deformed, but not entirely destroyed or eradicated. A nature created good by God Our Father could not be made into something totally bad but it could be compromised and that could happen in only one possible way, the abuse of our freedom. A decision to use the gift in a way its giver did not want. As Gilson puts it in “The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy,” “The rectitude of the will (was) lost but recoverable” with God’s helping grace. It is good to know that for, as the Church teaches, weak as we are we can still will to cooperate with that helping grace or for that matter refuse to. Our free will has not been so totally corrupted as to be unable to choose the good even though it often doesn’t. Original Sin may have weakened our will with regard to its original orientation toward always going for what is good for us and our neighbor but it did not remove the freedom to do so. What a wonderful world, as the song says, and it is indeed, but how much more wonderful it might have been with no wars, murders, lies, betrayals, abortions, Auschwitzs, evils of all sorts! Could all this have been avoided? Why didn’t God Our Father, make us perfect creatures, his perfect children. Not just a wonderful world then, we’d have a perfect one. Or would we? That way no more evil, true, but unfortunately there could be no more love either because as we know, love needs freedom to be love. Otherwise it is sham. And, besides, it would also be impossible! Impossible for God? How is that possible? If God had made creatures that were perfect, that is non-contingent and immutably good; he wouldn’t be making creatures anymore but beings identical to himself. In other words he would be making himself. They would not be creatures at all they would be him, the Creator. Creator and creature having the same perfections would mean no creatures anymore, just God. It would be impossible to tell creature from creator. They would be one and the same, identical. But, God as we know him by logic and through revelation is impossible to replicate. More than one God is a logical impossibility since they would all have to be identically perfectly one and the same. Back to square one. God sets natures it is true but evil flowing from the misuse of freedom is imperfection and can only belong to creatures. A perfect creature is as contradictory as a square circle. There are circles and squares; there is Creator and creature. Because God set the nature and definition of circleness and squareness, they are eternally different and to make them the same means to destroy their natures so that they are no longer things called circles, no longer things called squares anymore. They would no longer exist. God cannot make a circle a square without destroying the very natures he gave them. They would not even exist anymore. So too, making a perfect creature would destroy the very nature and definition of creature, which encompasses, as we know, mutability. There would be no creatures anymore because they would have all perfection and so be indistinguishable from God. Gone. A perfect creature is the heart and essence of contradiction because they would have to lack no perfection thus they would be identical with and the same as God. They would be one. There would be no creature. Annihilated! Creatures by definition are not one with God because God is all being and all perfection and creatures aren’t. A creature only has being for a while and by definition has mutability and contingency. They are contingent, changeable and therefore not perfect. They are not the same as the Creator. Only God by his essence is infinite existence and infinite perfection. To be a creature means not to possess these qualities. Making a perfect creature annihilates the creature as in no more square-ness or circle-ness, no more creature-ness. Natures gone. Eradicated. That said and then some, now the plot thickens. Giving a creature freedom was unnecessary. It didn’t have to be done. Creatures by definition may be mutable, contingent, impermanent but they don’t have to be free. That is not part of the job description. They can be programmed robots similar to insects or the beasts that are creatures similar to us in mutability, contingency and impermanence but there it ends. The gifts to us of a reasoning mind and free will, given to make love possible, set us worlds apart. They were just that, gifts, and no true gift is forced. God, Our Father, didn’t have to give them to us but he did with generous love and for that reason, love. It was a risky business but necessary if love was to be possible in the world. This laid creation open to the possibility of the misuse of that freedom by the will and decision of those very creatures who had been bestowed with it in the first place so that love, the very purpose of creation, was attainable. And it happened. The sad story, as mentioned, was told by allegory in the Genesis garden parable. A simple request, “don’t eat the fruit of…”a certain tree was ignored. A request, and more than that, an actual command of God was ignored. We don’t have the details but the loving Father was disobeyed somehow. That’s about all we know. The misuse of the gift of freedom, perhaps motivated by pride, led to tremendous loss, the loss of that original gift, that original harmony between Creator and creature, between our natural desires and God’s will. Disharmony and discord entered creation. The ties of goodness and love that once existed between Creator and creature were greatly weakened though not entirely vanquished. The wholeness and health that might have been ours was lost but the damaged condition, the weakness that remains, that is ours, our sad inheritance. Like the father who squanders the family fortune, the inheritance of harmony was no longer there for us; no longer ours to inherit. It was lost by our earthly forebear. In its place disharmony reigned with hate going toe-to-toe with love and sometimes winning. Following soon after this debacle described, as said, in the first part of the Genesis story in allegorical fashion and illustrating a profound religious truth, namely how evil entered a world created good, sure enough it happened, a murder was committed as if to bring the changed reality home. The actual blow-by-blow of the disobedience, Fall and murder was too remote to capture, all participants long gone, but the effects of the calamity were not remote at all. Genesis soon told how Cain envied and murdered his own brother Able. And the history of the human race was off and running! The original goodness was badly tarnished, an inheritance spoiled, and much trouble was out lot. Reason had originally been in full control of the passions but now no longer was. Anger, hate and violence were loose. No longer were human desires and the things on which they focused arranged beautifully and cultivated in accord with the Creator’s will. The damage has been so great that progress on the moral plane has ever after been slow at best with many reversals. A look at the last century with its wars, concentration camps and Gulags is enough to confirm that. Since the Fall, it is a struggle just to fulfill the good remaining in our nature but things have become so awry recently that something as basic as the natural desire for sex obviously designed for pleasure and procreation has been sundered. Ironically in an age that idolizes nature and the “natural” with back to nature nostrums as common as cold prescriptions, procreation has become artificially separated from pleasure and what was by its nature life giving has become in the present twisted state of things a major death dealer. Even something as basic and admirable as the motherly instinct, a “natural” instinct if there ever was one, is, like all nature, far from inviolable to corruption as the steady stream of heart wrenching stories of mothers destroying their own children often to gain favor with a male consort, usually not the father, attests. Our nature is damaged, its connection to the good so greatly weakened, it makes even the use of the word “natural” highly problematic. The scar of the original disobedience, the original misuse of the gift of freedom, the Original Sin, alienates us from the giver of the gift, the recipient from the donor, the Creator from the creature. We are betwixt and between, schizophrenic creatures. Whether we kow tow to or defy our troublesome nature with its drives and instincts, we find true and complete happiness down neither path. Every pleasure here is incomplete, every fulfilled desire carries with it discontent. Everything, all we taste and enjoy is imperfect, producing a happiness and joy that leaves much to be desired. Nothing completely fulfills us because, according to Augustine and Aquinas, the true object of all our longings is not any mere thing, any creature but our Creator, Our Father, He who IS, and the font of all being. There alone complete fulfillment lies. Our longings can only be partly met by created things. But that generous overflowing of love that brought creation about was not to be denied. Hope was held out as far back as Genesis. Help was promised that took a form beyond our wildest dreams. The Jewish people and Prophets were set aside to keep the hope alive and they did so from Abraham’s time four thousand years ago even to the present. Then, two thousand years ago came Christ. The old spiritual phrases it this way, “Oh happy fault” that brought us such a one to help us, such a Savior, to use the traditional expression. Healing and wholeness would indeed be ours again with the banquet of abundant life, the final great gift promised, but along the long way great suffering and disharmony was on us. Even nature became a grudging partner when it was not actually working against us. The Earth would sustain us but not without labor, much labor. Not only that but the material world, mother nature if you will, was also alienated from us despite the New Age movement’s near worship of it. It surrounds humanity but exists independent of and not in harmony with our wishes, desires and activities. Its awesome power intended to serve but now, be it hurricane or earthquake, often results in human destruction. Rather than simply human delight and wonder in nature as originally intended, now we often experience fear and awe. Nature like sex misused has become, instead of life enhancing, often death dealing. So now we have to contend with the effects of the original Fall, nature disrupted, actually two unruly natures, our own and “mother” nature’s. With all that going against us, isn’t it strange, not that we are discontented, that makes perfect sense, but that we want more, not more chaos and evil, though the way we often act may have fooled observers, but more life. Humanity became so disjointed that, as Adam Phillips put it in his book, “Darwin’s Worms,” ”How could it be possible that we were the only natural creatures…but that felt nature to be insufficient to our needs.” That’s easy; we are the only creatures that know nature is off kilter and with faith and hope know it will be restored to its original loving harmony. All life hopes to survive as long as possible but only humans hope to survive death, and why not? Now more than ever do we hope, especially with the support and promise of revelation still ringing in our ears. That is why we alone are often discontented with this small slice of life. From whence this disconcerting idea that we can survive death? Even before revelation the idea was widely about. We are divided, torn creatures far from intact, as mentioned, we are betwixt and between almost schizophrenic. This is true but nevertheless that yearning for life is in us. Augustine in his autobiography captured it clearly, outlining the only escape, “we are restless and will never rest until we rest in Thee.” That’s when the healing comes, the harmony returns, and every tear will be wiped away. Should it be said, “it’s only natural?” After all, every one of our natural appetites be it food, sex, knowledge has a real object, an actual goal, one that is good and only abuse, the abuse we are so prone to, turns it bad. If that is so, if all our yearnings have real objectives, why should our natural yearning for God and the gift of life in abundance be an exception? But our new secular priesthood will have none of it. Life is a meaningless accident. This is its central dogma and many listen. As one wag put it, now the only time taking the name of the Lord is approved and acceptable is when it is taken in vain. Many people suppress the ancient thirst for transcendence. They settle for temporary life in spite of Christ’s assurances. Christians especially don’t settle. But, what’s to be done for the others? XVIII THE COSMOS VS. MONISM, AMAZING GRACE VS. AMAZING DEBAUCH Prone as we are to evil we are not totally corrupted, none of us are. To repeat, we are a lot like St. Paul in that what we will not that we do and what we will we don’t. To put it in more modern terms we are Jekyll and Hydes, split beings. We are damaged goods but salvageable goods still. A nature compromised but still possessed of the remnants of our origins, which were good, very good according to Genesis. That natural moral law graven in our hearts and called conscience still indicates to us the right and the wrong. It still tells us that the right or good should be done and the wrong, evil, avoided. That notion is universal in mankind and in direct defiance of the keystone of Evolutionary theory, natural selection resting on the dog eat dog dogma of survival of the fittest. By it George Bailey should have let the helpless and obviously unfit old man Horace drown after he jumped from the bridge in “Bedford Falls.” So, from whence came this noisome thing called conscience, this old glow from a remote and marred past that is often confused, abused, muted and ignored but still with us always? Its specifics were revealed to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai in the Decalogue, more familiar to some as The Ten Commandments, but that promulgation merely put before men’s eyes, as Gilson explained, “What they had refused to read in their consciences where nevertheless they might have found it already written. Written by whom? None other than our loving Father, ”AM, ” Being, the absolute Other that we call God and who gifted us with it as a guide in the use of our free will. Conscience can become terribly distorted of course by the likes of a Hitler or a Bin Laden when evil becomes a good in minds so twisted that only the Father, the originator of everything we have including what we are discussing here, the natural moral law graven in our hearts and called conscience, can discern and decide cause and guilt. Our Father will know the culpability of these human disasters and will see the whole truth. Individuals will be judged accordingly and justice will be done. There is indeed a place or state of justice for those who sow hell on Earth. Conscience with its draw to the good can obviously be terribly distorted, ignored or left in a vacuum into which flows culturally endorsed misinformation similar to the justifications for abortion. Even with the Ten Commandment’s clear prohibition of the killing of the innocent and the teachings of the Church about love and mercy, teachings meant to make conscience more informed and in conformity with God’s will, terrible evils still occur. They are part of the awful downside of our free will and the price paid to make love possible. Evidently love must be the most important thing in the world to be worth such a price, so many murders, so many abandonments, so much abuse, so many Auschwitzs all flowing from the parade of usual suspects from self-love rooted in pride to hate. This entire refusal to love must be counterbalanced by love itself in order to make creation worth the pain and suffering. This is why it is so important that there be growing multitudes of authentic lovers reflecting our Father’s love for us. The Church’s job given it by Christ is to produce lovers, lots of them for every age. Sometimes they are called saints. Sometimes they are even publicly recognized and canonized as such by the Church. They keep the boat afloat and the world worth living in. But it is never an easy job and there are never as many championship lovers like a Mother Theresa or Max Kolbe or the mother in Rayne as we would like and need to make up for those who refuse to love such as the Costco mother in Manhattan, Casey Anthony in Florida, Whoopee Goldberg in New York with her six abortions and the raft of failed fathers denying love and life to their own children. To help rise up more lovers, conscience must be informed and this the Church works at through teaching and preaching (currently an unpopular word) and the dispensation of God’s grace and help through the sacraments so that moral judgments are enlightened or at least do no harm. Conscience operates in and through rational reflection but we are free to act irrationally and ignore its promptings. From such abuse of freedom flow gulags, concentration camps, nine elevens, Hitlers and Bin Ladens. Aside from human beings, the rest of nature and all in it have no such freedom to defy law. Inanimate nature with its energies and forces is unknowing. It cannot will evil as we can nor mistake evil for good. Science communicates to us the laws directing the natural world and those laws are obeyed without question by all of creation but us. The pertinent point is this, although we know why we should obey the promptings of conscience we don’t have to. Why then is it that nature invariably obeys the laws governing it? The fact is of course, it has no choice in the matter. The law is built into it much like our conscience is built into us but it has no freedom like ours to defy. It is commanded and must follow. This implies a commander but as Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas writes, “Given the insufficiency of purely nonreligious explanations of our natural world,” all this will eternally puzzle those devoid of religion and also those who elevate or even worship nature in true pantheist fashion by equating nature with God. The type is common today. Many travel to exotic places to feel united to nature and nature’s God viewed as equivalents inextricably mixed. But as James Matthew Wilson writes “one can only greet the universe with awe and gratitude for so long before desiring to bow down in worship before the founder of that feast.” Unless they do, unless they make that advance, they will be perpetually at a loss for the explanation of the origin of the laws of nature and especially why nature, Earth, mother or not, Sun and all else dutifully, worshiply, obey those laws. Many will find it difficult to explain why man, a free and rational creature, should worship at the feet of things that are not free and not rational. Worshipping creation rather than Creator is a good way to further demean human beings and for some that seems to be a popular past time. Often we hear how “insignificant” we are especially compared to the size of the Cosmos. This passes for wisdom these days. Our Father, the necessary Being and absolute Other, existence itself, whose very essence is existence is the only Being. Out of love He created other beings. Beings like us who are capable of love but the difference between the Creator and everything else that is including us is so vast, the chasm so immense, as to be of two entirely different orders. It makes pantheism an obscenity. In the order of existence this one Being is necessary because without it there would be nothing. Nothing would triumph for there would be nothing capable of filling always and forever. The fact that there is not nothing screams out “AM.” We, and everything contingent like us, are of the other order of being, the created order. We are unnecessary and need not be. We are because of love. The difference is unimaginably enormous. One needs to be or else nothing is and the other doesn’t need to be at all. The latter’s being is a gift of love and not a necessity. We have not one but two distinct orders of being, one eternal and necessary, one contingent and temporary. There can be no greater difference. The monism of pantheism is dashed into two pieces forever apart. Even more, we rational beings are in important ways not even one with the rest of created nature. Nature must obey. We don’t have to and early on didn’t. Early on the freedom not to love God, neighbor and self but rather self-alone, the putting of “my way” first above all else often at else’s expense, was exercised. The havoc that resulted is still with us. It is still rattling through the ages, a schizophrenic humanity finding no completion, no permanent and happy fulfillment anywhere. The only rational and free, the only God seeking creature, indeed the only creature capable of blowing the gift did. Now in desperate need to reclaim a lost happiness and true fulfillment found only in conjunction with Our Father, we needed the help of revelation to get the wreck back on the track. We still have a ways to go. Now consider that different creature, the only rational one that we know of, us. Science has discovered no other like us nor has revelation made known any other like us but of course in so vast a universe with 50,000,000,000 galaxies it is not out of the question. Nor do we know what lies beyond the galaxies. This may serve as a reminder that Our Father need not reveal everything to us. It is pleasant to speculate about other rational creatures possible in the universe and whether they had a Fall too or are they, unlike us, living in perfect harmony and sync. with their nature and their Creator? Author C.S. Lewis has a science fiction series around that theme. There is certainly a lot of creation out there and the very amount of it all and the size of it all is a wonder. Many seek an explanation for the vastness of the universe. Stephen M. Barr in “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith” asks the question, “Why is the universe so big? Scientifically the scale of the universe, he states, is tied to life. “It takes 1,500,000,000 years for life to evolve. In that time, the universe has been ever expanding at a colossal rate. In terms of space, life comes at an enormous price.” Light travels at 186,000 miles a second or 6 trillion miles a year. The furthest known galaxy may be 72,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (72 sextillion) miles away!“ Yet in all that as far as discoverable up to now we are the only rational creatures. We have taken dramatic steps to signal our presence and to reach out to others but no one has reached out to us except that is, our loving Father, the creator of it all. The life that took 1.5 billion years to evolve, no time in the eternity of our Father, eventually resulted in uniquely rational and free creatures, creatures with elements such as consciences indicating good and bad, right and wrong, that runs counter to evolutionary dogma. This, along with the origin of the material cosmos, Darwinian theory is at a loss to explain. A morality calling for the fit and useful to care for the “unfit” and “useless” is hardly survival of the fittest. Why keep those around who drain scarce resources with nothing worth contributing. Off with them! That’s the evolutionary dogma. But no, conscience tells us else wise. Where did it come from? We deduce the answer, Our Father who even went into specifics with the law, the Ten Commandments, given Moses. Would man devise such inconvenient rules and regulations? Rules he often seems to take delight in ignoring? These consciences that are to be followed can be ignored and often are. Nietzsche proposed a philosophical escape. He saw God as dead and modern liberated secular man as beyond good and evil but we know where that went, Gulags and death camps. The evidence of history points to the terrible price of the freedom to abuse conscience and break the commandments. Is love worth it? Our Father obviously thinks so. The beautiful mathematical laws found in nature and the magnificent call of conscience in us are for our good and it is a good world when we honor and obey them but that choice belongs to us alone. That’s the problem. Nature must obey but not us and sometimes this leads to spectacular evil. To our shame as human beings some among us have become monsters and even the average and kindly Joe and Jane Doe down the street in a private reflective moment would probably agree with the statement of one of our own “I don’t know what’s in the heart of heart of evil men but I know what’s in mine and it terrifies me.” The command to love, and love does no harm, is the best handle for containing that terrifying and ever-threatening nightmare. Sex is a major human drive and one of the great ways of expressing love but it can be a fly in the ointment too, a major one, because it too can often be abused. The message revelation clearly pronounced to the Jews on the topic Christ more than confirmed and a healthy society heavily depends upon it. It is that marriage is the only acceptable relationship for the sexual expression of love. Monogamy was the original ideal though polygamous arrangements existed. But Christ reinforced the original monogamous intent. The others arrangements outside marriage are faux and often very damaging and dangerous. Marriage is imperfect because people are but in faithful monogamous marriage we have a man and a women seriously committed to one another’s happiness to the point of serious sacrifice. Here sex is kept from doing all the awful harm that flows from polygamy and promiscuity. Women in communities built on polygamy are often so damaged by early marriage at very young ages, more subject to domestic violence and birth related illnesses that according to researcher Rose McDermott of Brown University, their life expectancy is shorter than their monogamous sisters. Where religion does not rein them in with strict prohibitions, males will create polygamous societies and where existing religious restraint weakens, often sequential polygamy of the type made fashionable by Henry VIII and his new church will come to be accepted. With promiscuity too, the self invariably comes first. Not so with authentic marriage, it can’t work that way. There the happiness of the beloved is the primary. The true test of authentic love is the “forsaking all others” part of the Christian marriage commitment. Loving spouse as self dispels infidelity and actually results in the highest quality happiness possible here for the deferred joys purchased by loving sacrifice are always far and away the sweetest and longest lasting. When worked at, and it takes work, and with faith and love present, it prevents the life wrecking deceits, lies, betrayals, infidelities, and hurt hearts that are the number one factor in two of the U.S.’s great ills, a better than 40% divorce rate and a major child poverty problem with about 22% of the children involved. Fidelity, the mutual refusal to cheat, is the key that prevents marriage from becoming just another form of promiscuity like the hooking up, the cohabitation or shacking up, to use a more imaginative term from a far less promiscuous time, so common today and so fit for its mini-morality. Marriage is indeed a challenge because it is other centered. All else is less because the self-centered element is dominant. And marriage usually produces children that demand still more of the other centeredness that stands at the heart of authentic love. This is what Hesberg meant when he said, “the greatest love a father can give his children is to love their mother,” and it should be added, mother the father too. No doubt about it, the married state is life’s great love learning crucible. It may start, get kicked off with raw passion and desire, a preliminary form of love, but takes off from there into a far more substantial level of love which stays after the passion slowly and naturally dissipates and cools with time. This produces the most long lasting and satisfying happiness we can hope for in life. Life, as we know, has many passing pleasures, food, sleep, sex, alcohol, drugs, tobacco, fame, sweets, games and all the rest that may thrill for a while but always leaves us short of full contentment, satisfaction, joy and happiness. Overindulged in these things produces demeaning addictions and often a life full or remorse. Nothing we do here fully satisfies and that includes marriage but because marriage requires authentic love, a love that defies and is far above the mini-self centered “love” of modern convention in that it puts giving above taking, the other co-equal with self, our way above my way, contrary to conventional thought it actually ends up getting us closer to true happiness than anything on earth. If anything, the wisdom of the ages testifies to that point, as did the aged Sultan with a lifetime of many women and the finest of everything in foods and pleasures behind him. He calculated he had a total of about seven truly happy hours during his lifetime. His witty vizier exclaimed, “that many?” Sex in marriage produces more health and happiness and less harm and death statistically than any other form of sex. The faithful and devoted love that it requires is acquired through determination and effort, as anything good and worthwhile is, and needless to say, with grace requested and given. The love learning experience gained in the married state, kicked off by passion but sustained by love, makes the needed sacrifices including the “forsaking all others” part possible and with progress, if not easy at all times and nothing worth building is, at least a source of a self-esteem nudging into a joyful sense of satisfaction in a purpose well carried out and a life well lived. And, that’s about as close to true happiness as we can get. It happens when you live it for someone else beside yourself. He who dies with the most toys doesn’t win and only the fool thinks so. Only those who learned to love win and there is no better place to do that than in marriage and family. This lesson, life’s essential one, seems to be getting increasingly lost amid the mindless clatter of our media inundated culture which blandly, blindly and almost exclusively dances to the dead end beat of the happy promiscuity tune. Much is lost to those who listen. Their chance to learn love is greatly diminished and, in a word, love’s reward, a happiness above any other possible here, one not heavily laced with remorse and littered with damaged victims goes missing. Adding to the tragedy, most victims as always are the betrayed wives and most poignantly, the children, the dead and many of the living too, 22% of whom live in poverty. Marriage, like writing a symphony, a hit song, a simple little ditty or doing anything worth doing, is usually not easy and often challenging and so it has always been but it is becoming more challenging by the day in our heavily pornified and faithful-less culture. Our media saturated culture, loaded with titillation, makes fidelity not just a challenge but often an extremely strenuous one and the culture is not exactly turning out a bumper crop of robust authentic lovers to meet it. And as long as it tries to mute and marginalize religion there will be even fewer. If it is tough for those working at authentic love, needless to say the mini-morality folks grown or growing up on tripe like the “Playboy philosophy” and its many imitators on and off line are far from being up to it. So promiscuity and infidelity soar and so do divorce, family disruption, damaged and not infrequently impoverished spouses and children. These children, many in the heroic care of struggling and overtaxed single mothers, are nevertheless bereft of what all children need to grow and prosper, authentic love of the Hesberg type. With all this come multiple government programs to try to remedy the spreading problems and a budget bent out of shape and balance by heavy borrowing to meet the costs. And, disease and death come too. The STD- AIDS epidemic has cost the public billions and has killed almost half a million people so far. So much for the 60s mantras “make love not war,” and “what you do in the privacy of the bedroom with a consenting adult stays there.” Would that it did! That the life-style preached in the declining 60s killed more people than the war they loudly protested is the tragic irony of our era. To make matters worse the sexually active characters parading around many prime time TV series are hardly ever married. Its as if the world was made up almost exclusively of singles and divorcees. This goes for realism. Promiscuity is almost taken for granted as if there were no well known consequences. But there are indeed and yet today’s media lack the courage to proclaim them. It did so with smoking and deserves credit for it but speaking against the damage and dangers of promiscuity is just too hot a politically incorrect potato for it to handle. The panacea of condoms sometimes mentioned has proved ineffectual as the spread of STDs and the 18,000 annual deaths from AIDS testifies. There was not a year in Viet Nam that the U.S. suffered that many deaths. Fidelity in marriage hardly exists anywhere among prime time media land’s heroes and the dysfunctional family has replaced the happy family as if there was no such animal. Picture our cool detective coming home after a hard day cracking cases to a happy spouse and family, sitting down for dinner and saying grace! You are hallucinating. The only way the name of the Lord is taken in prime time media land is in vain. Even though or perhaps because religion is a major factor in encouraging the authentic love required for marriage it and it’s teachings on the subject, especially Catholicism’s, are frequently held up to ridicule. An early Law and Order episode, for example, had the ludicrous theme of the murder of a husband by a “devoutly” Catholic wife because “the Church doesn’t recognize divorce!” The fact that it doesn’t “recognize” murder either didn’t come into it. Mindless nonsense like this is common. The secularist mind set has so invaded state and media that there are now new commandments replacing the old and they bear watching. Thou shall not take the name of the Lord unless it’s done in vain, is the new second commandment. It is the one honored more now that our bold and adventuresome media envelop pushers with no better cause in mind than spreading vulgarity and promiscuity, often with the self-satisfied thought that they are cutting edge trail blazers of an enlightened and shackle-less era of freedom, more and more have their way. Our new commandments are indeed a little skewered. We are commanded to never, never let your child ride a bike without a helmet yet gain respect in some quarters if you deprive him or her of a father. But single parenthood, much more often motherhood, an apparently growing trend which the media strenuously tries to normalize, is not conducive to good and happy living, quite the contrary statistically. Divorce and single parenthood for most, Hollywood actresses and media pundits excepted, often mean depleted resources, financial and emotional loss, fatigue from overwork and children in greater jeopardy, educationally and otherwise, than if the parents were together and working at it. But that takes authentic love and all that means. With the rise of single parenthood illustrated by the fact that out of wedlock births hit 33% in 2008 compared to 6% in 1965 and illustrative of the failure of a pervasive sex education system based on condom use and the de-emphasis of abstinence, single parenthood has spread and contributed greatly though not entirely by any means to the sagging of the American educational establishment. It is at present 25th in achievement score rank out of the 30 leading industrialized nations. Thirty percent of our high school kids do not graduate. That’s about 7,000 dropping out each day, a disproportionate percentage from single parent homes. The sex featured in movies, music and TV shows suggest that the practitioners of bed bouncing, a similar term was first used in classical Greece, have nothing but fun. The fun such as it is tends to favor the male. The reality is fraught with consequences that should make anyone blanch and hesitate. Statistically, emotional problems especially for women spiral and often STDs do too. If a child is conceived and not destroyed, the common emotional problems often following abortions are escaped, but a life of single parenthood looms because often the male dances away free with the attitude that she could have aborted but didn’t so the “problem” is hers. Nice how abortion, so favored by the vast majority of feminists, liberated the male precisely as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth C Stanton and company had warned. With single parenthood, marriage becomes less a possibility for many while shacking up with all the instability and abuse that it is open to becomes more likely. The fact that a new and innocent life was nor killed is wonderful but a life under better circumstances was a possibility had mom and dad, a dad the child will likely hardly ever see, not succumbed to the spirit of a very ill era. But the child has a chance at life and where there is life there is hope. Perhaps some will learn from the mistakes of the parents. This chance is of course denied to the aborted, over one in four to the tune of more than a million a year. The courageous single parent who spared her child’s life even though a corrupt law and complicit society says it is all right not to do, though Eagle eggs get protected,, has her work cut out for her. Promiscuity is indeed a major taker of life health and happiness. On top of all that, add in the greater risk of child abuse especially for the female child now that divorce, cohabitation and sex out side of marriage are common. We now have more single moms with lusty new husbands or boyfriends at home than ever before and of no blood relation to the children. Though some claim the level of abuse we are now experiencing is nothing new, is not unprecedented, there is ample evidence that it is. The secularized culture has made successful love, marriage and happiness far more difficult than it normally is and only religion stands in the way of its complete and destructive domination. In point of fact, statistically the happiness meter has never been lower and antidepressant use never higher, up 400% since 1988, as many studies have shown. The penchant for promiscuity, already a resident member of this troublesome nature that we have inherited, is strengthened and encouraged in our decaying culture with enormous direct and collateral damage to many innocent men, women and children. It gets worse as more people, especially the young and impressionable, take their marching orders from it. The Church alone, it seems, continues to stand in defiance with its call for authentic and faithful love and damn the difficulties. The difficulties dim in comparison to the damage done by their shirking. With our sickened and weakened nature, outside of marriage “doing what comes naturally” frequently produces physical and social harm of enormous scale and doing the unnatural, to again use that unpopular term, often produces sickness and death. To repeat, the U.S. has seen 400,000 die with AIDS with 18,000 added each year. So betwixt and between are we in our present state that faithful marriage, itself no easy thing even for the person of good intentions in a more aware time, is in today’s soured culture even more of a challenge. The good man who was terrified by what’s harbored in his heart of hearts may not be contemplating thoughts of bloody murder though they might well be there too, so much as the more common thoughts of happy infidelity. Abortion aside, the culture still frowns on murder but playfully winks at the betrayal and deceit of cheating spouses. Here is a typical scenario of how badly awry our weakened nature is as well as the culture that is wounding it. Ditch the good wife or husband. Throw the kids under the bus but visit them now and then. Make sure they wear seat belts but follow your heart’s new desire and get on with living. Go find your new true real inner self. Be true to yourself and fulfill the real you, your honest inner being often in the arms of a new and really fated love. Grab all the gusto you can while you can, and so forth. The lower, dangerously self-centered part of our nature is at war with what’s best in it. We are still Jaekel and Hydes, always have been. This is ancient history going back to near the beginning and in some periods of history it seems the lower gets the upper hand. In our era up to the 1960s such was not the case in the private lives of most Americans. It was not usual for people to hurt people they said they would always love but statistics now show it becoming very usual. They now show much less resistance to the demands of the self-supreme. Infidelity is a major factor in the almost 50% divorce rate, a rate never approached prior to the 1960s where it usually hovered in he 10% range. The result is not happiness. For the best chance at some happiness here we need to learn authentic love. It is indispensable for marriage and for most marriage is indispensable for learning authentic love. In our present condition, we need help to achieve the virtue and willingness to sacrifice that produces happiness for others and ironically for us too and help is available. It is called grace, sometimes amazing. The Creator, marvelous to say, did not stop loving us because of the original harmful misuse of our freedom or its continued misuse and abuse. Grace is a gift of the Father on the Porch. It is the unmerited and unilateral act of love, the same act that created us in the first place. By it he continually calls souls to himself, sons and daughters home, and even helps them answer the call but with care lest he impinge on that ever priceless and ever costly gift of freedom that makes us human and makes love possible. We read of awful murders, deceits and betrayals every day and yes the price is high, awfully high. But with the help of grace the prodigals still turn themselves around and trudge the road or crowd the ship helping them to come back home. There is a lot of help available, some of it institutionalized in the Church and called the sacraments. They are visible signs conveying the Father’s help and grace to us but, and here’s the rub, just how much help can be given without compromising our human freedom? Thankfully, much but it’s been a contentious question in the Church for many centuries. It was answered thusly. XIX THE STORY OF PELAGIUS-MR. OPTOMISM Once upon a time there was a man named Pelagius. We mentioned earlier that he was a priest and was born in Britain around 355AD. His answer to that question was simple. No problem, we need no help. We can do it ourselves, grace unnecessary. Where his optimism came from is a puzzle. Certainly he couldn’t have been raised in the 20th or 21st Centuries and still maintained it. Was Britain in his time such a peaceful and bucolic place? Perhaps. Rome had occupied Britain in the 40s AD and the area prospered as part of the Empire. In 313 AD the Empire recognized Christianity as its official religion. Catholic Romans and missionaries from the continent had brought Christianity there even before that time and with it all the bright hope and delight that the announcement of the good news often carries. But, the Romans departed in 410AD and in twenty years night closed in on the former Roman province of Britain with barbarian invasions from northern Germany. Britain became England. But by that time Pelagius was long gone so perhaps he did indeed reflect a very upbeat time and place. It must have been, for his optimism was such that he didn’t believe that we had been damaged by “Original Sin” at all. Our nature was unwounded, undamaged, and so had no need of the aid of healing grace. Why should it if it wasn’t in any way weakened or prone to evil? Human effort alone was enough to get us to God. All we needed is to use God’s great natural gifts to us of intellect and will. That would be enough. These great gifts were all the grace and help we needed according to him. He rightly treasured human freedom and independence and feared that reliance on help from God would severely compromise them if not destroy them completely. He proclaimed that we could make it on our own with no hospital ship needed. To this day he is admired, often by people who don’t even know his name and is one of the most popular heretics the Church has ever had to condemn. He was in a way the Mr. “My Way” of his time. He would quite naturally appeal to the type. The Church did not agree with him. Some said it was because, even though a priest, he was making the Church and the sacraments unnecessary for salvation but the real reason was the Church with its more universal experience even up to that time knew humanity better than Pelagius did. The Church saw the damage Pelagius’ blind optimism could do and knew as the Gospels and tradition testify that Christ established it to extend God’s much needed gracious grace and help precisely because struggling humanity obviously needed it. Despite a bucolic Britain, if that was the case, humanity as a whole and individually were often lost, often losing and sometimes downright more into hating than loving. No doubt the will is free, as Pelagius stoutly proclaimed and defended, but it is wounded. That, he couldn’t see. The human will is led by intellect but the intellect can err and lead it wrongly. The Church as teacher works to inform the intellect and make it a better more sensitive and knowledgeable leader. A debate over the issue of free will and grace broke out in the early 400s between Pelagius and Augustine. We have mostly Augustine’s account of it so its only fair to treat Pelagius kindly to compensate. The problem as St. Augustine and the Church saw it was Pelagius’ unrealizable expectations of what human nature can accomplish on its own in the order of goodness. Like the incident with the ancient apple of the Genesis parable, pride in our freedom, a pride we all share within reason, seemed to blind Pelagius. Augustine debated him and the Church approved Augustine’s damaged nature thesis against Pelagius’ more optimistic but evidently less realistic view. In essence the Church held that we enjoy free will and our nature is by no means totally corrupted (chalk one up for Pelagius) but it is in greatly weakened state and in need of help from Our Father on the porch. We can’t do it all ourselves (chalk one up for Augustine). Interestingly, there are some who claim we are semi-Pelagians to this day because the Church has always maintained that many can and should do much more to help their own salvation. Asking for help is the essential starter and that calls for anything but pride. And actually God may even provide a nudge in the asking direction, discretely. The Church’s name for that action is as you might suspect, Actual Grace. It’s a starter grace. For some it might be a blessing in disguise like the Prodigal’s running out of money. After that though, as the parable makes clear, hitting the road for home is up to you. Or maybe for others it’s the dawning of a wonderful little humility after a something event in our life, not humiliation by any means, humility, and with it the recognition of the reality about what we are, what we need and what we really want. Or it may be a jolt that leads to the asking for help and the first steps in the journey back. Whatever it is and it can be as varied as humanity, it takes the shine off that damned old allegorical apple, gets us moving in the right direction and keeps the Father on the porch always hoping, always looking down the road for us. While Pelagianism demands superhuman willpower, no nudging needed, as the path to salvation, the Church’s teaching on Original sin places us all in the same boat. We are weakened of will, wounded, often erroneous of intellect, sometimes almost helpless and sometimes active in ways not good for others or for us. We are dependent on the grace of God for needed help. It puts our feet on the road and is ours for the asking. Interestingly, about twelve hundred years after Pelagius, the Church had to excommunicate another priest who got the same question wrong. The issue came to a head when Luther had gone to the opposite extreme from Pelagius and was teaching that we are so totally and absolutely corrupted by Original Sin that we can do nothing spiritually beneficial for ourselves. Salvation is not a cooperative venture; it all depends on God’s grace. He denied free will altogether. The will is totally enslaved. But the Church said no. The will is free and can choose the good at times by following conscience, which is a kind of grace for everybody, but without the constant need of special grace. However, to stay the long course requires working with the grace of God. Often the will is led by what the intellect sees as good and that might be in error. For many good reasons the comely beauty working in the office might seem to the intellect a better deal than the wife. The intellect can and often does err leading the will astray, leading it into making bad choices but it can and does make a choice. The Church has always been the ultimate defender of human freedom and it hasn’t always been an easy struggle. Shortly after Luther there was Calvin. He even went beyond Luther. Not only is man’s will lacking freedom in that it is totally enslaved to evil but the liberating grace doesn’t go to everyone, just some, God’s chosen ones. And the Church had to condemn Calvin for preaching predestination. Rough waters! Yet the great hospital ship stays afloat. The Church declared that our journey to abundant eternal life with Out Father is a joint venture, our will freely cooperating or not with God’s grace, perhaps with a little nudge on the cooperation side. That’s what all good Fathers do. They want to help. The Church’s long experience made clear that freedom had to be defended against the errors of both extremes, from the no help needed we can do it ourselves side to the total helplessness, corruption and dependency thesis because it always knew from revelation the purpose of that freedom. Without it no love is possible. As human beings we cannot make or retain one moment of time. It all comes to us as a pure gift of God and, as someone said, what we do with it is our gift to God. Grace is a lot like that. It’s a gift. We are free to accept it or not. That’s the ultimate freedom. It’s the gift of loving help to which we respond or not. The situation gives hope to “the waverer, the backslider, the slacker, the putz, the schlemiel,” everybody it seems except the overbearingly and blindly proud and complaisant. A sincere “yes” no matter how late in life can turn everything around. Of the deadly sins pride’s the one. It enables one to turn his back to the Father on the Porch, even slap his helping hand. If, especially with the advance of age and wisdom, that be the stand, it might be prudent to have strong and cogent reasons for the rejection. And for those who do desire a change in course there is always the atheist’s daily prayer, “I declare myself a seeker of truth. I want to know the truth and live the truth. If you are THE WAY, THE LIFE, THE TRUTH, please help me.” And the help will come. By grace man’s free will achieves power and liberty over the things that enslave it. Grace, if accepted and that’s where freedom comes in, can liberate the will from its enslavements. With its help history is full of great turn arounds. John Newton a slave ship captain in 1772 captured it in his song “Amazing Grace.” He became an abolitionist. Bernard Nathanson leading abortionist, over 50,000 of them, and co-engineer of the Roe decision in 1973 later became a leader in the pro-life movement. He died this year. And Ms. Roe herself, really Ms.Norma McCorvey of Texas, is now a leader in the fight to rescind for the sake of life the Supreme Court decision that bears her name. Grace achieves great things. It can be amazing. XX LOVE, FREEDOM AND THE HIDDENESS OF GOD There are those who complain that the revelation of eternal life, most clearly outlined in the New Testament along with the grace to attain, it is not convincing enough. More is needed. They feel that God the gift giver should make the offer and his presence much more obvious. Astronomer Carl Sagan once suggested God might have engraved the Ten Commandments on the moon, a sort of 2001 Space Odyssey monolith. But years earlier Pascal offered a plausible reason for what he called “the hiddeness of God.” If God were to get in our face where would our freedom go? According to Pascal’s thinking, if God were to declare Himself beyond our ability to reject Him He would be forcing us to believe and awing love out of us. In effect, it would reduce us to robot status almost like the docile domesticated humans responding to the sirens in “The Time Machine.” Theologian John Haught writes in “God After Darwin,” “An overwhelming and suffocating display of divine presence or omnipotence would leave no room for anything other than God.” All would lose independence and in a sense be absorbed by God. It would be a kind of neo-pantheism. Again, love is the key and it can’t be forced even by omnipotence. That would destroy it. It is as God intended, risk and all. Only creatures with mind and free will can love and unfortunately, on the down side, hate. That’s the risk but for God love is worth it. And, amid all the terrible things and disappointments, it is worth it to us too for love is the thing that brings us the pearl of great price, life eternal with Our Father. Love then is what it’s all about, creation and all, but forced love is no love at all. Unfortunately, history amply illustrates that the necessity of freedom carries great risks and makes possible the other side of the coin, hate and holocausts, murder and slavery, fraud and deceit and all the other human failures. But, hard as it is to say with so many individual victims, without the risk there can be no freedom to love and that is the purpose of the whole thing, the missing motive for why anything is, why anything exists at all besides “AM.” How strongly God desires love to flourish! He created for it. Christ suffered on the cross for it and many others suffer everyday in their own way for it. Overly influenced and conditioned, driven to love by overwhelming in your face proof, presence and necessity, real human freedom perishes and with it the ability to love. Forced love is false and dishonest. The reason why there is something rather than nothing is, as was said, precisely the love of God the Creator and his desire to see authentic love flourish in His creation. We creatures have the capacity to reflect, in a creaturely way, the mutual love within the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We do this by loving one another in a way analogous to that Godly love. The triune nature of God was arrived at through revelation and long and intense reflection on what Jesus said of himself, his Father and the work of the Holy Spirit. It is beyond the achievement of reasoning alone and requires faith in the divine knowledge of Christ. It should be added as an aside that the old English word “ghost” had been used for spirit over the centuries but had to be discontinued because media absurdity and sensationalism turned it into the popular nonsense epitomized by current ghost hunting programs and the like. Thus to return the love of God for us, we are commanded, not requested, to love one another but we need not. We are free to ignore, abuse, hate. Unfortunately we have to be. But the God who created us out of love in the first place and demands but does not force us to share that love with our fellow creatures gave us help in the form of grace to achieve that goal. But not only that, he showed us how to do it, how to live love. He gave us the Ten Commandments, a specific summary of the Natural Law already engraved in our nature, to help us realize that love in practice. Freedom is the necessary ingredient that leaves us the ability to accept or reject love and life. Love requires freedom to also be loved, to accept the love of others or not. We are free to reject not only the love of God but the love of our neighbor too. In rejection, often again it is pride in one or another of its many manifestations that is the culprit. It’s a destroyer. But love is the reason why there is anything at all instead of nothing at all except God. It is the end of creation, its goal. The risk, as mentioned, is great for with the ability to love comes the ability to hate and we have the freedom to choose. It’s the heavy price and responsibility of freedom but the ability for true love demands it. So in the end, when this life is leaving us, all we have are these three, writes St. Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:12) “Faith, hope and love, they remain, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” Love, the kind of love the Creator wants to flourish, is difficult at best for us but can be achieved and is in multitudes of unsung lives. Not screen stuff; they are the great authentic lovers who stave off the horror and calamity that is always threatening to overcome creation. They keep hope alive. Love indeed is the greatest of the virtues but with regard to the other two, faith and hope, the reasonableness of faith and belief in God even without the aid of revelation has hopefully been demonstrated effectively, though as Paul added “At present we see indistinctly…but then face to face.” From this faith flows our hope for the gift of eternal life, the pearl of great price of the parable in Matt 13:45, in which the man sold everything he possessed in order to buy it. There are only two kinds of reasonable people in the world wrote Pascal, those who serve God out of love because they know him and those who seek God with all their heart because they don’t know him. Philosopher Peter Kreeft authored the seeker’s prayer to God and begging indulgence, it bears repeating. “I declare myself a seeker of the truth. I want to know the truth and live the truth. If you are the truth please help me.” A much older prayer simply states, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” As R. Guardino in “The Life of Faith” put it, even “ the ill disposed if he truly wishes or tries to have faith will remain in God’s eyes a believer.” We saw some of those ill disposed make remarkable turns around. There is always grace enough to move ones thoughts and direct them toward the all-important last things, our final end and that pearl of great price, the promise of life eternal with our Father. In doing that, in doing that much seeking, with that much faith and love, scripture assures us, the grace of God, that amazing grace, will be there to help. Earnest and open hearts draw forth his love in torrents. Like the Prodigal we must place our feet on the road and He will help in that too but ultimately the first step lies with our will to take it or not. The Prodigal could have wallowed in self-pity with the pigs or headed off in a direction other than home. But he didn’t. As perhaps this essay demonstrates albeit ever so weakly, the so-called hidden God is really not as hidden as some would have it after all. Increasingly, reason and science observe him in his works. As Cecil Laird put it, “God doesn’t have to put his name on a label in the corner of a meadow because nobody else makes meadows.” A lot of prodding to faith, hope and love there may be but never love negating force. The freedom to love or not is the line God does not cross. But as it is put in Matt. 7:7 and Luke 11:9, “Seek and you shall find…Knock and it shall be opened.” As true as it is, the real mystery focuses on those who refuse to knock. What holds back the hand? Not always but often enough it is the ceasing to behave that comes first. The refusal to live in accord with one’s conscience, even an abused, muted, weakened and neglected one, and to ignore one or more of the Commandments often leads to the abuse and neglect of faith, even ultimately in some cases the cessation of belief in God altogether. XXI THE CLEARING EFFECT OF REVELATION ON RELIGION & SUFFERING It is a fact that bears repeating and a consolation too of sorts for the many Barbara Walters out there, the people who are put off by what they consider the multiplicity of conflicting religious paths, that there really are not that many. Albert Mohler, author of the book, “Atheism Remix,” commenting on the late rash of new non-scientific atheists, wrote that they are “certainly right about one important thing, its atheism or biblical theism (revelation). There is nothing in between.” Though his point is a good one, “nothing,” seems a bit strong. This nothing that’s in between includes the often pantheistic leaning Eastern religions of which Hinduism and Buddhism stand out. Though, as said, Mohler may be a bit strong in his dismissal of them and we will take a look at them and what else is in between before too long, the fact is Revelation simplifies the world picture by enabling us to divide religions into two distinct groups, revealed and unrevealed. We can, with most people, dismiss atheism, a third option. We have already looked at its failure to provide a convincing explanation for being. Its chance scenario is too irrational and unscientific to be convincing for most people. What remains are the two and one of them, revealed religion, specifically Judaism, Christianity and to a lesser extent the later derivation, Islam, all valuing the Exodus metaphysic to varying degrees, has been examined at least to a partial extent. Though more will eventually have to be said about Christ and the claim to resurrection, we must in due time begin our examination of unrevealed religion, the religions that grew up outside the influence of revelation most especially the various forms of Animism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Are they really as empty of import as Mohler strongly suggests? We shall see. But first, speeding the whole simplifying and distinguishing process along is of course the person of Christ himself. The claim of divinity and resurrection splits the revealed religions thus further helping the narrowing down process. As scripture scholar Timothy Luke Johnson of Emory University observed, “The good thing about Mohammed, Moses, Buddha, Confucius…is they didn’t present themselves as God incarnate. Jesus and His followers did.” That splits things pretty wide. In this claim Jesus is absolutely unique and that makes the sorting process much easier. The advice to all the Barbara Walters’ should be to focus first on the only one who did make the claim to be “AM,” he who IS, in the flesh. His incarnation and resurrection must be examined. Did the necessary Being, he who always exists and from whom our existence graciously came, become man, live, die and rise? In other words, did the Creator descend into the level of the creature? The Barbara Walters’ must look carefully at the Christ of revelation, as presented in the New Testament, if it hasn’t been thoughtfully done. If the claim is dismissed then the other options may rate a look though Mohler denies it. Perhaps we can understand his strong statement. History records no one who ever came remotely close to saying the things Jesus said. To cite just one example of many, to the crowd wondering how he could say that Abraham, dead 2000 years, had rejoiced to see him, he told them, “I say to you before your father Abraham came to be, I AM.” The crowd had no doubt what he meant and almost killed him for it then and there. But we don’t have to take him at his word. What we do have to do is look at that capstone and confirmation of his word and the bulk of the rest of revelation too, his resurrection. Does it hold up? We shall have to see because we don’t know by natural reason that Jesus Christ is God, “I AM,” or for that matter the triune nature of God either but we can reason to it in the light of revelation. And much of revelation rests on the authenticity of the resurrection. Reason and revelation are compatible and indeed overlap in many ways. Therefore, a yes or no response to that claim of Divinity after due study is possible and whatever the decision, it should reduce Ms. Walters’ multiplicity of “conflicting paths,” rather well. It is Christianity, of the revealed religions, that teaches along with Judaism that God sent prophets to us by way of the Jewish people but far beyond that, it is only Christianity that holds that the Creator loved us so much that he didn’t stop at that but became one of us himself and suffered and died too like we must but with a difference. His disciples said he rose from the dead as he himself said he would and promised that we will too. We are meant to join him in eternal life with his Father and Our Father. There was nothing like it before and nothing like it since. Some of the earthy gods of classical poetry and myth had died and rose, died and rose, much like the cycle of seasons or the crops of the fields but never a concept like the “I AM” of Exodus and the promise of Christ of life eternal with no more death and with our Father “AM.” Death was conquered for us. There would be no more dying. The incarnation and resurrection leave the gods of myth and even the two other religions that are in the revealed category, Judaism and much more so Islam, on a very different level while those in the non-revealed category, mostly New Age types and Asian religions, on a very distinct third. The number of available choices therefore is not really that overwhelming. With regard to faith as the Christian understands it as well as science and philosophy, we have seen that they show that true faith is anything but unreasonable and in fact quite the opposite. Indeed, as Regis Debray wrote in “God: An Itinerary,” “ Belief is natural for the only animal that knows it is going to die.” The knowledge of our eventual death spurs thought and reflection and that reflection, call it metaphysics, points to something of necessity that always existed along with powerful indications, for example the rigorous and precise ordering of everything from galaxy to the living cell, that show great power and intelligence. What reason could not tell us, the only creature that knew it was going to die and did not want to, was why. Why life had to end when we longed for it to last. Why was it this way when in vast numbers we longed for more life not less, for life in abundance? More precisely, we stare at the problem of why the disorder of disease, suffering and death that disturbs and disrupts the obvious order of creation and our desire for life so drastically intrudes and we wonder? For that answer reason drew a blank and needed the aid of revelation. Genesis told in parable fashion of the horrible disruption of that order by man’s revolting decision to bite the hand that gave him being, existence, and love. Man’s free decision to love himself above all else including God and neighbor led to defiance and disaster. It disrupted and upset the purpose of creation and brought great disorder including death itself, the necessity of which some speculate had been rescinded, into the Divine order of things. This death and disorder is painfully obvious in many ways and is perhaps best epitomized by the all too common occurrence of a healthy human cell becoming a rogue, a disruptive and deadly cancer cell. Thus revelation, the Old and New Testaments or more accurately the Jewish and Christian scriptures, although Christianity is based on both, comes in to fill out the picture, supplying the motive for creation, namely overflowing generous love, and revealing an offense against that love that introduced the disorder and death we must now live with and die for. Reason and revelation are the two great tools for arriving at the answers to the life questions that we all wonder and think about at one time or another. As Gilson says, “revelation opens the way for the work of reason.” Philosophical reflection based on reason seeks to clarify what the revelation found in both the Jewish and Christian Testaments indicates. Some Medieval philosophers expressed it by saying that they valued revelation because it helped them to better understand the world and man’s place in it. Thus the clearing effect of revelation helps distinguish religions. Specifically, on the one hand, the non-revealed ones, mostly of Eastern origin, and tending strongly to a hope reducing pessimism embodied in a world view so dismal, painful, even nightmarish, as only to be escaped. On the other hand, the more hopeful and optimistic Genesis based disposition of the revealed religions that see the world as tarnished by man’s misuse of his freedom but still good, or as Genesis puts it “very good.” Indeed it is the creation of a loving God who, far from abandoning it and us, loved it enough to become part of it. We are commanded to use our freedom to love but we don’t have to. For the loving use of that freedom the gift of life in abundance is ours for the asking. As we all know it is very challenging. For example, one demonstration of love is forgiveness, not always easy but it must be extended whenever sincerely requested. Discussing love and forgiveness, Peter asked Christ, how many times must we forgive, seven times? Seventy times seven said Christ. Only the opaque literalist would conclude 490. To summarize, we have the combined one two punch of reason and faith, intellect and scripture, philosophy and revelation, call it what you may. The philosophy that thrived on revelation originated with the classical Greeks, mostly Plato and Aristotle. The Early Church took it over and developed it with the help of revelation, especially Exodus and the four Gospels, the good news. That union of faith and reason is a hallmark of the Church and the hallmark of revealed religion in general though Islam eventually turned away seeing philosophy more as a threat to faith than a help. It bears repeating that in general the revealed religions, Islam to a lesser extent, tend strongly to optimistic hope as opposed to the endemic gloom of most Eastern religion. Christianity more than any other religion has taken advantage of the two approaches to God, namely the metaphysician who studies God through reason and the theologian who does the same using reason and revelation culminating in Christ. Unlike classical Islam, Christianity finds no insurmountable conflict between the two. From the metaphysician, especially Aristotle whose claim that human beings by nature desire to know, especially to know the first cause of everything, the Early Church found much helpful support in its endeavor to bring the good news of the Gospel to those who looked for reasonable confirmation from outside revelation of what the Church was presenting. As the culmination of Greek classical thought, Aristotle’ metaphysics elucidated by reason some of the attributes of God, namely the eternal necessary being, the uncaused cause of all that is who reveals in his creation great order, intellect and power. From the theologian we approach the same God of reason but who also revealed to us attributes beyond the unaided comprehension of reason and philosophy alone, the Triune nature of God and most prominently his love as epitomized in the motive for creation and finally the incarnation. It was out of that love that he sent us prophets and helped lead his first people, the Jews, to himself. To them he revealed not only the love but also his ten commands involving how to love and also his name, “I am who am,” “I am he who is,” Yahweh. From them would also come the great gift bearer himself, Christ, with the promise of eternal life not only for the Jewish people but for all people. For the Christian theologian especially, God is the tremendous lover who became one of us or to use the Eastern expression for the incarnation, pitched his tent among us, his forlorn but beloved creatures and loved us so much as to die for the beloved. There is no greater love than that. He shared in but did not remove suffering from our shoulders. Why not? Gilson explains this hard fact with philosophical concepts. The nature of created beings, the essence of creature, involves not eternal self-sufficient being but rather mutability, impermanence and contingency else creature would have the perfections of God, would be God, Being, thus the creature would be eradicated. The intention of creation, the procreation of love would be defeated. Love could not be free and would not be love. This creaturely mutability and changability however leave us open to discomfort, suffering and demise though it had only been a potentiality, a possibility, until sin and defiance actualized it. Essentially, the hard uncomfortable fact is the removal of the possibility of suffering would have to involve the removal of freedom. Our decisions and choices to be real and not merely hollow facades have to have real actual consequences, even the bad and destructive ones. This is the fact that holds back the hand that could remove all suffering right now. It is another one, the worst, of the terrible consequences of the abominable Fall from grace. Beyond that, suffering is surrounded by mystery, that is to say it does not succumb completely to the mastery of reason at least not at this time. We will have to wait for complete understanding. But we do have Christ now. At least his suffering tells us something. It shows us suffering is not a waste. Ours need not be either. Our pain and anguish can be intense; intensity captured for all ages in Christ’s cry to his Father from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” As the old song says, “By your cross and resurrection you have redeemed the world.” Many carry their own crosses every day. Their suffering united to Christ’s can also bring blessings like Christ’s did. And far from proving Christ was not God as some took this anguished passage to do, it shows the consummate reality of the Incarnation. When “the Word became flesh,” it was no play-acting and the Gospel writer of that passage knew and understood that. God really became human, really suffered. It was no fa?ade as some early heretics of a Gnostic bent believed and whom the Church had to censor for that reason. They were distraught at the idea that God actually became a real human being with all the flesh and blood icky-ness that meant, the gurgling and suckling infant, the adult suffering intense pain and death. They proposed that Christ, being God, just put on humanity as one would put on clothes but really wasn’t human and really didn’t suffer and die. It was the clothes that got ripped up and destroyed. But the Church reasserted and proclaimed at Nicaea in 325 what it had held and taught over the years, that God without giving up divinity undertook humanity and became real man, no suit of clothes; one person of both real human and real divine natures. That is the incarnation. Being, “AM” incarnate in Christ the son, could and did actually suffer like we do and then die to affect the defeat of death for us. It gives some consolation to know that the Incarnate God loved us enough to really become a human being, Creator becoming creature, descending to our plane of being, to our level. As Lorenzo Albacete states in “God at the Ritz,” the incarnation was the self-inflicted humiliation of the Supreme Being.” “AM,” actually shared in our broken condition in all ways except sin. In Christ was a creature like we were originally intended to be. Evil is so alien to how we are made though not how we choose to act, it makes suffering and death absolutely repulsive. Imagine what it was like for him who unlike us always chose love. If his incarnation was humiliation and he himself said, “Learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart,” it was for us the beginning of hope just as the resurrection was its fulfillment. With his resurrection comes the full hope of life, not temporary but permanent and in abundance. It is this that so separates the revealed religions most especially Christianity from the non-revealed ones. With Christ the greatest evil and our greatest enemy, death was, as is said in Mass, defeated. With His resurrection, the new abundant life that is ours was revealed in the concrete. What this means to creatures like us, creatures of body and soul, matter and spirit, is that none of it is to be lost lest we cease to be the creatures we are. This new life is held out for our full and complete selves, not only our souls. Our body is not a suit of clothes either. It and our immortal soul together are us. That is why our mind can affect the body and the body mind. We are not facing a future of flitting around like some sort of ghost or disembodied spirit. We will be fully our human selves chastened by the love learning experience here or in God’s way, in a period of purgatory. Thus our humanity will be changed in eternity to what it could have been here had we attained our holy loving potential. But we will be intact as Christ was after his resurrection when he met with the disciples in the room and on the lakeshore and asked for something to eat. It was he, body and soul and not some disembodied spirit or apparition. So too shall we be. The price of our new lives is love, Christ’s on the cross and there is no greater love than that and ours, the love we learned here even in our little unspectacular daily ways. His love can make up for a lot of lacks. Not a bad deal, almost too good to be true. The gift horse is greater than anything we could have dreamed. “Eye has not seen nor ear heard what the Father has prepared for those who love him.” The magnificence of the gift is no reason to reject the horse. Only the distracted, the foolish, perhaps the perverse, would reject it without looking into it. Not looking the great gift horse in the mouth is like putting another great gift, our intellect, on hold as if it was not up to this its greatest, most challenging and important task. A task, it would seem, it was made for and is equal to. And grace is always there to help. XXII JESUS, THE RESURRECTION AND PROMISE OF ABUNDANT LIFE We need not rely on revelation, specifically the New Testament, the Gospels and Epistles, to know that Jesus existed. There is more evidence that Jesus crossed the Jordan than Caesar crossed the Rubicon. He is cited in pagan literature, Pliny, Tacitus, Seutonius, and the Jewish author Josephus. He died at Roman hands with the complicity of the Jewish leaders of the day. No Roman author denied it nor did any Jewish authority. The question is, would someone who died for us lie to us: “I have come from the Father who sent me.” “I and the Father are one.” “He who sees me sees the Father.” “I have come that you may have life in abundance.” “I am the way, the truth, the life.” “On the third day I will rise.” “No one goes to the Father except by me.” “Before Abraham was I am.” These are words unheard of before or since. Perhaps his words to the Samaritan women at the well in John 11:25 sums it up best: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” Is all that true? What is truth asked Pilate. The answer here is “I AM.” Are the words true or is the diagnosis one of insanity, delusion, a tremendous liar rather than a tremendous lover of truth, the greatest of con man of all time or the duped front man for a bunch of devious conspirators? Forget etiquette, this is one gift that has to be examined. One gift horse that calls for a good look and St Paul puts it and its right on the line. “If Christ did not rise from the dead our faith is in vain.” To briefly repeat the point as was made in the Christmas 2009 essay, “From Swaddling Clothes to Shroud” that was dedicated to “Head” O’Leary as he fought his losing battle against cancer and in Arnold Lunn’s book “And Not So New,” no one at the time denied that on that third day Christ’s tomb was empty. There is no Jewish or Roman source claiming that the body was still there and there is independent Jewish evidence for the fact that not only was it not denied that the body was gone, that the tomb was empty, but that the Jewish Sanhedrin explained the emptiness of the tomb by the alleged theft of the body. That was the Roman line too. They all insisted that the disciples must have stolen the body. Motive? A prank? A hoax? A conspiracy? A dream of wealth and fame? Group insanity? Pride? Start a new religion they knew was phony, for money? Laughs? Excitement? Or perhaps secret suicide pact? In this multiple choice question the closest answer is the last one. Preaching Christ risen from the dead eventually got eleven of the twelve and many others killed when a simple denial, a simple coming clean, would have saved their lives. Suffering and dying, not just one, but many, for what they knew to be a lie is a first in history. If the disciples had stolen the body they all would have known Jesus had not risen from the dead. But they preached it anyway, the lie, taught the lie, spread the lie, and established a Church to keep the lie going after they were gone. And they were going to be gone in relatively short order to the most horrid kinds of death. This hoax would be the death of almost all of them. If they pulled it off for excitement this was excitement no one wanted. Most of them were killed propagating what they knew was a monstrous and ghastly lie. There is no record of anything like it happening before or since. Hoaxers are not known to lay down their lives for their hoax. People have been known to die for the truth. They have been known to die for what they mistakenly thought was the truth or were fooled into believing was the truth. But to die broken and broke for what you know was a lie, a hoax? Unheard of! Explanations? There is really but one. It wasn’t a lie. Even psychologically, the bearing of a secret that wasn’t true even to painful and premature death, defies reality. The pressure would be far too much and relief far too easy, a simple recantation. The apostles were persecuted, tortured, brutally murdered, crucified, beheaded and stoned to death. But none of them, to quote Charles Colson (another one of those turns around) in the new biography by Jonathan Aitken, “snitched…copped a plea by confessing to their tormentors: ‘we’ve been part of a conspiracy to tell lies about the resurrection.’” The reality and truth are far more cogent than any cooked up conspiracy theory. There is no convincing ulterior motive for what they announced in the face of death. What gain in promising eternal life with no ability to deliver? They didn’t sell it. They didn’t get rich. Instead all were willing to die penniless for something they knew to be true. No one ever gives up health and life for what they know is untrue. The disciples were willing to go to their painful deaths because they knew the resurrection of Christ to be absolutely true. He had risen as he said. The blinding, breathtaking new Easter faith, the good news of the Gospel, “Tidings of Comfort and Joy” in the old Christmas carol, began to spread through the world and still is and always will until time ends even at times against organized opposition, sometimes against ignorance, despair, indifference, defeatism. It swept up some good people like Pelagius and made them giddy and unrealistically optimistic. But it wasn’t called the good news for nothing. It was called that because humanity’s worst enemy death was destroyed and the life eternal awaiting us revealed. The news was spread with joy and in spite of persecution. Paul wrote his letters spreading it. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote their Gospels telling of it. Clipped and to the point, they teach the same message from varied angles. Hear and listen, we are made for life not death. Far from a mad man or hoaxer, Christ, the incarnate “I AM” who was before Abraham came to be, before anything came to be and comes through the Gospels in deep earnest, a tremendous lover of humanity and abiding in his own humanity to the point of referring to himself as, “the Son of man.” As fully human, he faced his cross with fear and trembling as we too might when we think of our coming deaths but then he conquered this our worse enemy and revealed the life that awaits us. Good news indeed and his cross became the symbol of hope and proof of the love of God for us. Christ in his death on the cross became the sign of the great gift of new life. Generous and loving men and women took the good news with them on missionary journeys far and wide and far from home to help announce and share it with the world and the Church has been doing the same ever since. That’s the job it was given almost two thousand years ago. It would be very wrong for us to sit on such great news and not share it with others, to help spread it. It’s another great way of showing love. And, to say it again, what was the good news, the break through news, the great Gift Horse? Life in abundance, permanent life was ours for the asking. To qualify, move to belief and love from whatever condition you find yourself. Our Father is always on the porch looking with outstretched hand. In the end then, there are only three things that count, faith, hope and love and the greatest is love. Work on the one and the rest will come. We have come to the bottom line. The reliability of this promise rests, as St. Paul wrote, on the truth of the resurrection. Without it our faith and hope are in vain. The Resurrection is the capstone and confirmation of all New Testament revelation; the mouth of the horse. XXIII REVELATION AND NON-REVEALED RELIGION The resurrection put the seal of confirmation, reliability and veracity on what had been made known through revelation going back even to Genesis and Exodus. Men and women flocked to the good news because it brought sense to what before had made no sense, namely the purpose of existence. But the coming of Jesus did not happen in a vacuum. Beside the Judaism that Jesus, a Jew, said he was sent first of all to fulfill there were, among other religions, the Greco-Roman Paganism of the Roman Empire as well as the great religious traditions of the East such as Hinduism and its split off Buddhism. Except for Judaism, of course, they were all to a great extent polytheistic, often polygamous with strong strains of pantheism. That is why, with the Jewish parentage of Christianity in mind, Pope Pius XI in the face of the growing Nazi threat made it clear that Catholicism’s spiritual roots were in Judaism and that spiritually we were Semites. The roots of the faith go through Christ himself and the disciples all of whom were Jews, back to the Jewish “Old” Testament. The Pope knew that Christians had to be reminded of this and that Judaism had to be respected. Over the centuries, because of disagreement and controversy between the two, it had often not been, sometimes violently. Part II of this six-part work that carries the overall title “The Lie Swatter,” is called, “Holocaust and War” and covers those troubles in some detail. Six hundred years after Christ, Islam, the third religion claiming revelation status, arose out of Arab nationalism. Judaism for the Jews, the Roman-Byzantine world had Christianity, both strictly monotheistic, but the Arabs still wallowed in pagan polytheism. Mohammed determined that he would remedy that situation for his beloved Arab people. Claiming revelation from Yahweh, the God of the Jews and Christians, his religion was basically a male dominated monotheism combining Jewish and Christian elements but with a heavy dose of Arab paganism devoid of its polytheism but retaining its polygamy. Mohammed, besides being a visionary, was a war leader and his religion reflected that fact. It spread quickly often by the sword. With the exception of these three, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, none of the other religions out there, Hinduism and Buddhism for example or more current New Age variants claimed to be revealed by God. Actually they tended to have a very pantheistic and rather rudimentary concept of God if they had one at all. As non-revealed, both Hinduism and its offspring Buddhism arose from the honest efforts over many centuries of good men, seekers and thinkers, to make some sense of the human condition and to reach God, if there was such a being. If not, then at least reach some state of relief from the pain and suffering of existence. Philosophically, their out look was generally rather pessimistic. A dominant theme was escape from the pain of existence in this unreal and nightmarish world and above all to escape the horror of rebirth into more of it. Reincarnation, being an ancient part of the life outlook on the Indian sub-continent, was part of both religions. Life was a search for the best way to escape it, to escape more rebirths and more living. They tried everything from meditation and Yoga to lives of compassion, detachment, induced trance and extreme asceticism as ways of release and escape while living in the hope of achieving Nirvana, a conscious-less blissful state of nothingness with no more life and no more reincarnations. At bottom, these religions were a sincere and serious effort by many men and women of good will over many generations to get some understanding of themselves and the world they were in. The differences between revealed as opposed to non-revealed religion are vast. In addition to the fact that the non-revealed religions tended to look upon the world as eternal, uncreated and more or less a nightmare while revelation holds to the tarnished goodness of a world not eternal but at a point created by a loving God, the issue of abundant life marked a great divide between them. One side wanted it; the other didn’t, actually anything but. Christ’s revelation of more life awaiting us, the good news of revelation on the one hand, as opposed to ultimate oblivion for the individual conscious self on the other, the longed for life goal of Hinduism and Buddhism, turned a mighty divide into a vast chasm. The strong common trait of these non-revealed religions is that the “you,” the person you are, will not last, has no future. You will be gone. Ultimately, after many rebirths, the you is dissipated, dispersed, recycled, remerged, reabsorbed into the powers and energies, that is, into the great soul of an oblivious universe from which it emerged quite by accident in the first place. Taken all together, it illustrates a great divide that the Dalai Lama, with kindly intentions, attempted to paper over. The very concept of God in most of the non-revealed religions tended to be very different. It was strongly pantheistic in that God was indistinguishable from the natural world and part and parcel with the energies and forces of the cosmos. The worship of things, world soul, forces of nature, stream of energy, or the “divine” embodied in the things of nature be they trees, animals, mountains, Sun, Earth or Moon was not unusual. Behind all reality, indeed the ultimate reality was the great soul, the life force, the stream of energy, pervading all nature. This was often the only concept of God that these religions developed. Needless to say it was not “AM,” not Being, Yahweh, the loving Father and creator. Instead this ultimate reality, god with a small “g” if you will, was unknowing, uncaring, unloving, an element driving nature and just a part of it, following laws it knew nothing of, and by no means a separate intelligent being. Oblivious re-absorption into this soul of the cosmos, never really defined, sort of as ink into a blotter, was man’s ultimate destiny and only escape from misery of life and existence. Such was the philosophy and religious thought that, when Christ came, pervaded and still pervades much of the East though things are slowly changing as the influence of Christianity continues to spread and scientific advances are being felt. Obviously this thinking was very different from the God of revelation who was anything but part of the material universe, a stream of energy, soul or life force immersed in it. The eternal, knowing, loving Being we were taught to call Father was not at all part of that picture because everything immersed in matter is doomed by matter’s very contingent, and temporary essence. The traditional idea of these religions that the unknowing cosmos was to continue eternally, in a sense to be constantly reborn, reincarnated so to speak, always starting again, an endless cycle or wheel of being, may still be part of the picture in the East though the discovery of Universe’s actual beginning out of nothing scientifically detectable in the big bang and its eventual demise may instigate some rethinking. Actually, the rethinking, if that’s the right word, had begun with Genesis’ creation revelation and was developed in earnest, as was seen, almost two thousand years ago in the West by the Church’s use of Genesis to correct Greek philosophy. The God of revelation, I AM, is a being very distinct from his creation and rectifies all the monism dominant in other systems. This difference, as remarked before, highlighted another great line separating the world’s major religions. For non-revealed, God and world was one (monism), for the other not so. The God of revelation was separate from and creator of a world that had a beginning. He sustains the existence of this material world, so contingent in itself as to need sustaining, but is not part of it in the order of being as the pantheist or monist would have it. This distinction between God and the universe is key and marked a decisive metaphysical break between the many pagan philosophies and non-revealed religions in their various manifestations mostly of the East and the great revealed religions beginning with Judaism. The revelatory lightening bolt that brought about the great break was the Genesis story in the Jewish Scriptures found in the first book of the Old Testament. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth” There was a beginning. The universe and the world as part of it weren’t always here, didn’t always exist. This was scientifically confirmed a few years back. It started about fourteen billion years ago. The material universe was not eternal. But, something must be. Its creator is or else nothing, no universe. Nothing wins. And, of course, the Creator is not the creation, not part of it, as the pantheist holds, but eternal and distinct, Being, “AM.” Again, this distinction between God and the world as first put forth in Genesis, the first book of the Jewish Bible, marks the decisive metaphysical split between Revelation and the Pagan philosophies and Eastern religions that understood the natural realm, the world and universe, to be eternal and accounting for everything that is, there being nothing else, no Being outside it. Revelation also marks the raising of mankind to something very special and beyond the purely natural realm. Humanity is not destined to personal obliteration and re-absorption into something called the soul of the cosmos whatever that is. This awareness grows during the Old Testament days and becomes fully realized in the promises of Christ as detailed in the New Testament. With revealed religion, especially Judaism and Christianity, the straining of philosophy, especially metaphysics as we have seen, received an immeasurable boost. Now headway could be made in earnest on the life questions. God is seen as Creator of all that is, both seen and unseen, sustaining it all but wholly distinct and distinguishable from what he created and sustains. The God of revelation is the only being whose essence is to exist, existence itself as opposed to everything else that we know of. Everything else need not exist and at one time or another didn’t. Unlike God, everything’s essence is not existence, far from it. Everything else is finite, temporary, runs down, decomposes and is full of contingency. In other words, the God of revelation is the something that always had to exist for anything to exist now; the necessary Being making the chance of nothing existing impossible and everything that is, possible; the Being who thereby defeated the eternal doom of nothingness. To help us understand, the God of revelation, as we saw, when asked by Moses his name answered, “I am who am.” “Tell the Israelites “I AM,” “HE WHO IS” (Yahweh) sent you to them.” To repeat, the word has a complex history with vibrant eternality a key element. And eternality was precisely what was needed to fill up forever and avoid the split second of nothing that would doom everything. A good thousand years after Moses, and two thousand after Abraham, Christ was confronted with the fact that he had said about Abraham that he, Abraham, was glad to see his day. The retort was, “you are not yet fifty years old,” as the crowd replied, “and you have seen Abraham?” Christ’s answer almost got him stoned to death for blasphemy. “Before Abraham came to be, before he was, I AM.” He was identifying himself and the eternal God and the crowd knew it. The God of Jews, Christians and Moslems is not the pantheist’s god. With the pantheist all is one, nature and everything in nature including the individual is part of god or together participate in god. God, whatever they may mean by the term, is part and parcel with the world and its energies. In a pointed rebuke to individual existence, an old Hindu poem states: “Know that all is one self same soul. Banish the dream that Sunders part from whole.” Here is pantheism’s monistic Apostle’s creed in a proverbial nutshell. No declaration of independence allowed here. You are the part that is never to be sundered. We are not just in the world, but also entirely of the world and destined to be reabsorbed into it. It is all one, all god, all “one self same soul.” The part longing and dreaming to be “sundered” to use the poem’s word, to be separated, to not go down into oblivion with all material things as they are destined to do is you and I, the individual person. In such a philosophy of religion our hope of ultimate personal individual life and value, individual value that it is to be preserved and is the object of the Creator’s love, is doomed. It will never be realized. Of no permanent value as individuals, mindless re-absorption as our ultimate fate, often societies resting on such ideas meant lives lived with very little caring for its more unfortunate members and quite logically so. A good example is the Caste system. This ultimate mindless oblivion that awaits us is considered bliss and, given the extremely dreary not to say horrid view of the world these religions hold, it is not surprising. The dream to be banished in the poem is our individuality as a person and its continuance. Instead we were destined, according to Hindu thought, for ultimate depersonalization, absorption and oblivion in the world soul. As mentioned, some might consider this bliss but for many living, thinking beings with or even without the inheritance of the hope filled message of abundant life found in revelation, it is more a nightmare. Rescue was to come with revelation, for its good news was that the individual person is no illusion to be ultimately blotted out and absorbed into the eternal cosmos but the unique creation of and indeed the child of God and of such importance that more life awaits and he was even taught to call God, Father. The difference is immense. For one, life is illusion but an illusion with pain and suffering the dominant reality only to be escaped into an ultimate blissful merging and annihilation in the soul of the cosmos. That is the aim and goal of life. Life is to be escaped with rebirth into it the constant threat. Eternal life in such a worldview would be a horrible calamity. The message here is that unconscious unity with the cosmos is everything and conscious life worse than nothing. The individual, the part, is basically a dream fated to eventually fade into the whole and into the bliss of painless impersonal nothingness. And if modern science is correct, fated also to diminish with the whole universe as it goes on its way to extinction. Everything is gone. No personal permanent abundant life awaits anybody. No loving Creator made us because there is none, no Creator, no creation, no “In the beginning…” just the eternal cycle of things and all reality just a terrible accident. With all due respect to the Dalai Lama, the two theologies are very different, drastically so. Adding to that difference is the monotheism of the revealed religions. John Garvey of “Commonweal” has written, “Nonbelievers say that humans have created the gods, or God, in their own image, and that is certainly true of the gods who serve as patrons of wine, war, sex, wisdom and so forth. Monotheism changed all that by making God essentially other…” Essentially other is to put it mildly. Very other indeed, so other that not too many humans would want to concoct and impose upon themselves such a God. A God who imposes not wine, women and song on us but the duty and freedom to love or not along with all the sacrifice that often entails. A God with all the often challenging, unwelcome, unsought and uncompromising ethical imperatives found in the Torah with its Ten Commandments combined with the awesome Christian demands of love, forgiveness and purity. A god invented by men would be of much more friendly disposition to the base desires of our damaged natures. Given the apparent male domination in most societies throughout history, a god more understanding and undemanding of his so called “favorite,” pushing rather than condemning favorite male pursuits such as promiscuity, polygamy, bigamy, east male divorce, concubinage, prostitution and such and by no means demanding quite challenging things like chastity before and faithful lifelong loving monogamy in marriage. What male would concoct such a god? Here love would really be learned. An invented god of the kind we know through revelation is a laughable thought because of the essential contradiction involved. Who would invent such a god? Much better one made in our image, not one like “AM.” The God that we know through revelation is not like us, is not in out image, is so other and with so “other” demands as to be unlike anything else we know. So, to help us know him he revealed his essence which is existence, pure eternal existence, in the name he gave Moses else we would never have gotten beyond Greek speculation about his nature, though Aristotle’s surmise of pure thought and uncaused cause were quite fine as approximations. On top of that, he commanded a morality of rugged and refined love with specifics that were very other indeed, though contained even before revelation in that natural law engraved in our hearts’ and shared by all people. But it, like the commandments, was often honored more in the breech. Revealed religion, especially Judaism and even more so Christianity had specific demands in the areas of justice, love and their close and very important though certainly not exclusive arena of practical action, sex. They are not often found in any of the non-revealed religions but are very worthy of children of Our Father. This is not a god we would have made up or invented, far from it. Clearly we are not God and not part of God and he is not us, though some of a pantheistic “new age” mentality would like to have it such. We can think about God but full knowledge of him is well beyond us even with revelation’s aid. Not everything by far has been revealed. There is more to come, much more. XXIV BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM Where does all this leave the Dalai Lama and the great religious traditions of the East? Certainly they are in a very different realm with their strong polytheistic, pantheistic and polygamous traits. Of the three faiths claiming a basis in revelation only Islam maintains polygamy and a generally inferior status for women. But there are other basic differences too that make the relativism of those who agree with the observation made by the Dalai Lama before his visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in N.Y. City that all religions are the same, even more untenable. With regard to human life, it is only in the Judeo-Christian tradition and to a lesser extent Islam due to its attachment to polygamy that every individual is something very special, is of great dignity and importance regardless of gender. Male and female both share equally in that basic dignity. Each person is an individual of great importance because he is made in the image of God and is taught by Judaism and Christianity to call God his father. With the coming of Christianity and its central dogma of the Incarnation, the value, worth and dignity of each human person was immeasurably boosted by God becoming one of us, taking upon himself a true humanity like ours in every respect devoid of sin for sin involves the failure to love. The Creator thus graced his creatures and all creation. In the East by contrast, the individual is an illusion and the self worse than worthless. His final destiny is not personal and eternal life with our Father in heaven but a hereafter of blissful unconscious eternal oblivion with the individual self reabsorbed into the cosmos. Contrasting the philosophical Hindus’ and Buddhists with the ordinary believers, Gerald McDermott in his essay “God’s Rivals-Why Different Religions,” makes the point that the philosophical Buddhist insist there is no personal God because there is finally no distinction between God and the universe, the cosmos. Everything is one, a great unconsciousness stream of eternal uncreated and unknowing being. In Hinduism the ultimate end for every person is to lose personhood by absorption into the undifferentiated and unknowing soul behind all things. Life’s goal is to escape life and merge into that unconscious stream. Life’s worst curse is to have more of it, to be reborn into more life. The fatalism and the pessimism toward living is pervasive and would be much more deadening than it is if the less philosophical rank and file believer did not ignore many of the dismal ramifications for daily living that could flow from such a theology. By contrast, the God of Revelation is not an amorphous unknowing essence or stream of being, part of and indistinct from the cosmos, but, though spirit, a most personal, intelligent and distinct being whose very essence is existence and more, the universe’s creator and indeed our loving Father. Christianity, Judaism and Islam teach that life and the world are great gifts not great horror shows. Oh, to be sure, like Christianity they teach that the gifts are damaged, that this life and the world are to an extent a valley of tears, that creation has been partially knocked off the track by the abuse of freedom but, as Genesis insists, the world was created good indeed very good and as Christianity confirms, so good that God in the flesh came to rebuild and redeem it. It is by no means Buddha’s world of pain and suffering so devoid of real pleasure and happiness and hope that it would be better never to have been born. For Buddha, escape it was a must. Not only was the world beyond redemption it is not worth redeeming. It is to be eschewed not renewed. No salt of the Earth here. The old Catholic prayer calling on Our Father to send forth His Spirit and renew the face of the Earth,” would be unthinkable and unimaginable in Hinduism or Buddhism. In these religions, wants, desires, hopes all flow from ignorance and are the sources of mankind’s misery. Making yourself into a blank in anticipation of the ultimate blankness awaiting us is achieved by eliminating these things through meditation and other techniques with final escape into blissful nothingness the only goal. This pessimism was Buddha’s Hindu inheritance. He could not shake it so escape became his goal. Buddha was a good man and an inspiring teacher who wanted to share this message and means of escape with others so that they too may be free of life with all its desires, wants and dreams. They are nothing but trouble. His was a purely ethical religion designed to achieve release from the horrid existence of life in a world of pain. There was no hope or promise of personal immortality, instead the ambition was to die once and for all and permanently escape rebirth. How vastly different from the Judeo-Christian message, “I have set before you life and death…choose life…”- Deuteronomy: 28. Life is the choice of the revealed religions. Not so the others. Another vast difference Much of Buddha’s thinking in this regard came from the dominant Hinduism of his time: “Sweet is sleep, better is death, best is never to have been born.” With such a mantra, why not blow your brains out? Yet Buddha reproved suicide. He had absorbed the Hindu belief in reincarnation. Suicide was useless since the unpurified soul would be reborn, possibly into extremely unpleasant circumstances, an untouchable or perhaps an animal, until escape into oblivion or Nirvana was achieved. Nirvana translated means “extinguished like a lamp.” It involved the painless peace that rewards the moral annihilation of self on Earth through a life of meditation and complete self-abnegation. For the Hindu it meant the use of austere asceticism to cleanse self and sense until the spirit returns to the great ocean of soul of which it is part. Then at last the individual will cease to be. Buddha accepted this end but rejected the Hindu approach to achieving it. He reacted against both methodological poles of hedonism and extreme asceticism all the while accepting the rebirth doctrine. For Buddha, desire was the enemy and to escape reincarnation one must extinguish the self with all its desires. When this forgetfulness of both self and self-love with its wants and longings was finally achieved there would be no bad karma and no more rebirth. As Buddha said, “One thing only I preach-Sorrow unending sorrow.” The way to escape unending sorrow, the wheel of rebirth and the law of karma to achieve Nirvana or annihilation and blissful absorption into the world soul was to extinguish the desire-filled self. We are caught in a trap of endless rebirths into the horror of earthly existence. We are stuck in this cosmic nightmare until we escaped by self-forgetfulness and achieved the painless oblivion of merger into Atman, the world soul, the only reality. Buddha had taken from Hinduism the meaningless of life along with Karma, the sum total of past moral conduct that determines the quality of rebirth. A rebirth that, as mentioned, could run the gamut from animal to untouchable through many castes to Brahmin, the Hindu of the highest caste. He also took the ethics of Confucius with the idea of doing ones duty no matter in what caste or position one’s Karma placed one and thus tread the road of escape into the blissful oblivion of Nirvana. Buddha did not explicitly condemn the Caste System but preached to all castes in the belief that all was one and he believed even the most vicious person can ultimately achieve enlightenment and thus escape into blissful Nirvana. The Judeo-Christian concept of the inherent individual dignity of every man, women and child is foreign in all this. In contrast to Christ’s openness, equal dealing with women and indeed the importance of women as Christ’s disciples right from the start, was Buddha’s advise to a disciple not to see them and not to talk to them. Only slowly did he allow women into his new order. Sexual desire was to be avoided because it led to reproduction thus adding to the long horrible chain of rebirths. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism treats reincarnation and individual souls as illusory. The only reality is the eternal undifferentiated stream of being. From it existences are produced and prolonged according to Karma. Under Buddhism the oneness of the whole universe is stressed. As in Hinduism, the individual is not a separate entity and reverts to the primal eternal stream when desire ceases. Some dissenters emphasized that Nirvana was not extinction but a supreme void of blissful light. But Buddha refused to answer whether persons in Nirvana existed or were annihilated but some hold that he repudiated cravings for annihilation or non-existence. Apparently there is some confusion on the matter but there is no doubt that Buddha was agnostic on specifics as well as the question of whether there was a God but he was evidently not an atheist. He believed something endures beneath the shifting appearances of the visible world, something unmade but he refused to call it god. It was certainly not the uncaused cause of western philosophy. What is clear was that life’s dreary goal was to quench hopes and desires, to be purified of them in order to escape existence and be off to some nebulous state of union with the unknowing cosmic divine over soul where particularities and personality are erased in the oneness of ultimate being. Besides the extinguished lamp motif, Nirvana has been described as a drop of water returning to the ocean. Complicating a clear understanding of all this is the multiplicity of interpretations and schools that have developed over Buddhism’s long history and the mixing of Buddhism with many local cults and gods. In this it is similar to a limited extent to Christianity after the debacle of the Reformation. In addition to this multiplicity there is an underlying problem with the central law of karma and rebirth. How can rebirth take place when there is no permanent entity or self to be reborn? With the doctrine of non-self in place, what’s being reincarnated? And, how can a non-entity experience the light and bliss of the ultimate void of Nirvana? . The pessimism of these Eastern religions was so severe that it contrasts glaringly with the Judeo-Christian view of life’s ultimate significance and goodness. With the Christian, the task in this life is to transform self and thereby the world, not escape it. To renew it, as mentioned earlier, not eschew it. We are to be the leaven in the lump not the Ostrich in the sand. Buddha would say such a goal is futile. With the aim to uncreate all creatures making them into non-beings instead of the eternal beings envisioned by the revealed religions, the quiet inertia, stagnation and hopelessness of the historical East with its lack of zest for life and intellectual adventure was quite understandable. Also, understandable in view of the amazing resiliency of the human spirit no matter where found is the ability of so many there to rise above such a philosophically debilitating world view, often with kindness and a smile, and get on with their lives. In addition and without any neo-colonial tripe at all, it can be said that some of the zest of the west, in spite of the unfortunate baggage of its human blunders, has increasingly rubbed off on our greatly shrunken world including the traditional East where often such contributions as Western science and political principles, those found in the Declaration of Independence for example, are admired and emulated. In these principles the impact of Christianity is felt for many of them, “all men are created equal,” and “endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights,” to take two examples, are to a great extent derived from it. More on that point later. So too is the charity and love exemplified by well-practiced Christianity, Mother Theresa and her many followers being a good example. XXV COMPASSION AND THE GOOD SAMARITAN To try to understand the stark uniqueness of Christianity one must look ever so carefully at Christ. In Christ our relationship with God is taken to a radical level, wrote John Garvey. In the Incarnation, God’s becoming man, “God becomes one of us, as powerless before evil as we are, and is murdered. This is not an incarnate god like the mythical gods of Hinduism such as Krishna who can, quite wonderfully in the Bhagavad-Gita, switch instantly from flesh to divinity. Jesus was not a divine being merely clothed in flesh but a completely real and vulnerable human being of flesh and blood like us who could be nailed to the cross and still be God. This (suffering) takes us to a new place.” We’ve talked about the difficult subject of the suffering of the innocent earlier and its exploration in the Old Testament book of Job but the “My God, My God why have you forsaken me” cried out in death agony from the cross was the epitome of human suffering and was no act. It was the cry of a person who was totally God and totally man too, Jesus. That cry shook Chesterton out of his skepticism and into the Church. In that instant humanity could see that God loved us so truly that he became one of us in living, suffering and death. Jesus, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, Son of the Father and identical in divinity with the Father and Holy Spirit as best we can understand the triune-ness of “AM,” was a real human being with a real human nature as well as his divine nature. This is utterly unique and when he taught with parables like the Good Samaritan he wasn’t identifying with the helper, the Samaritan. He was the beaten traveler in the ditch whom the Samaritan helped. That helping hand is what it means to renew the face of the Earth. The eschewing recommended by Hinduism and Buddhism is not. This Christian renewing, this engagement with the world, perhaps epitomized in the U.S. by Martin Luther King, had a large hand in rolling back some of the great evils plaguing humanity including slavery, human sacrifice, infanticide, abortion, polygamy, concubinage, easy male divorce, segregation and racism. With less success it took on war with “The Peace of God” and the “Truce of God,” in the Middle Ages and is still working at it. Sad to say, though, some of these evils have returned or are creeping back especially as the Christian influence is discarded or ignored. At the center of that influence is the great dignity and value placed on every human being at every stage and even after soiling. The story of the Good Samaritan is helpful in gauging the vast attitudinal gap between the Eastern philosophies and religions and the Judeo-Christian ethic. Most Buddhists refuse to take sides in conflicts. Presumably, this would include any preferential option for the poor or persecuted. The aim of Buddhist meditation and prayer is to avoid emotion. Enlightenment means a state of calm with feelings of neither extreme happiness nor extreme sadness. The goal of contemplation is an awakening to a state of pure being the germ of which is already in all things and the realization that mind has no substantial self behind it at all. The individual person is an illusion that mature awareness can see through. This desire for calm along with the karma concept can often be stultifying and block reaching out to the forlorn and broken as the Good Samaritan did. The upper caste reaching out to an untouchable was practically unheard of. This was apparently a factor in Mother Theresa’ decision to work in India. In this regard the reaction of a Buddhist Monk in Korea upon hearing the Good Samaritan story not long ago is revealing. “What a beautiful story we’ve just heard.” he said. He went on to explain “…Buddhists place high priority on interior peace. Anything that would fracture that peace we avoid, such as the battered man on the side of the road.” But interestingly, as if the message in the story enlightened the Monk, he went on. “But there is also a higher value we should be striving for on our way to true enlightenment: harmony with all creation. In the parable, helping the suffering man does not destroy the Samaritan’s inner quiet but rather repairs the disharmony in creation caused by the robbers.” Although both Christianity and Buddhism value compassion, note the implication in the words “helping the suffering man does not destroy the Samaritan’s inner quiet…” Apparently, if it did destroy it or even risked destroying it, no help would be forthcoming. The Christian, on the other hand, would be obligated to help even if inner harmony and calm were reduced to utter turmoil, great inconvenience and extreme discomfort, in other words, a complete shambles. Professor Paul Knitter of Union Theological Seminary writes: Jesus calls us not only to love and have compassion for our neighbor…but also to confront the systemic powers that oppress our neighbor and be ready to accept the uncomfortable or deadly consequences. I’d like to find the one responsible for inventing this God and these strictures! But that’s what renewing the face of the Earth is and the Earth needs it and is worth it. It was created good by God, not something to be escaped or eschewed. That should resonate with all the “greenees” out there! True love goes beyond contemplation and begets action; a Mother Theresa in Calcutta; a Father Damien with the Lepers of Molokai; George Bailey going off the bridge in a fictional Bedford Falls; the Nun teaching in the slum school for love and room and board; the faithful spouse resisting strong sexual attractions at work or play for love of wife and family. This is renewing the face of the Earth in action a little bit at a time. History is full of it (not literally). Look at the work of the abolitionists against slavery and for the recognition of the humanity and personhood of the African slave; look at the Civil Rights movement against segregation and racism; look at its modern sequel, the continuing pro-Life movement as it works against the human destruction of abortion and for the recognition of the pre-born’s human dignity. Movements of reform and renewal like these have been rare to non-existent outside the parts of the world rooted in Christian influence and only now as communication makes the world smaller and more reachable is the effects of that influence finding resonance elsewhere. Historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. makes that very point when he writes that nowhere else outside the West with its own fair share of tragic evils have those crimes and the crimes of society in general produced their own antidotes. He writes, “it is to the Western standard that groups in other societies appeal to redress injustice.” The generation of these antidotes is rooted in the value Christianity places on the person even the most despised and discardable. As noted earlier, feelings can be very unreliable and subject to change, hardly a firm foundation for substantial reform and renewal. Feelings may act as a starter but sustained effort requires something beyond them namely serious thought based commitment. It should be kept in mind that feeling a desire to help, feeling compassion without doing anything about it, is quite different from knowing that you are obliged to help, to do something about it whether you want to or not because you have been commanded to love. Much better to do it without the command but the command is there because many of us need help, need a push, we have to be motivated otherwise it would be lacking. And hopefully, after a while, the command will become internalized and part of us. Law can have that effect, it can teach. Unfortunately, sometimes it can be a terrible teacher as Roe amply demonstrates. Before it, it is estimated there were about 75,000 abortions annually, now it’s above 1.2 million. There may be some who would stop for the beaten man and get into the roadside ditch to help him without command but many who would not, who would walk right on by. They are the ones who need that additional motivation and then of course there are still others who don’t give a damn either way. This is part of what Christ meant in his parable of the sewer whose seed fell on shallow ground, stony ground and good ground. Acting on a feeling of compassion for someone in trouble is very laudable of course but if feeling is lacking and the person in stress is entirely unlikable even detestable we must act anyway. That is our portfolio as Christians. Judeo-Christianity is the only religious tradition that hands out such a portfolio. It makes Christianity rather difficult, hence the need for helping grace in spite of Mr. Optimism. That is authentic love. It makes the burdens and obligations manageable. It doesn’t make them go away as traditional Buddhism attempts to do with its important eschewing element. Christ when asked to sum up the whole law said: love God and love your neighbor. That’s the command that takes all in. Buddha on the other hand said, “He who has no love has no woe.” That’s a big difference. Love is a level above compassion if by compassion we simply mean to sympathize with someone. Compassion literally means much more than that. The Latin root is “com-passio” literally to suffer with. It is one thing to say we sympathize with the plight of those who suffer, the slave, the poor and the ill but quite another thing to say we suffer with those who suffer so much so that we are compelled to act like a Father Kolbe who took the place of an inmate in a concentration camp who was scheduled to die or Peter Claver who took the place of a slave condemned to the galleys. This is precisely what Christ did on the cross. As a human being, he truly suffered in our place, for our guilt and the totality of human guilt for the crimes committed without number before him and after him. The ledger was redressed. All we need to do is sincerely ask to apply his merit to our need and who doesn’t need? Kolbe, Claver, Christ and numberless others share humanity and love. Love is the motive and drive behind sacrifices great and small and the hard reality of love is it is unattainable, undoable without sacrifice. The Buddha would extinguish it. Compassion involves an active ingredient that is often missing in Buddhist philosophy, the commitment to transform the situations that cause suffering and in this way renew rather than eschew. The Samaritan put the injured man up in an inn. Christ transformed death itself, our greatest injury, when he transformed our graves with his own resurrection and promised that resurrection and life was our too for the asking. Legions of people who have followed Christ have also done some transforming. We have talked of some. Under the influence of Christianity the great reform tradition of the West, the Wilberforces in England for example and the William Lloyd Garrisons here in the U.S. both abolitionists, or Martin Luther King and so many other “do-gooders” such as the Mother Theresas of the world have achieved amazing results. To repeat, as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, “The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes. They have provoked great reform movements against slavery, racism, injustice and the subjection of women. It is to the Western Standard that groups in other societies appeal to redress injustice.” Such appeal was necessary because they were not rooted in this great Christian tradition that infuses the West to this day calling for the renewal of the face of our good old Earth. “Do-gooders,” it’s a put down term in a world now infected with a media that so often idolizes the “my-wayers” but they are still out there and how much more suffering would there be without them? Princess Diana’s brother summed up the attitude at her funeral during his eulogy when he commented on some of his sisters critics. He could well have had the critics of Mother Theresa who died about the same time in mind too. .”Goodness is abhorrent to the morally bankrupt,” he said. For moral bankruptcy we need only turn on the tube and much of the “entertainment” industry. In many ways it’s like a millstone around the neck of American society. Today’s media morality represents a disastrous shift in values for the world’s suffering and vulnerable targets, the unwanted pre-born, the dependant or terminal elderly, the inconveniently helpless, handicapped, damaged, the Down Syndrome and the similarly afflicted for when the capacity for true love and compassion is called for but fun or convenience calls for something else, the latter is more frequently the choice now than has been the case for a long time. Such is the expected result in a society where the influence of its religious roots is being avoided and even forgotten in an educational system that practically bars religious influence and display under a false notion of a barrier wall separating church and state. The First Amendment never called for such a wall and it has risen only as secularism has risen. Good evidence of the change can be found in New York City, the abortion capital of the nation. There 40% of the pre-born never see the light of day, 61% among African Americans! It puts the lie to the mantra of how tough and heart breaking the abortion decision is. For some it may be but over a million a year, one out of every four conceived! The decision can’t be all that tough for many especially since a good number are repeat abortions and the number continues to raise. Indeed in 2009 47% of abortions were repeats. Some evidently see abortion as birth control. Actress Whoopee Goldberg has had at least six of them! Contrast her with Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, who is busy leading a new African American Civil Rights movement, this one to roll back the slaughter of young minority Americans in the womb. The national grand total for all abortions since the disaster of Roe in 1973 is almost 55,000,000 and rising. Difficult decision? Law can be a terrible teacher especially for the easily influenced. If it wasn’t for the influx of immigrants, and their number almost perfectly balances the number of Americans destroyed by abortion, the effect on the economy would be crippling and the present economic stagnation worse. Besides that, it’s as if a large part of the older established segment of the American people, deep into abortion or the avoidance of posterity as many of them are, are clearing themselves away for replacement by newcomers. It’s the historic fate of all people who refuse to reproduce. When Rome was experiencing a birth dearth, a problem that contributed to its decline, the Emperor Augustus, like a growing number of governments today fearful of the same problem, offered incentives of various sorts to families with more than two children. The results were disappointing and the slow decline continued. Worse still is the overall cheapening effect that abortion has on the value of human life. It is a disaster waiting to happen. It should not come as a surprise that other innocent and vulnerable human beings besides the pre-born and who are deemed useless, inconvenient, damaged or as the Nazis used to say, “life unworthy of life,” will be nudged and encouraged along the death with dignity path. For safety sake it would be better to return to the days when abortion was illegal, mostly safe, in many ways safer than some of today’s clinics as records clearly show, comparatively rare, and unlike now, usually performed quietly in a doctor’s office. The coat hanger claim is mostly pure myth concocted for propaganda purposes. Statistics show 39 deaths attributed to illegal abortions in 1972, the last year before legalization. As Bernard Nathanson said, the coat hanger ploy was a brilliant propaganda devise by pro-abortion forces to break down resistance to legalized abortion and about as accurate as the promise that legalization would make abortion safe and rare. But more common it became, much more, about 1.3 million in 2010. The claimants were ignorant of the fact that, as any close student of humanity knows, the law can be a potent teacher especially for the fence sitting impressionables with no guiding principles other than going with the flow. Renewal is possible. Reform is possible. Rising from the abortion horror is possible. As possible as was the rising from the slavery and segregation disgraces was. In all these reforms religion was and is a major catalyst. Is should not really be surprising that in the giving to charities, in helping others, in serving in the world’s poverty wards, AIDS hospitals, orphanages, homeless hospitals, leprosaria, poor houses and such, not many my-wayers and free-livers are to be found. It’s the givers until it hurts group that carries on. Not only that but it is the people of faith, the so-called do-gooders who usually staff those kinds of facilities and statistically give far more in money and other resources to help others. Arthur C. Brooks, professor of public administration at Syracuse University, confirmed this trend. In his book, “Who Really Cares,” he writes “In years of research, I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people…An average secularist non-giver earns 16 % more money than a religious giver…Yet secular liberals are 19 percentage points less likely to give to charity each year than religious conservatives.” As if to underline the point he calculated that the Dakota farmer gives more per capita than the San Francisco swinger. One group talks the talk, beats the compassion drum, and preaches the good fight but the other does, it walks the walk. This is compassion in action and that is love. It’s the Christian’s portfolio. You must really value every human life to do it even the apparently “worthless.” It’s by no means easy and sometimes in facing great problems calls for terrible personal sacrifice that is hard for many of us to imagine as Michael J. Fox’s conundrum illustrates. But, perhaps there are more Pat Tillman types, life givers, than we know. Hard as it is to imagine, compassion has a down side. In the wrong hands it can become freedom quenching and even deadly. As R.R. Reno wrote, “One can have endless compassion for the young women who feels forced by her circumstances to have an abortion,” but nevertheless her action is destroying a new and totally guiltless life. Here as with Fox, love requires serious sacrifice and without its guidance the vulnerable will be in increasing peril. The taking of a life, be it only beginning, may benefit many and do much good but, and here’s the part that doesn’t go down easily for any of us, so what! It’s an innocent life. This was the point of the Dostoyevsky story of the killing of the rich old widow before she could will her wealth to a monastery so that the money could be used to benefit multitudes of poor peasants and their starving children. Other ways to help must be found not involving murder. That’s the tough law of love behind “Thou shall not kill.” Injustice cannot be used to solve injustice. Things cannot be made right on Earth by the able and motivated, no matter how well intended they are, destroying the vulnerable and discardable in order to help others. And practically speaking it won’t be long before it backfires and the wildcat is loose. You know the one, who decides…..? There is an elemental and essential injustice involved in a murder even of a bad person to aid a good person, unless in self-defense, a basic right of everybody. Ultimately the act of killing the innocent will not just kill the victim, it will become a social poison with effects dangerous and inescapable. The wildcat once loose will be hard to contain given our human predilection for selfish, self-serving acts. Compassion on the rampage and free of the authentic love rooted in revelation is tantamount to pulling the plug on multitudes. Abortion may well be only the tip of the iceberg. The proverbial road to hell famously is paved with good intentions. Most of the people staffing abortuaries as I suppose most of the people staffing concentration camps seventy five years ago did so for the salary but were not devoid of some good intention, help the mother, help Germany, misguided as they were. Even on a lesser, less deadly scale, compassion can be a threat. Today on many college campuses compassion in the form of hate speech edicts can severely infringe on even hate-less speech when in the hands of those who have replaced love with political agendas and such. On some American campuses even raising questions about homosexual behavior, for example, can be labeled homophobia and merit ostracism or worse. On French beaches Muslim women cannot wear burkas because they are in the view of politicians “demeaning to women.” Meanwhile men in speedos still parade and in New Zealand compassion for animals has mandated they be stunned before slaughter although it violates the ancient ritualistic procedure for producing kosher foods for the country’s 7,000 Jews. One man’s compassion can be another’s tyranny when compassion blind-sides common sense and the rule of love. This happens when tenderness and compassion becomes detached from their authentic source, which is love with its hallmark “com-passio,” and the readiness to sacrifice. Then, historically it often gets busy cutting down human imperfection. The gas chambers and abortuaries and death with dignity squads are usually not far behind. It is interesting to speculate on the philosophical Buddhist’s view of the suffering of Christ on his cross. Here the value of compassion clashes with the ideal of calm and detachment. The cross represented severe disharmony no doubt! Suffering in any cause was to be avoided not embraced. For many Hindus and Buddhists astrology is a major and debilitating influence. According to it much suffering is caused by our stars or bad karma and has no value. It is to be avoided on the path to peaceful, blissful oblivion. If by now it sounds like a mantra it bears repeating nevertheless. In much of the traditional East the problem filled world is to be eschewed. For the Christian it is to be renewed. The old prayer calls upon us to “renew the face of the Earth.” Problems and suffering cannot always be avoided and like the birth pangs of the women in labor or the pains indicating health troubles, they can have value. As with the man beaten and thrown down in the side of the road, suffering can bring forth, draw out love like the Good Samaritan’s and with it, healing. But note, the Samaritan healed out of his own resources not by killing or using someone else’s. Hard as it is to bear, suffering can lead to and achieve good. If anything, that’s the lesson of Christ on his cross. The suffering on the cross was the birth pangs of the new and abundant life made available to all for the asking. Just love one another as I have loved you, Christ said. Christianity, writes the late Richard Neuhaus, does not believe in non-attachment, but rather teaches precisely the opposite, that we should weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.” And, it might be added, help out in spite of any personal disharmony. That is true com-passio. These are lengths the traditional Buddhist would likely want to avoid. The Buddha, as was mentioned, said, “He who has no love has no has no woe.” St. John wrote, “He who does not love abides in death.” All religions the same? XXVI PLURALISM AND DIALOGUE There is a saying favored by some that the various religions are just “different fingers pointing to the same moon.” By now it should be obvious that the pointing fingers are really less than five and different indeed. It should also be added; even the moon they point to is far from the same. For Hinduism, Buddhism and most non-revealed religions in contrast to Judaism, Islam and especially Christianity, the moon being pointed to is individual annihilation. It has nothing for us but ultimate individual oblivion. For the revealed religions it is life, and that in abundance for every loving individual. It can hardly get more different than that! Oblivion, blissful or not is something far from individual personhood and conscious survival in new life. Nor do Judaism, Christianity or Islam believe that the material world is so reprehensible as to be avoided and escaped. Indeed it is good, very good according to Genesis. Christianity goes beyond that to teach it is the glorious if tarnished work of a personal loving God who entered creation and blessed it even more by becoming a part of it, one of us. We, the tarnishers, are damaged beings prone to use our gift of freedom for things other than love, sometimes terrible things and with weakened wills inclined to sin. We are in need of help and grace, the grace won for us and offered to us by Christ on his cross. Though the differences between these two religious groupings are vast and even between Christianity and the two other religions in the revealed category quite large too revolving around the person of Christ and the question he asked shortly before his death “Who do men say that I am?” a question no one should not answer in this life, yet, in all this there need be no acrimony. As Alan Jacobs writes” Only the coldest of hearts and the most tightly shut of minds could repudiate acknowledgement of one another and learning from one another and having lots of fruitful interchanges.” This can be done, the Church believes, all the while retaining the absolute uniqueness of Jesus Christ who alone presented himself to us as God incarnate. True pluralism need not mean that any window on the world and any take on the destiny of humanity is as good as any other. Some are better than others and as Raimundo Panikker has observed, some windows are more smudged than others. Dialogue grounded in the hope of mutual learning and understanding may well lead to a conclusion about precisely what windows are more smudged and which present a truer view of reality. Be that as it may, all people, all the window peepers, the window users themselves, all demand and should get individual respect and love. Though some live lives with beliefs very different from our own, these lives are nonetheless meaningful and partake in the love that God has for all humanity. And when, as it too often happens, these lives or our lives are lived in indignity, in sin and blinding narcissistic self-love, the Father’s love is not withdrawn but still offered, to be accepted or not. The hope is that the response will be the Prodigal’s. That’s true pluralism. It need not trample truth for, as Aquinas wrote, “Every truth without exception, whoever may utter it, is from God.” There is a popular bumper sticker that cleverly makes the symbols of the different religions read, “coexist.” The impression can be that all religions equally endanger this noble goal or that no one of them is more or less a problem in this regard than the others. Historically, this certainly is not the case, as we well know. Earlier we brushed on the topic of the military expansion of Islam. This aggressive tradition is not yet entirely abated among important elements of that religion. But the overall intent of the bumper sticker is well received so long as it doesn’t imply the banishing of public religious expression and discussion or general moral standards in the name of a blind non- judgmentalism. For too long we have been going down that road. It’s a road that tries to ignore the metaphysics that has been discussed in these pages, the religious commitments and obligations based on revelation that have been examined here and that form the foundation for the civilization we enjoy. The belief that out religious roots could be easily dispensed with without severe damage to that civilization is a dangerous illusion. That we must co-exist in peace all the while respecting differences is a must for, in spite of the Dalai Lama, the differences are wide and deep. If coexistence in that sense is the point of the bumper sticker, it’s a good one. But rather than simply ignoring differences in the name of toleration or diversity or inclusiveness, they must be examined with the love and patience that Christ taught. Despite the differences there are strong ties that bind. We all share a common humanity. We are all sinners. We share a natural law, often referred to as the Golden Rule, with the freedom to follow or not. For the rest, let us pray the prayer of Jesus that they all may be one Father as You in Me and I in You. That oneness in spirit and love is something well worth “imagining” and working for. Diversity itself can be overrated. Carried to extreme it becomes disintegration. . XXVII NEW AGE ENDS AND DUST IN THE WIND There are many people today who subscribe to “New Age” beliefs. The beliefs are generally rather fuzzy, non-demanding and usually include the spiritual but not religious mind trend. Adherents are often partly influenced by Eastern religion or at least intimations of it and are sometimes consoled when confronting the mystery of death with sentiments captured in a poem used at many funerals and whose title and first line reads “Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep.” The theme that follows is, “I am not there.” The rest of the poem explains what has become of the person and the first thing to notice is that he or she is not a person anymore. “I am the winds that blow…the diamond glints on snow…sunlight on ripened grain…autumn rain…birds in circled flight…stars that shine at night…. “ The last line reads, “I am not there. I did not die.” The sentiment is kindly, well meaning and probably satisfying to many but certainly not to anyone of a Judeo-Christian conviction. The depersonalization of the person, the deconstruction of the human being, the demise of the individual, the absorption of a thinking being into non-thinking nature is far from satisfying, far from reassuring and far from the promise of Christ, so much so that it would leave most Christians unmoved and totally unimpressed. It is perhaps the New Age equilivant to the nothingness that awaits us according to most Eastern religions and philosophies though, it should be noted, some Eastern religious thought of a relatively late period and possibly due to the influence of revealed religion, has evolved a so called process pantheism found in a variety of Buddhisms and has introduced a personal element, even personal survival, to the death experience. However, to those steeped in the Judeo-Christian promise of not just survival but abundant personal life in the loving presence of God, the Father and creator of all, the poem is lacking and ultimately depressingly sad. To think of a world brimming with life and intelligence, flawed though it is, but nevertheless of great capacity and with the hope of life in abundance, reduced to this, to glints on snow and circling birds, how can it be otherwise? To think also of all the generations of talent, of striving to accomplish beauty and understand truth, all the loving, laughing, grieving, suffering, sacrificing, giving and receiving and begetting, all to become a glint or wind on grain, not even a thought and to make matters worse, everybody sharing in the same fate, Attila the Hun, St. Francis of Assisi, all achieving the same glint- hood, the same sunlight on ripened grain; it is a vast injustice, justice undone! The scenario, it would appear, presents a terrible deal to the lovers of truth and justice and the lives lived full of love. A scenario only mitigated somewhat in Buddhism by the karma concept that allows earlier escape from the misery of existence for good lives of sufficient detachment. But, it is an escape much delayed by many rebirths fraught with destructiveness and pain for poorly lived lives, until the getting of things right enough for escape is finally achieved and the ultimate equality of oblivion in the blissful non-being that marked original Eastern thought is attained. At least, in the poem glinthood may top oblivion, but the difference appears moot. As for the poem, it allows no separating of the hate and hell sowers from the sowers of kindness and love! All apparently share the same end. Far from justice, this is nightmare equality, inclusiveness gone mad. All are one and the same, glints on the snow, dust in the wind. And the individual, honed here in personal struggle to grow, understand and perfect self often amid great hardship, that individual like all individuals is to end up as nothing much. To the Christian this scenario is horrific. Our life and suffering and Christ’s who shared in it lead not to a banquet of life but to its negation and erasure and a permanent personal mindless oblivion as glints or blowing wind. We can look forward not to life but a final lobotomy. Not so according to Christ. But in New Age sentiments, Eastern Religions and Western secularism, we have the great gift horse that was revealed in Christ’s resurrection rejected, often unknowingly, sometimes without the thought it merits, sometimes due to the sins and crimes committed by Christians over the centuries or on the weakest of grounds of all, that it seems just too good to be true, pie in the sky. Such people often put it in the same bin as Santa and the Easter Bunny. To the superficial so it seems. The fact is though, authentic love is also too good to be true but it most definitely exists. The world has been blessed with many great lovers. Think again of Father Kolbe at Auschwitz volunteering to take the place of a condemned man who had a family in needed of him or Kurt Jaegerstaetter the Austrian peasant beheaded for refusing to be drafted into Hitler’s army because he detested Nazism. They were following in the footsteps of the most tremendous lover of all, Christ, who died for all. But all this, indeed all real love, in the poem’s scenario, is love never to be rewarded, never to be recognized the way it should be, never given its due and never to be fulfilled in the tremendous lover who made us in the first place and who loves us the more in our sufferings and struggles. Indeed, he even shared with us in those sufferings and struggles. On the other hand, in our New Age poem, sharing the same dissolution into the energies and senseless forces of nature as the lovers are the haters, the defiers and deniers of justice and sewers of hell on Earth. In the poem the fate of the just and unjust is the same. But if there is no justice in our future why strive for it in the here and now? Nietzsche had it right. Remove God and his justice and the underpinnings of traditional morality are gone because the end is the same for all. All are dust in the wind; all lives are meaningless; it is a strange end to so glorious a story of human struggle, failure and achievement. So then, we must ask again, why anything? Why not nothing? Nothing would seem to be better. There would be no grief, no heartbreak, and no death. No tantalizing taste of the good things of life, only to be finally withdrawn. Given the end envisioned in the poem, the same glint hood for all, nothingness would make better sense. So again, why? Why something rather than nothing? XXVIII WHY? A REVIEW Why there is anything rather than nothing can never be known without the aid of revelation. Only it provides the motive. Science is at a loss. Some believe there is no motive. All is chance, the luck of the draw. To repeat, the best explanation that one famous scientist of the atheist persuasion could manage was there is no why. All we have is a spontaneous creation, an undirected happening from Hawking’s gravity. “Because there is a law of gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Another scientist, in trying to explain the rise of life from dead dumb matter says it is the result of some “chance combination of gasses.” Still another prefers the slime of primeval seas. The gasses, the gravity or the slime from which life emerged, whatever it is; it was just there, just existed, no explanation. Though even the structure of slime is extremely complex nevertheless, there it was! Push the envelope as far back as you want there can never be nothing. There is eternal gravity or slime or gas (heaven forbid) or something else from which intelligent life came forth. In this desperate materialism of the Atheist persuasion we ourselves, our world, our universe, our literature, our music, all human accomplishment, Aristotle, Dante, Einstein, you, me, everything came from anything but “AM.” Instead everything is the product of pure chance. This is a miracle made even more miraculous because there was no intelligence to perform it. It just happened. There it is, a universe filled with material things, many extremely, mathematically, complex and at least a small part of it brimming with something even more complex, life and intelligence. In the face of all this, the best from a notable group of atheistic scientists is accident! Most people just don’t have enough faith to be an atheist because obviously something always existed and as one salty critic commented, “gravity, slime, gas, my a--! And we know that life did not always exist here on Earth yet we are presented with a world filled with it now and thinking, rational and free willed life too. Life and thought rising by evolutionary chance though there is disagreement about what exactly the evolutionary process had to work on in the first place and where it came from. This is what we are asked to believe. Presumably it, whatever it was, was just always there. Nevertheless, there it is, life and thought, as was said, rising from dead dumb thoughtless matter and the matter itself coming spontaneously by chance from nothing or from an eternal inexplicable gravity or gas. This is what some in the science profession of a strong materialist bent present us with. This is a faith for the desperate or gullible for bringing all this something about is chance and the process of an evolution that cannot even account for its own existence much less the existence of anything else. Evolution can’t work on nothing. In itself it needs something pre- existing it to work on, a something that one scientist who, disdaining miracles and especially the possibility of “AM”, attests came from nothing “because there is a law of gravity,” a gravity that just happened to be. This miracle is presented to us with a straight face and is called science but really it is what happens when some scientists leave their field and dabble in metaphysics and theology. We are asked to believe that living beings suddenly made their appearance by pure chance. We are asked to believe that these beings had the capability of distinguishing, good from evil, of choosing love over hate, justice over injustice. They became capable of writing prose like Shakespeare, music like Mozart, poetry like Dante, art like Leonardo and attain a self-knowledge that often leaves them discontented with and in themselves. As was said, such belief is beyond most believers. They can only marvel at this manufactured faith that apparently only unbelievers can manage. It is the great atheist miracle. Anything apparently is better than taking a good look at the gift horse. Looking seriously in the horse’s mouth is especially hard for people so immersed in such a crude materialism. But change is brewing. A growing number of scientists are becoming disenchanted with these apparently desperate sputterings of a failing atheism and a dogmatic materialism. In the words of author E.F. Schumacher, they “look at the strange and wonderful mathematical order in physical phenomena” and cannot remain satisfied with the crude materialism of the past. In his essay, “The Role of Chance in the Emergence of life,” Donald DeMarco gives some details about the change taking place. He cites Charles Townes a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and co-inventor of the laser who has recently argued that new discoveries in physics “seem to reflect intelligence at work,” and Allan Sandage, a world-leading astronomer has stated that the Big Bang can be understood only as a “miracle.” The increasingly chancy chance scenario is under logical attack because the extraordinary high degrees of order in the universe cannot be the product of pure chance. Pure chance in our experience has never produced anything like order. It produces disorder more than anything. The monkey experiment mentioned below illustrates that fact. As biochemist Michael Behe explained in his book “Darwin’s Black Box,” random evolution cannot explain “the existence of a biological complexity (DNA etc.) that did not evolve by a succession of slight modifications.” Darwin’s theory cannot account for “irreducible complexity,” as found, for example, in DNA, our immune system, the complexity of blood clotting and the human thinking process. As Chesterton jokingly observed, “one elephant having a trunk was odd. But all elephants having a trunk looked like a plot.” Playwright Tom Stoppard, with a creative artist’s colorful way, states that the idea of God, (even without any help from revelation,) is more plausible than the alternative proposition that given enough time green slime could write Shakespeare’s sonnets. Famous psychiatrist Karl Stern calls the idea “delusional.” It is easy to see why. Stephen M. Barr writes that the “slime” itself (or gas or whatever) “was made of atoms that had all the structure, intricacy and potentiality that chemists devote their lives to studying.” The very concept of “chance” explaining anything is suspect. Chance itself depends on a previous grasp of the notion of order. In that regard, order precedes chance. Order in matter, however subtle, existed at the outset. The great mathematician and physicist Hermann Wey stated that we have penetrated far enough into physical nature to obtain a vision of the “flawless harmony that is in conformity sublime reason.” Almost sounding like St. John’s “In the beginning was the word and the word was God,” astrophysicist Sir James Jeans attests that order precedes chance, thought preceded matter and God the Creator preceded creation. Or, as it has been stated in several of these “pearls,” Being preceded being. We need only to add, they are by no means one, Being and beings are of absolutely different realms of existence. So, let’s now introduce being, men and women, beings so utterly different as to make their chance appearance preposterous. Not to put down our nearest “relatives,” they are admirable creatures indeed but in 2004 the “New Yorker” magazine reported about a computer program that simulated the keyboard pecking of the equivalent of 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years. The best the chance pecking of our nearest animal relatives could do, the best from the mess, the only intelligible part was”Valentine.ceasetoIdor:eflpofrjwk78axzvowm);8.t.” A three-year old human could do better in two minutes. What a vast gap for an accident to fill! A look at the Big Bang confirms much of the above repudiation of materialistic chance. Commenting on what scientists tell us the ratio of matter and energy to the volume of space at the moment it happened had to be for the universe and life to develop, specifically within about one quadrillionth of one percent of the ideal, George Will wrote, “What is is staggeringly implausible.” Indeed, impossible without intelligence at work. A secular faith that relies on the chance rise of life from slimy green soup or the chance combination of gasses or spontaneously from gravity is increasingly becoming unscientific. The reasoning of man is in tune to discover how it was actually accomplished and increasingly as we learn more chance does not fill the bill, not even for the scientist of a purely materialist bent. For the metaphysician, and all men and women by virtue of their share of intelligence and curiosity are metaphysicians by nature, it never did. And with revelation, well, we know our Father made us to make love flourish in creation. Taking a closer look at the something rather than nothing surrounding us might help free those minds immured in the materialism of the past. Taking that look, they would see a world of matter that came into existence but can’t account for itself. It is a world that is rife with contingency, beings coming in and out of being but still following discernable laws all pointing to great intelligence. Some might prefer to listen to avid materialist Jacques Monod, the Nobel winning biologist who still maintains that “man is a mere accident,” but to be complete he must also say everything else is an accident too, both man and matter. Unfortunately, a science based not on seeking rational laws but on the will o wisp of accident and chance is more voodoo than science. And of course it leaves us severely handicapped when it comes to the questions before us. But science not tied to a determined materialism sees the irrationality of accident, for accident itself presupposes order and law. And science has discovered laws and orders of irreducible and beautiful complexity. So much so that the old saw passionately embraced by Monod that man just happened to evolve by a chance directed by an evolutionary process that can neither account for itself nor its own origin nor the laws and rules it goes by but nevertheless is supposed to account for everything else that is, leaves the mass of humanity marveling at such blind faith. From a mindless lifeless matter here by accident we get mind and life here by chance. But, it’s the chance of an algorithm, some argue, a process of repetition that always yields the same results and in this case goes by the name of natural selection. Its result, they maintain, played out over billions of years and never by design but always-blind chance, is life. But, what was there for it to work on and why does it act that way instead of another? Evolution and natural selection cannot with complete satisfaction account for life’s process much less its origin and so require a grand exception from the rule that effect be predicated upon, flow from, cause. It is an exception given nowhere else. Nevertheless, some people having rejected the great gift horse sometimes because it requires belief in the miracle of the resurrection, yet the above miracle they happily accept. It has to be wondered if one adept at such faith has really looked at the horse? After all, electrons follow laws, seeds follow laws but .how can they and why do they? They are without minds. And what laws! They were deeper, more intricate, complex and beautiful than was ever imagined. They underlie the very workings of nature and usually account for even the anomalies. Biologist Ursula Groodenough has called it “the sacred depths of nature.” Better to accept the resurrection, the confirmation at the heart of revelation, rather than reject it out of hand if the alternative is to cling to the illogic of a dying materialism. To reconsider the resurrection is always appropriate. The tomb was empty. It was a fact that no one denied and everybody admitted. Christ’s was gone but how? There are only a few possibilities. One is conspiracy. That he wasn’t really dead at all but had faked it and had then sneaked away with the help of conspirators never to be seen again. Said conspirators, presumably disciples, then announced his resurrection, the motive still a mystery, They were all eventually killed because they wouldn’t stop doing it. Living a lie is possible, maybe, but going to one’s painful death for one? Hardly. And , to death they went. Can’t believe that scenario? Here’s another. Either somebody took the dead body even, it seems from reports with guards posted at the grave, or it took itself. If the disciples took it they all died for the same lie, motive still a mystery outside raving insanity. Or someone else took it, who or why unknown, but whoever it was, tricked the disciples, who were obviously very stupid, into believing he had risen hoping they would preach the resurrection and get them selves killed which they proceeded to do. It’s the most successful and dastardly mass murder conspiracy in history. It even has a motive and a suspect. With a little imagination, It was probably a rival fishing company. And on and on the nonsense goes. Sort of like life arising from lifeless matter, mind from mindless matter. As was said, some people would cling to anything rather than look the gift horse of revelation, resurrection and life in the mouth. Perhaps it would mean very uncomfortable life changes for them. Nevertheless the disciples went around, far and wide announcing, “He has risen as he said,” and became what he said they would, “I will make you fishers of men.” They became so good at it that it got them killed but the Church has carried on ever since. Still, some fish try to get away, some don’t really listen, some run into swift opposing currents or as in the sower parable, some seed falls on stony ground, some dry ground, some weedy plots but some good ground. But with grace, anything is possible. To reiterate, though it is fashionable in some circles to still doubt the existence of God, who can really doubt that if ever there were nothing there would be nothing now and forever? As we saw, the Big Bang tells us the material universe didn’t always exist. Everything, including space and time, matter and energy, as far as we know based on hard evidence, came into being from literally nothing over 13 billion years ago. But, whatever begins to exist can’t really come from nothing. Here is where revelation supplied the answer and it will always be outside the ability of laboratory science to confirm but not reason. The universe began to exist so the universe has a cause. From the very nature of the case this cause has to be uncaused because logically, as we saw earlier, there cannot be an infinite regress of material causes. This uncaused cause is a powerful creator who is very different from what was created. Of necessity it is a Being eternal and timeless having created time and since matter by its nature is contingent, always changing and prone to decay and extinction, a non-material Being. A Being whose very essence is to exist, existence itself. “AM,” is his revealed name, the essential eternal something that the laboratory of logic demands. Being, known to most as God, is evidently very powerful and intelligent having brought everything else into being. The essential non-material Being that always existed thus avoiding the absurdity of something, the material universe that had a start and will have a finish, starting from nothing. Aquinas always held that reasonable people could arrive at God’s existence in the laboratory of logic by a human reasoning strong enough to provoke a faith that is anything but irrational. What logic points to revelation prods and confirms: “Tell the Israelites “I AM,” sent you.” “And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” “He has risen as he said.” XXIX THE CHURCH, THE NEW AGE AND NEW MORALITY Little wonder the new atheism never caught on and a default position, a vague spiritualism of the New Age variety has sprung up to serve many as a gap-plugger; a vacuum filler for those who for whatever reason still do not accept or sometimes even approach the great gift horse that revelation presents. The reasons are varied and a look at some of them may be helpful. In some instances it may well be a case of those who think they are well but for whatever reason are actually not. Many minds get distracted and reality is left unconfronted. The placebo of popular media entertainment or some other such soother, innocuous or not, preoccupies many minds. Many are taken up in the daily time filling clamor that much of the media provides or some other mind occupying diversion and may well be lulled in this manner. They deem themselves in good health, in no need of a doctor and let it go at that. In this mind frame, the Church, that great hospital ship heading home with a crew and cargo of very mixed bag indeed but knowing they are unwell and lacking in some vital arena of authentic love, is dismissible. Christ said I have come to call sinners. That’s almost all of us but those who don’t know it, those who have lost the reality and sense of sin don’t hear the call and see no need for the ship. There is another group that accepts the message of Christ but not the ship that originally carried it and still does. Often they are put off by some of the passengers who were once on the ship in ages past or even now, people no self-respecting ship or assembly should allow aboard although they are the very types Christ came to wake up, as the Siegfreid Reinhardt painting attempts to illustrate. Nevertheless, these people prefer a better church; purified, full of latter day saints so to speak, the very people whom Christ said don’t need a physician or a hospital ship. True, Christ never promised the church freedom from sin but nevertheless in the multitudes the Church contains are remarkable lovers, yes, sometimes called saints though many more like us, often failures at love but still trying. Churchgoers are sometimes labeled hypocrites and sometimes rightly so but most are there because they know they need help and they know where to get it. Practically the first prayer of the Mass is the “Mea culpa.” It means, “my fault… my great fault.” The good people, those who are healthy, the true lovers, they are there too and though none of them is perfect, they are essential in keeping things afloat. Of course, those whose consciences have been crushed, those who have given up, and those who consider themselves simply not in need or not interested are numerous and often won’t darken a church door. They sometimes delight in focusing on the historical sins of those who have crammed on the ship over the centuries including captain, crew and passengers. A recent captain, Pope John Paul II apologized in 2000 on the Church’s behalf, a “mea culpa” for sins over the ages. Some ridiculed, some refused the seventy times seven. For some the imperfection of the Church remains a great stumbling block though perfection outside its assigned task of teaching on faith and morals was never promised it. These demanding folk, some easily able to see the splinter in another’s eye while missing the log in their own and as been noted, are known at times to dismiss believers as hypocrites. They gladly single out the Church for criticism as indeed the Church should be singled out when it fails to live up to its founder. But Christ left it in the hands of human beings and though he built on rock and promised it would last to the end, it has nevertheless been severely shaken at times; the Great Schism and Reformation come to mind. Even the first rock, Peter of the famous, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church,” tended to be an impetuous if well intentioned bungler even denying Christ in the clinch before crucifixion but then sought forgiveness and rallied. When Peter was killed in Rome others took his place as the foundation rock of the church and necessarily so for Christ meant the Church to last well beyond the Apostles, indeed till time ends. Removing the rock with Peter’s death would not serve that purpose. These succeeding Pope’s, as the Bishops of Rome are called, have been a mixed bag over the two millennia, some saints, some weak like Peter but overcoming it and some disgraces but most did the job humanly well. As writer Flannery O’Connor pointed out and it bears repeating, the Church was promised inerrancy in its assigned work, the teaching of the faith and morals contained in revelation and not sinlessness. It is a singular institution making quite singular claims to authority and truth. Then there are always those seeking newer, better churches and since the Reformation hundreds of them have sprung up. These divisions have tragically weakened the appeal of Christianity to the unevangelized parts of the world. The original Church still founded on the foundation rock of Peter and his successors and uniquely called Catholic since prior to 100AD strives for a perfection it knows it can only approach but never achieve here but it won’t divide the mass of Christians up in competing sects in the effort to attain it as happened with the Reformation. Christ wanted unity and even prayed for it in John, 17: 20, “that they all may be one Father as You in me and I in You.” It’s a prayer the Church always works to fulfill. It is very reluctant to ostracize anybody, including abortion supporting politicians and other practitioners of the multifarious forms of hatred toward any segment of the human family though in the past it used the power to excommunicate more readily. As with Christ its founder forgiveness is always offered to those with true contrition and willingness to do penance. Over the long history of the Church penance took many forms from a simple “Hail Mary” to pilgrimages. It depended on the seriousness of the fault. A civil emergency such as war or famine could even induce new forms of penance. During the Crusades, the attempt to halt Islamic incursions into Europe especially at Constantinople, the penance offer was broadened to meet the encroachment of conquering Islam. Muslims had earlier sacked St. Peter’s in Rome and were besieging Constantinople. Years later they conquered it renaming it Istanbul. It was in that critical era, in the spirit of self-defense and the defense and safety of pilgrims to the already conquered Holy Land as well as the defense of threatened Constantinople that the Church offered as a penance for sins confessed and forgiven the joining of the Crusade. As always, true contrition for the sins committed and confession of them to a priest were required before the Crusade penance could be given. It was an extraordinary form of penance and could be refused and replaced with a different one. All penances were supposed to help break the dangerous and sinful attachment to some earthly thing be it food, drink, drugs, promiscuity, adultery, anger, envy, hatred, revenge, the list goes on, and to make just satisfaction and restitution where called for. In other words everything was still required for the forgiveness the Church was commissioned to give only in this case the penance, for those who accepted it, was extraordinary. Instead of the more usual prayers, almsgiving, personal sacrifices to feed the poor, for example, or aiding the sick, helping build a school or hospital and so forth, it was the going on the Crusade. The sacrifices involved, sometimes referred to as the temporal or Earthly punishment due in justice for sinful actions were to be replaced in this case by helping in the battle to halt the advance of Islam. This type of broadening sometimes went by the name of an indulgence and was open to abuse if a sacrificial gift of money became an acceptable substitute penance. This indeed happened when some wayward popes and preachers later required specific donations of money in place of other forms of penance for a particular indulgence. In the most famous instance the money was to be used for the building of a new St. Peter’s in Rome. Tragically this helped precipitate the Reformation and all the pitiable divisions flowing from it. This interesting topic, the history of the Church, is covered in the first part, entitled, “The First Nineteen,” of this six part series. The series itself goes by the overall title “The Lieswatter.” Copies should be available. As mentioned, it is no accident that a favorite prayer of the captain, crew and passengers of the great hospital ship is the “Hail Mary” with its “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” and the “ Mea Culpa” that leads off the Mass. Nevertheless, historically, whenever the Church was strong, its influence felt, the law protected the lives of everyone including foreigners, Jews, infants, the handicapped, the pre-borns, slaves even heretics. With regard to the Jews as Jewish historian S.W. Baron points out, many Popes condemned attacks upon them. Those who took these live into their own hands broke the law. When the Spanish Inquisition, a favorite target of vociferous critics of the Church, broke the mold and went after heretics with fire and sword, they being in the mindset of the time an endangerment to immortal souls, a capital crime akin to murder today, they included those Jews who were believed to have dishonestly claimed conversion to the Church and who rightly or wrongly were seen by the Spanish government as a dangerous fifth column during the struggle to liberate the country from Moslem domination. These two groups were prosecuted though the prosecution flowed as much from political urgency as religion and was often far in excess of Rome’s requests and guidelines. These guidelines were often ignored by the Spanish authorities. Nevertheless, a Due Process was laid out and to be followed in these cases that was of a higher standard than common at that time and higher than in many places today. As a result, more of the accused walked than suffered punishment and the number of deaths over the Inquisition’s four centuries of existence was far fewer than the fatalities during the few months of the French Reign of Terror during the “Age of Reason” or the twelve years of Nazi concentration camps or the seventy years of Soviet Gulags in the Twentieth Century. Details of the due process followed under the Inquisition are also found in Part I, “The First Nineteen.” If under Christianity the first rules of contemporary Due Process arose to protect the lives of everyone from precipitous prosecution and punishment including Jews and heretics whose crime of endangering the salvation of souls was seen as very serious indeed, with the decline and even in some areas the demise of the Church’s influence, especially in the 20th Century, things changed and so did the rules. Unfortunately, in many countries ordinary people adjusted accordingly and those who like Franz Jaegerstaetter in Germany protested were killed outright or went to the camps without any due process at all worthy of the name. In the 16th Century it was different for the Church still had public clout and government had not succeeded in the attempt to shove it into a closet. Throughout most of the history of Western civilization its voice was heard. For example, when the Central American Indians suffered at the hands of colonial powers as they often did, the Church’s Bishops, like Bartholomew Las Casas, and clergy protested and succeeded at times in winning protective legislation though not always as effective as intended in that world of primitive communication. By the 20th Century the clout was greatly reduced. When Bishop Von Galen of Munster, Germany, a close friend of Pope Pius XII, publicly protested the actions of the Nazi government, it had more negative than positive effect. Hitler had targeted certain “inferior” groups, first the handicapped and dissenters and later, on an even more massive scale, Jews and Slavs especially Poles and Russians. In 1941 word leaked out in Germany of a secret government program to weed out and exterminate mentally and physically handicapped fellow citizens, “unproductive national comrades” and “life unworthy of life,” in the Nazi bureaucratic jargon of the time, but strikingly and sadly similar to a mode of thought finding acceptance in some circles of American academic life today. Although the German handicapped were the first such group to be so targeted they were far from the last. Bishop Von Galen was quick to their defense as Las Casa had been to the Native Americans. He strenuously protested and because of Nazi press censorship had priests hand deliver his message to the public. A copy of his letter is available from . The protest had little effect; fear and the difficult in spreading the information can do that. Adding to that fear was the beheading of at least three of the priests involved in the distribution much like Jaegerstaetter two years later. Von Galen escaped their fate because the Nazis did not want a prominent martyr on their hands. What, when Church influence was powerful had been a violation of civil law now was in accord with it. Things had changed. After the Nazi state got away with their disposal of these first victims it was sufficiently emboldened. It next went after other groups of unworthies in a cleansing frenzy, Jews and Slavs. This is the topic of Part II of the six-part “Lieswatter,” entitled “Holocaust and War.” Something similar happened to the pre-born in the U.S. after 1973 Roe Decision and, as happened previously in Germany, many ordinary people changed with the law. As the Nazis had targeted the handicapped and later Jews and others in Germany, radical feminists and their supporters targeted the pre-born in the U.S., considered legally protected and part of the human family before Roe. After Roe they became sub-human, life unworthy of life to use the Nazi classification. Human dignity and life was in for another blow. Sometimes, unfortunately, law is a powerful teacher especially for those who hold to or have no strong life affirming values. The affirmation of the value of every human life regardless of condition is uniquely Judeo-Christian, the result of revelation. As its hold weakens, often on former Christians and Jews or those who call themselves such, all hell usually breaks loose. Only with tremendous effort from pro-life groups in the U.S. was even partial birth abortion taken off the table. Sadly, anti-pain legislation protecting pre-borns is running into stiff opposition from Planned Parenthood and NOW. Who’s next is a valid question. The victims of Down syndrome are already disappearing from the scene thanks to ultra sound and hearts unable to stomach sacrifice. Of course without faith in the dignity of every human, a faith that is waning in spite of being reason based and strongly supported by Judeo-Christian morality, it’s hard to see the point of such sacrifice. When the Supreme Court targeted the pre-born at the insistence of radical feminists and secularists, few except the Catholics, often in the face of a strong lack of sympathy from a basically “pro-choice” media, protested at the time though the ranks of the opponents of Roe have swelled as the horror of abortion becomes clearer. Bottom line, often those with a slight or incomplete grasp of history and who are often influenced by the media’s superficiality and frequent bias, end up with a very distorted view not only of history in general but the Church’s role in it in particular. Instead of history they often get historical nonsense like The DaVinci Code or the so-called History Channel’s “Kingdom of Heaven” on the Crusades. This is a serious obstacle to the functioning of the Church and the attracting of people to its message of life. To see clearly the change, as secularism replaces Christianity in the minds of many, the start out law of our land, the Declaration of Independence, stated that all men are created equal. Later some states added and the Supreme Court eventually concurred, except slaves. That helped bring on our bloodiest war. Now we have the same court saying, except pre-borns. As the extremism of Princeton’s Peter Singer’s brand of life threatening secularism gradually moves center stage replacing the Judeo-Christian life ethic, will the U.S. Courts permit open war on other vulnerable groups by removing from them too the inalienable right to life? Will it add to the pre-born such groups as severely deformed and handicapped infants? Will Down syndrome infants if there are any left, follow Down syndrome pre-borns? Will seniors with advanced and very expensive dementia or to use the Nazi term for them all, “life unworthy of life” be mercifully dispatched with the approval of financially and emotionally drained families? Singer and others are already calling for it. Will even pubecide, the legal dispatching of troublesome teens deemed worthless by completely defeated parents and supposedly competent authorities, guardians and others be added to the list sometime down the road, a road perhaps to hell. Novelists are already suggesting as much. Life could be made almost painless and very pleasant for the powerful and healthy. Can they resist the temptation? And it’s all in tune with evolutionary dogmas of natural selection and survival of the fittest. What has kept all this away so far is the Judeo-Christian morality that forms a strong basis for much of our law but as more and more people depart its influence in favor of more pragmatic and utilitarian creeds, who knows? Continuing this examination of reasons for alienation from the Church, for others it might have its source in the demands of the challenging moral standards associated with Judeo-Christian revelation especially in the sexual area coupled with the demand to love our neighbor and forgive our enemy. Of this general group there are some who justify rejection on grounds of independence. This is the “I follow no rules but my own,” group. They must march to their own drum, and so forth and if they hear a better beat they refuse it because it is not of their own making. This is the old deadly pride obstacle dressed up, what the Classical Greeks called hubris, the central disaster of many Greek dramas. But there are other rejecters with more substantial reasons. After surviving a death camp, Elie Weisel left the practice of Judaism behind rather than even entertaining the thought of forgiving the Nazi who killed his family had he asked for it. For the Christian even more so the demand to forgive is pressing. Christ had forgiven those who killed him with his prayer, “Father, forgive them they know not what they do.” With all respect to Pelagius and Pelagians, many of us need the help of grace to pull off that kind of forgiveness. Forgive the neighbor who constantly offends us? When they asked Christ, “Who is our neighbor/” He told the parable of the Good Samaritan who helped the foreigner and stranger left for dead in the ditch. Christ universalized neighbor to include all our fellow men and women. This demand to help all and to forgive those who ask is a great challenge. Sweet revenge or the nursing of unforgiving hatred must be forgone. But how difficult it can be only the Elie Weisel’s of the world can really tell us. The turning of the other cheek ethic must reflect pre-Fall perfection and perhaps is a foretaste of the heavenly ideal where it will never need to be used. A Catholic friend of Weisel’s, Jean Mouroux, I believe tried to tell him of Christ’s suffering but the words wouldn’t come. All he could do is cry with him, pray for him and hope grace will help. Demands, often in the sexual area, chastity, monogamy, fidelity, especially are another obstacle for some, maybe many. It affects everybody and is probably especially challenging to the “I want to be me” and “my way” people. Frequently such people like to imagine themselves as rebels, gusto grabbers, line crossers, envelope pushers, supreme independents, renegades, outlaws, anarchy sewers, challengers of all convention, defiers and deniers of dogma, breakers of all the rules and all the usual popular folderol including that epitome of manipulative deceptions the 1960s “make love not war,” con. In effect it usually covers a multitude of mean, selfish, sordid and harmful doings resulting eventually in fifty-five million dead by abortion, four hundred thousand dead by AIDS and millions sick with STD not to mention the poverty and damage from millions of wrecked families, the latter made possible in part by the new no fault divorce laws. Adherence to the Judeo-Christian moral code would have avoided most of the calamity but many in power prefer to spend billions in public tax monies to control bad situations when some modification of dangerous-behavior would do the trick. They see it compassionate not to be demanding, not to object to life jeopardizing activities for fear of stigmatizing people. However they often turn a cold eye on the taxpayer struggling with his family budget. The reality is, feelings of diversity, toleration and compassion devoid of a foundation in authentic love and “com-passio” become skewered and dangerous to the public health and purse. People get hurt, often innocent people. A Planned Parenthood sex guide called “Healthy, Happy, and Hot,” of all things, promotes the keeping of one’s HIV/AIDS a secret from one’s sex partner. The Girl Scouts allowed its distribution! According to this general way of thinking and as illustrated in the Becker-Weisman letter exchange to be examined, it is unrealistic and lacking in compassion to call for sexual abstinence in the young in spite of the fact that abstinence is sure fire safe. Better to be compassionate and understanding and call for condom use though it is not sure fire safe at all and has yet to contain and indeed may encourage, promiscuity. Rampant promiscuity is a public danger carrying in its train serious threats to life and health including abortion, STDs and as we shall see, poverty. Such “compassion” can kill. In their self-congratulatory world of imagined independence there are those who want nothing to hold them back from tasting life in the full with no holds barred. Here is where the ignorance of history can be truly dangerous because it’s been done many times before and as Barzun has often stressed, has not usually ended nicely or happily. He uses American writer Hart Crane’s early death as an example. But it’s worth the risk some claim but the risk is often not only to themselves. They claim to relish chaos except of course when they themselves have to live in it for some time. Then the charm quickly dissipates. When the crossed line is the one they drew, when it is their rules and dogmas that are being broken, when a “my wayer’ puts the envelope to them, ah, how good rules turn out to be. Admittedly, “my-wayers” may have a certain place in spheres of innovation and experiment but the concern here deals with social situations like marriage where “our” way is called for. Frequently in all this it is the innocent and vulnerable, often the children if there are any and the relatively defenseless who do the suffering at the hands of these free spirits. Needless to say the type does not relish the Church. The oblivious Madonna with her Pied Piper-like advice that “lines are meant to be crossed,” is a good example The Church is often the only institution that officially frowns on the dangerous antics. The vaunted independence from rules came home between 1969 and 1973 when the legacy of the 1960s with the summers of love and so forth really began to hit homes and do unprecedented damage to people and families. In those five years the number of people believing that premarital sex was “not wrong” doubled from 24% to 47% -an astonishing change in so short a period-and continued rising to 62% by 1982. Warning flags should have gone up all over the country but most of the churches missed it, the governments ignored it and the media seemed to like it. As a matter of fact, without the vast influence of mass media such a change is hard to explain. At the timeMales might have been falling behind females in advanced academic degrees but here they led the way often under the guise of chic political radicalism, reform and progress against the stale standards of yesterday. Madonna loved it. The “make love not war,” sixties slogan captures the dodge beautifully and of course women often had to pay and the children too if they weren’t eliminated before birth. Life is too hard for the unwanted of course and making up your mind to want what you’ve created was asking a bit much. Legalized abortion was waiting in the wings and about to make its deadly debut. Nothing is free and as usual the innocent and less powerful paid for this carefree debauch and mindless discarding of the rules of traditional Judeo-Christian based morality. Not surprisingly, Madonna wasn’t rushing in to build orphanages so the “unwanted” might have a chance at life, as the Sisters of Charity and other religious groups had always done. Crossing the line into the pro-life camp was too much for the great line crosser. She didn’t love life that much! Soon no orphanages were needed, just lots of little graves and handy incinerators, pollution be damned. Something had to be done with all the tiny bodies, hundreds of thousands of them. Life was in for some hard knocks in America! Former orphanages, now empty were torn down for parking lots or turned into self-storage units and pet hotels.. The growing popularity of drugs also helped fuel the moral blowout. U.S Senator Daniel Moynihan’s office documented the chaos. In 1930 out of wedlock births amounted to less than 3%. In 1960 it was 3.8%. In 1965 with the coming of the Age of Aquarius and other horoscopic nonsense (a recent intensive Danish study blasted the accuracy and reliability of horoscopes) it reached 5%. By 2000 it was almost 33%. And, child poverty began its in step march to nearly 20% by 2000. Teen sexual activity rose from about 5% in the 1950s to near 50% by 1990 to become even higher after 2000. This is not progress. And society’s most important and vulnerable institution, marriage and family, began to buckle and sag under the weight of the mindless self-centered pursuit of Eros and self-fulfillment. When “compassionate” opposition to a war becomes so arbitrary as to support crowds shouting “make love not war” in the frequently patent ploy to get into the pants, as the popular expression put it, of often sincerely deluded coeds, disaster is in the works and it arrived shortly. The divorce rate went from 10% in the 1950s to almost 50% in 1990 and it remains near there. The rise of child sexual and physical abuse was not far behind with randy males often buzzing around a bumper crop of divorced or single young women frequently with children. This in itself is a recipe for danger. The best statistics available indicate that approximately 60% of females and 40% of males under sixteen in this type of situation suffer abuse, hardly ever from the biological father but rather the “significant other” or the lusty new boy friend. This is not Camelot. This is a human disaster. Hollywood actresses may glow in the wonders of single parenthood while the maid watches “boopsie,” but for most single mothers exhaustion and frequently poverty loom large in their lives. People were and still are being damaged. Multitudes of lives hurt and families destroyed not to mention the lives of millions of pre-borns snuffed out before even seeing the light of day or getting a chance at life became a fact of American life. The fact is the freewheeling, line-crossing life devoid of tie downs and moral standards is the Typhoid Mary of healthy societies. With the spread of promiscuity came the spread of abortion and finally its legalization in the 1973 Roe decision, the most life damaging Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott and then some. Somebody had to pay for all the summers of “love.” With abstinence now in ridicule, condoms and pills, not always without defect and far from totally effective, couldn’t do it all. They are, after all, not fool proof and the 60s produced a bumper crop of the type, many of them drug riddled and riding in that lovely Yellow Submarine. It would have been better for thousands if it had sunk, many lives would likely have been spared the abortion knife and the AIDS ward. A society overflowing with line-crossers is in deep trouble. With the breakdown of authentic love and longstanding sexual restraint outside marriage, the floodgates of promiscuity were opened and the bodies began to pile up. Statistics document the murderous damage done to individuals and society beginning in the 1960s. Because of the seriousness, they bear repeating: Fifth-five million American deaths by abortion with no due process whatsoever since Roe took care of that. The Supreme Court unlike the Spanish Inquisition would not allow it. The girl’s parents need not even be told or consulted much less give permission in most states. Planned Parenthood lobbying saw to that. According to its dogma the pre-born were mere blobs of cells and part of the mother’s body instead of a new individual temporarily residing in its first true home, it’s mother’s womb. The new life was often of a different sex from the mother and always with its own unique never repeatable DNA right from the start. This is Biology 101 but in a sex stampede supported by groups like Planned Parenthood and encouraged by its lobbying against all efforts at abstinence education and parental consent and with a complicitely hoodwinked Judiciary leading the charge, what chance was there to stem the destruction? The calamity wasn’t over. Add almost 400,000 dead from AIDS with about 18,000 more each year in the U.S. alone since 1980. Ironically, the Viet Nam war that many of the free spirits of the time were protesting ostensibly in order to save lives didn’t kill nearly as many people as the new sacrifice free mini-morality that was replacing Judeo-Christian moral standards did. This was especially true of a good number of college campuses at the time. Abortion referral services became a fixture on many of them. And if perchance you think that what happens between consenting adults in the privacy of the bedroom or dorm has no effect outside it, the cost to the taxpayer to try to remedy and repair the personal and social damage from drugs and promiscuity was enormous. The nation that had once led the world in industrial might became number one in porn and abortions with 20.8 per thousand women age 15 to 44. That results, on average, in more than 1.2 million abortions a year or one out of every four conceptions all under the rubric of choice. It is a choice that destroys all chance at life with all its choices for the helpless victims. Only something like abortion could give choice such a bad name. Choice was translated into dog eat dog survival of the fittest. The value and dignity of each human life, a great inheritance from Judeo-Christian revelation, was being severely damaged. Soon academic voices, Peter Singer of Princeton for one, were urging infanticide and if it advances can pubicide be far behind? In his defense of abortion Professor Singer argues, “that the fact that a being is human and alive, does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that being’s life.” Well, it used to! With Singer and his growing following, a human life has no intrinsic value. That uniquely Judeo-Christian concept upon which much of our law is based was to be replaced by a view that life is not an inalienable right after all but must be earned by possessing minimal capacities such as being aware or able to value one’s own life. In the view of personhood theory, some humans, namely all unborn life, infants and people with serious “cognitive disabilities” or diseases such as late stage Alzheimer’s for example –are human non-persons and hence possess lesser value than other humans and in the opinion of some, lesser value than some animals.” It is almost as if life is tied to IQ, The higher it is the more right to life you get. This sounds a lot like the Nazi’s “life unworthy of life.” The striking irony is Singer is an Australian of Jewish descent with relatives who died in the Holocaust. He disdains religion because he thinks it’s the only force in society that upholds the inherent worth of every individual and in so doing protects “sub-humans.” He is right in that. To help fuel the deadly debauch, the U.S., with a great assist from the Internet, (at latest count there were 4.2 million pornographic web sites viewed by 72 million people a month with porn the most down loaded category of material on the net) became the world’s number one porn producer with 11,000 new “hot” flicks turned out each year compared to about 400 mainstream movies annually. Japan recently took first place from us narrowly, but we’re still a strong second. Don’t count us out yet. We may be about 28th out of the thirty most industrialized nations in educational achievement scores but when it comes porn, promiscuity and abortion the good ol’ U.S. is always in contention for first rank.. If we can’t make many really fine movies anymore or for that matter manufacture steel at reasonable prices and must import most of our autos from abroad and rely increasingly on highly educated and accomplished talent from abroad too, why not forge ahead in porn? It’s important to be number one in something. We may be going “green” ecologically but Porn pollution along with foul mouth smog is a major problem now. What can be expected from a nation whose young are being steeped in porn and promiscuity by an apathetic, adult controlled, profit hungry media with tremendous influence? Nevertheless, when it comes to education, more than half white students, 80% Hispanic and 84% African American fall below proficiency in reading skills with math achievement scores even lower if that can be imagined. What can the future hold? There are economic ramifications that would be funny but for tragedy. It was discovered that quite a few at the SEC, instead of watching the economy on their monitors as it pigged out on bad debt and imploded in 2008, were spending a good part of the day watching internet porn. Can any of this have anything remotely to do with the mandatory censoring and banning of the centuries old practice of an opening the public school day with a short and simple non-denominational prayer by the Supreme Court in the Engle vs. Vitale decision of 1961? Can forcing religion into the closet effect the health of a society? Mr. Engle believed the voluntary prayer infringed on his son’s atheistic rights as protected by the “no establishment clause” of the First Amendment, now erroneously interpreted to require a wall of separation between Church and state. The courts interpretation is highly suspect in light of much of what Jefferson and many other Founders wrote including his letter to Washington dated January 4, 1786 “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of the nation be secure when we have removed the conviction that these liberties are the gift of God.” As alluded to above, soon to follow the Court’s Engle action was the gradual reduction of much serious educational endeavor in a good many of the nation’s classrooms. For evidence compare SAT scores before and after the 1960s. “After,” may not necessarily mean “on account of,” but it does give pause for thought. In truth, and perhaps connected there was a gradual decline of family and marriage. The rise of media influence in its place was a major signal of the trouble ahead. Adding to the pain of all this, what Moynihan and others predicted happened. There was a rising tide of poverty and loneliness especially among the droves of single mothers, often heroic women who would not abort and usually were abandoned for their decision by their “lovers.” These were sometimes known as “significant others, terms like husband or wife involving too much commitment to authentic love for growing numbers of mini men. Many of them would pay for an abortion but never the hard choice of life and support for their child, there too being much sacrifice involved. Often if the women choose life she was dumped, it being totally her decision thanks to Roe. What radical feminists promised would be a key to liberation became a door to anything but for many. Often too, for those expecting empowerment through the destruction of their offspring, the farce was played out in the form of emotional problems flowing from guilt or on the other side, the embrace of callousness toward life that in many cases led to more abortions. Whoopie Goldberg’s six may not be a record! There were many effects resulting from Roe that were obviously missed by the radical feminists. That not everything can be foreseen is an integral justification for the go-slow attitude of conservatism. It was astounding how destructive sex under the misnomer of love turned out to be! In marriage, sex is desirable. Outside it, it is dangerous. Authentic love does no intentional harm. With promiscuity on the other hand watch out! And if someone is armed with Planned Parenthood brochures, head for the hills. Though human pleasure is desirable, the wise know none ever suffices. Incessant pursuit of ever fleeing satisfaction springs from the troubled and divided depths of our damaged nature. With all the virtual and real sex available in American society today one might think it would be a very happy place and from the viewpoint of the inimitable “Playboy Philosophy,” so it should be. But, it isn’t. It is obvious that we aren’t because we aren’t merely the pleasure-seeking animals that false philosophy of life portrays. No one can live by bread alone, the spirit dies. Suicide, drugs, loneliness are more rampant now than ever. Now, with porn and easy promiscuity ever available, the pressure was off the male for commitment and marriage. Husband? Father? Rather Playboy! Blessed we are now in America with truckloads of “Hef’s” kids and though aging, they are forever children, boys and forever discontented. Meanwhile, the number of unmarried women, many of them unhappily so, has grown tremendously. It is tough to compete with the wall-to-wall bimbos bouncing on the beds of the Internet porn stage. Sated in various forms of easy noncommittal sex, the male is not interested or even capable of the authentic sacrifice involving love required to make a marriage. Lonely single women whether a parent or not became a commonplace in a society with a severely reduced number of quality males ready for authentic love and commitment. It was a loneliness never imagined by Lennon and the Beatles. Childlessness doesn’t help. Today more than 20% of American women in their early 40s are childless, up from 10% in 1976. Ten years ago in 2000 studies reported that 13% of Americans described themselves as lonely; 50 years ago only 3% felt that way. Since 2000 the loneliness percentage has grown and would be much higher without the distractions of computer and media. If there is no flesh and blood companionship a machine can do for a spell. This may be one reason why the incidence of depression has grown by a factor of ten according to researcher Robert Royal. Since then the trend has continued and all the lonely people have grown in number but to repeat, they are not exactly the people Lennon and the Beatles imagined them to be. Family disintegration, especially families with fatherless children was reflected in abuse, poverty, social dislocation and school difficulties, part of the harvest of the new non-morality. Half the people in prison were in on drug related charges at tremendous cost to the public with the number of the OD’d, in America in the hundreds of thousands. It is surprising that the legalization of drugs cabal is still heard as if we wanted to increase the number of dead and make the roads, trains and planes of the country even more dangerous than they already are. Perhaps a little nod of rueful appreciation to the rock groups that helped popularize and mainstream drug use in America especially among their young and impressionable audiences is in order. The damage has been immense and cost in lives and money staggering. When we put a super tax on the media and entertainment rich let’s be sure they pay. Never had the United States so many impoverished women and children paying the price for the no holds barred “I want to be me and do it my way” mentality of the new non-morality. The reasons are not hard to discover. In 1930 out of wedlock births stood at 3%. It was 3.8% in 1960 before the debauch got under way. It crept up to 5% in 1965 and by Woodstock in 1969 the bottom was falling out. We hit 33% in 2000. Now throw into the mess an almost 50% divorce rate. No two better prescriptions for poverty exist. Most single parents live near the poverty level. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average amount of financial support a single parent receives each year is $4,900. The “lovers” are not noted for generosity. Swinging is expensive. Most single mothers and 83% of single parents are the mothers, earn an average salary of $28,000 a year. To contain the catastrophe that always occurs when the people of a nation will not control themselves and meet their responsibilities substituting Madonna and Co, line crossing advise for traditional moral restraints, government looms large and expensive with multiple programs to try to forestall disaster. In addition to poverty, part of that disaster is an exhausted parent, neglected emotionally, and as mentioned before, often abused children. The sad result can be guessed? To repeat, the nation that once relished being number one and once led the world in areas like auto production, steel production, wheat and oil production and the graduation of scholars in engineering and the sciences, America, as was said earlier, is now western world leader in per capita abortions, STDs and illegitimacy and a close second in porn. Does it get any better though it’s not exactly what the Founding Fathers envisioned? Explanations are called for. You do not get record spikes in promiscuity such as America experienced with the sixties and its aftermath without plenty of entertainment media help, from the music it puts out to the films and TV it produces. Parade nubile semi-clothed or unclothed young women, of the MTV type for example, before a healthy sixteen year old boy and we may as well open up more abortuaries and clear the way for more single moms. If lucky they will have parents willing to forego retirement and shift life plans to pick up the slack of the often shiftless swinging father. One generation unloading responsibility on another generation and walking away is a new phenomenon for America but line crossing and doing your own thing can do that. If the Grandparents for whatever reason can’t fill the gap and take up the slack, dust off the welfare rolls and build more school detention halls; and jail cells. The statistics supporting this dire scenario are plentiful and irrefutable. Also consider forced and pressured sex. Imagine the pressure that media hyped adolescents males put on the reticent girls in the neighborhood and school, girls betrayed in a sense by their porn performing money-collecting sisters. No help from the media. There the message more often than not seems to be that everybody’s doing it. Thus media adds to the peer pressure that it helped create in the first place. Meanwhile the schools are pulling the rug out from under the girls by giving out condoms with the not too subtle Weisman-type message that promiscuity is a natural given. All the while the message .of Judeo-Christian morality, never easy but followed nevertheless by most men and women in the U.S. prior to the 1960s as the statistics mentioned earlier demonstrate, was now deemed too tough, even unnatural, for the new mini-generation spawned by the fully secularized media. To illustrate, the Weisman-Becker exchange mentioned earlier appears below. Weisman’s attitude is typical. Almost every “cool’ rule breaking household of the 1960 and 70s had its “hot” new Playboy on the coffee table. It was another badge of liberation, real radical chic. With pornography thus accepted and mainstreamed, the floodgate opened with the Internet. An early casualty of the spread of porn was the revered traditional reticence of many women toward sexual advances. It caved in for many under the pressure as the predatory male began to enter pastures that hadn’t been this green since the rise of Christianity. The pickings were never easier and the media, including the ubiquity of on line porn, gleefully oiled the skids. This is confirmed by new research by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uetker laid out in “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think about Marriage,” They conclude that “If the sexual script sets a high price for sex, as it used to do (under traditional Judeo-Christian moral standards prevalent prior to the 1960s but no longer) a women can demand that her lover be mature and ready for the commitment she seeks before she gives him the sex he desires. If the script sets a low price for sex (and it could hardly be lower than now in our completely pornified society) she cannot demand nearly as much…Men will work for sex but they won’t if they don’t have to.” It is hard to imagine anything lowering the price more than ubiquitous porn and a media featuring bed bouncing bimbos on practically every Channel but Mother Angelica’s. Add on schools featuring condom handouts and abortion referral services without parental consent thanks to the combined lobbying efforts of Planned Parenthood with its annual $350 million tax gift from the Federal and several state governments and other similar “pro-choice” organizations and we have disaster in the making. In this sense government finances the organization’s lobbying efforts thus creating a novel version of conflict of interest! Planned Parenthood is America’s number one abortion corporation at about $400 a “procedure” with over 300 thousand of them or about 25% of the American annual total. A young women seeking to refrain from sex for moral reasons or health reasons, and the research shows that virgins or women in long term relationships such as marriage are the most emotionally healthy whereas the more promiscuous a women is the greater the likelihood of some emotional dissatisfaction, instability and disease, nevertheless she has few allies in her desire to abstain outside family and Church, especially the Catholic Church. She certainly can’t look to media or school and most peers are pretty much what the media turns out. Many must feel very alone and often presumably succumb to pressure to the delight of the male and sadly, in about 1.3 million cases a year, the abortion clinic’ds bottom line. The damage was great. Women became targets. Today 90% of hard-core porn is violent and 96% of juvenile sex offenders have viewed the stuff. Viewing porn is by no means the harmless past time its producers and queens like to make out. It’s not the mere appreciation of beauty that you would get by viewing Niagara Falls, a painting of the Rockies or the portrait of the Mona Lisa. For the healthy male, the naked female is in a class apart in the area of stimulation, nice as the Rockies are. It’s more like pouring gasoline on a fire. Once the clothes are off it’s a new ball game and porn defenders are simply blowing profit laced smoke about it being harmless. The young especially, after watching it and if of a predatory bent, often become more predatory and those new to it often become more demanding and more aggressive with girls. For frequent users especially middle-aged men, however, the effect can go the other way. Satiated after a while, it often becomes the end of Eros or at least it’s dulling and the wives frequently suffer. But for many younger males, after viewing, they frequently can’t wait to get their hands on the real thing and that is precisely what women become to many of them, things, mere objects of opportunity in the vast one night stand arena called hooking up. So, where are the enraged feminists who often get apoplexy at the merest pro-life sentiment? Unfortunately, even women outside that category often hesitate to protest for fear of appearing moralistic, even religious. For the young, the worst sin is to be deemed uncool, out of it, a goodie two shoes, to use a fine old term, by their peers. The pressure on women to play the game even though it involves the danger of disease and abuse, in other words to be there or be square, is immense and only the ones with great self worth and a dignity often rooted in revealed moral standards are able or even willing and wanting to stand their ground. Traditional Christianity provided strong motivation in the form of the high self-worth, esteem and dignity inculcated in every human being regardless of any external category or condition including gender. But traditional religion became passé with many young in the post 60s with songsters and singers even urging us to imagine what a wonderful world it would be with “no religion.” Well, as it turned out, it is anything but. Conned women opined that if males can play the bed bouncing game so can they and played right into the hands of the predatory worst. Promiscuity soared as did abandonment, single motherhood, fatherless children, abortion, STDs and though there is evidence of a lower rape rate that some attribute to the ubiquity of porn, others contend it is still up there, the drop being due to underreporting. Still others see a complex combination of women victims desensitized by a swinging pop media along with the peer pressure it helps generate and promote along with the decline among them of traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethics. The result is often more acquiescence and less resistance especially among a primary target, young women who crave popularity. It was consensual to use the legal term and thus does not rate a rape rating. But was it really? Aided and abetted by a porn polluted atmosphere with the media as a prime accomplice can we doubt that most women in such a situation are really victims? The idea that enough titillation and porn saturation eventually blunts individual Eros is not new. A little of the stuff might stimulate but plenitude deadens after a while and with it interest and ability but until that point is reached the damage can be great. Novelty is often sought and experimentation that sometimes leads to a pseudo-homosexuality. Jacques Barzun long ago maintained that “desire has to be dammed up to be powerful and longlasting.”A brook or stream, to prevent dissipation and remain strong, must be hemmed in. Suffuse means loss of power. In the past, a great deal of that restraint was motivated by Christian morality, or that lacking, the fear of pregnancy outside marriage but with the pill and decline of religion those restraints are greatly weakened and Eros overflows. For a good number, with the passage of time interest and strength dissipates into boredom and escape through experimentation and abberration. Roman Polanski once remarked, “Normal love isn’t interesting. I assure you it is incredibly boring.” And why not when you are drowning in it? This experimentation into aberration for escape, sometimes considered liberation, along with the Homosexual life that is sometimes adopted for the same reason by any number of individuals, often receives media encouragement. PBS, for example, the organization that deigned to run Elmer Gantry on Christmas day 2010 as if to show how out of tune it is with the spirit of the day it was, is right in tune with the homosexual movement even running a series called “In the Life,” to seemingly elevate that life-style and demonstrate its alleged normality. But in fact, dissipation is frequently a part of the “In the Life” life style with multiple partners; some statistics show an average of 50, the rule. In addition, almost none of the first same-sex “marriages” contracted, mostly in Massachusetts, lasted. The situation is ripe for the bazaar, what was once considered abnormal, in the mad search for novelty. Hart Crane was perhaps its first victim from the American literary scene many years ago. Often too, a pseudo-homosexuality develops to take its place beside the genuine article especially when the sex style becomes chic. It wouldn’t be the first time. During the Italian Renaissance “Greek love” became all the rage among the intelligentsia in emulation of the pederasty practices common in later classical Greek culture. In the United States it helped bring out a disease by the early 1980s that has and still does kill thousands. In the search for escape from satiation and boredom and into novelty, drugs too became a growing influence with still more problems for many people and society generally. As it turned out, together with the sexual revolution, the drug revolution spawned during the 1960s brought down its devotees by the hundreds of thousands. We had declared war on ourselves and combined with legalized abortion announced open season on our own progeny. It’s not a pretty picture. Doing your own thing, loving that line crossing, throwing out the challenging morality that had served us well for generations, turned out to be awfully costly in life, treasure and human dignity. XXX MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS As we “amuse ourselves to death.” to borrow the title from Neil Postman’s new book, and doing it over the lives of literally millions of pre-borns and hundreds of thousands of homosexuals and hard drug users not to mention the illnesses, some new and some old, effecting millions of carriers of STDs, we still have to face a child poverty problem of unheard of extent as well as other problems too. Marriage and family life have taken serious body blows and when that happens the whole society suffers and declines. For one thing, people are not marrying like they used to. The number of marriages per 1000 women 15 and older plunged from 76.5% in 1970 to 36% in 2000. The old farmer adage crude as it may be has some truth in it. “If the cow gives away the milk why buy it?” The “grazing male,” to use an African term, who has wall to wall porn and plentiful promiscuity to keep him entertained and with abortion to take care of slips, has small incentive to marry. Far from liberating, abortion has been a bane to many women. Helping greatly in the ongoing cheapening of the worth of sex is, of course, the media. If in these pages it appears to be a favorite target, it is richly deserved. It is by no means a scapegoat for the ills that have been discussed here. Indeed it is more a Judas goat, a veritable Typhoid Mary in their spread. It would not be so if the sexual looseness and rampant promiscuity it so often promotes with it programming was harmless but we have ample evidence it is far from it. We are not even talking about the flood of internet porn or the blatant crassness of popular types of TV programming from MTV and the obscenity laced “South Park,” to the man-obsessed concerns of “Sex in the City,” and such, all showing a weariness with the good life appropriate for a period of decline, but rather the general obsession with violence of the blood and gore type both verbal and physical, pervading much of the industry and rubbing off on society. Currently unpopular but tried and true traditions from respect in language, stylish modesty of dress and a robust abstinence from sex outside of marriage have been chucked out and the society reflects it even in its styles. As far from the colorful 50s as one can get, the ‘in’ dress color for today is black, in language vulgar blue is preferred and the red light districts of old are in every home that has a TV. There, often enough, the hooker, a formerly rather obscure word and occupation, for most is now known by nearly every grade schooler and seems more common in scripts than “mom.” The brightness of a civilization once believed to be on the up swing is now dulled and slowed by the myriad self-inflicted problems that have been partly discussed here but need more examination.. Even something as simple and innocuous as a dancing with stars type program is turned into a hoochie coochie show, to use a colorful old term. If in economics, bad money drives out the good, in media land it seems lowest denominator programming drives out the higher. Indeed, in trendy media land, in one of the greatest disappearing acts in history, the happily married person with family has been made as extinct as the dinosaur. The tribe of cool detectives, swinging female cops and similar “cool” types that festoon the tube and screen are almost never married and if they are, they are divorced or going through one but usually have loads of bimbos ready to bounce on call and keep them amused. And divorce, as it grows more common, has to be saccharinized. It is always the marriage that failed never the people, never their failure to love authentically and faithfully. Whenever a public figure, often politicians and show business types, do something especially degrading or despicable it is illness never moral failure that is involved and a few weeks of expensive rehab will take care of it. Of course, children are hardly ever in the new picture. Somebody else must be having them. This is media “reality.” By its lights it is a complete mystery how the American population ever got to where it’s at. Our heroes had no hand in it for they are almost always childless. Left to them, not posterity but possible depopulation is America’s future Is it a wonder the American family is hurting? Generations are growing up watching this stuff by the hour while mom and dad have to work or even more deleterious just mom with no dad around. TV has replaced parents as the primary learning tool in many families. It has become for many the prime dispenser of perceptions of right and wrong often erasing the distinction between the two. It seems as if the whole industry has been taken over by the generation of Boomers and its emulators who in their narcissism are open to no reform in spite of all the evidence of the damage being done to millions of Americans, often children. It’s a real tragedy because it wasn’t always so. In the past when realizing it was creating a problem, the media industry has reversed itself when the damage became evident. In the 1930s and 40’s, movies and media helped make smoking “cool.” Now it isn’t thanks to its potent influence. If it wished, and there is plenty of evidence to support doing so, some of which has been laid out in these essays, it performed a similar reversal and service with promiscuity and instead of promoting it promoted a sane and safe approach to sex, instead one replacing condom driven promiscuity with tried and true abstinence, an abstinence that always was and still is possible in spite of all the Dr. Weismans, the well being of our society would be served again. But if it went after promiscuity with the same zeal it went after smoking and began pushing for abstinence, it would have to turn on the very liberal establishment of which it is largely a part. It is not about to declare its independence. It was easier to go after a distant tobacco corporation even though a loss of some advertising income may have been involved than to turn on that of which you are part. As deadly to human life and health as promiscuous sex is, it was far easier to ignore promiscuity with its deadly concomitant of abortion and AIDS while continuing the crusade against cigarettes. Abstinence is too “churchy” for the secularist establishment to which media is beholden with NOW, Planned Parenthood and the gay machine integral constituents. They stake everything on condoms but putting all eggs in one basket is always risky, especially this basket. This magical trust in condoms is a puzzle to the objective observer. They haven’t stopped HIV/AIDS whereas abstinence or strict monogamous fidelity would stop it in its tracks.. There are still about 18, 000 new AIDS infections a year in the U.S. and though the U.N. and the U.S. have helped flood Africa with condoms, the death rate there is still tremendously high except where the stress on abstinence has reduced heterosexual “grazing,” the main disease spreader there. And of course abortion and STDs are a plague in our own land. Yet, no anti-smoking type effort for abstinence is likely to come from a complicit media.Abstinence, always 100% effective is called for but only the Church does the calling and it is often castigated as insensitive, impractical, unkind and worse as if sex was addictive behavior instead of one freely chosen. The church will never lower sex, a good from the Father for pleasure and procreation, to a mere uncontrolled animal act. Which is precisely what the media and secular establishment considers it, as succinctly expressed by Dr. Weisman. But there is hope. Indeed, the Family Research Council reports that abstinence programs reduced teen pregnancies by 67% and that accomplished with little Federal and no media help. Now if the media would cooperate… who knows? Sadly, there is no evidence of any about face. Instead it is now on the “gay” bandwagon, not supporting marriage but supporting instead its further deconstruction with no thought to future eventualities. When, with heavy support from the New York Times and most of the media, abortion became legal it was in the hope and promise that it would become “safe and rare.” Today it is anything but rare and often not safe. For many it is birth control and the low value put on each new human being has fallen to new depths. In 2000 there were more than 140,000 second and third trimester abortions and the number keeps rising. Only narrowly was partial birth abortion, semi-infanticide, made illegal. Not only that but many abortions were seconds and thirds though hopefully there are few six-timers like Whoopie Goldberg. Now, with same sex marriage advancing, again the N.Y. Times playing pied piper, Tom and Dick can legally marry in N.Y. but why not Tom, Dick and Harry? And, with its vociferous help the deconstruction of society’s premier institution for its future well being is further deconstructed to the point of meaningless. Why not Tom, Dick, Harry and Bertha, or Bertha, Mabel, Muriel and Fido, or Ahab with his harem? On top of it, something the media’s selective sensitivity and overweening political correctness never mentions, homosexual unions are notoriously unstable. In Massachusetts none of the first ones performed there a few years back have lasted. The lessons of the recent past often go unnoticed in media land. With the encouragement of homosexuality came the deadly AIDS epidemic although it is almost taboo in the land of the free to allude to the causal connection. But, again, what the media does to society it can help undo. That is the lesson of the past but seemingly a forlorn hope for the future, for now. Is it a surprise the American family is not what it once was? It is dwindling in several ways, one of them size. Even the married are not much help in this. At one time four or more children per family were common. In 2009 the birth rate in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in history. The number of babies born dropped 2.6%. Now, according to the Associated Press, “the average American home has more TV sets than children. The typical American Household has 2.55 people including kids and 2.73 televisions.” Just replacement level reproduction requires 2.1 births per family. Obviously we are not replacing ourselves so obsessed with self are we. It is not unusual for sets and pets to outnumber kids. The American Pets Products Association reports 2/3 of American homes include pets upon which 43 billion was spent in 2010. But we can’t afford kids. It’s a way to beat loneliness when kids are few, non existent or grown and the Internet and media are not enough. People living alone or with non-relatives make up about one-third of all American households. The unwanted kids who were destroyed in the womb because America, it seems, would not alleviate the “tough neglected lives” they would have had to face if allowed to live, would envy the dog’s life. It’s a challenge to maintain a prosperous society with such a birth dearth. Like Rome under Augustine, Spain and other countries faced with depopulation are offering money incentives to families with more than two children. Spain provides each newborn with 2,500 Euros (about $3,938), more for families with three or more children. It didn’t work for Rome and it isn’t working for Spain. Evidently money isn’t everything. What is needed is authentic love. When that’s lacking nothing can take its place. For the U.S., we are fortunate in that we have a solution in immigration. It is making up for our own birth dearth, Prior to this recession the United States created 1.5 to 2 million jobs every year. Without immigrants we’d have a hard time filling all those jobs. Should economic health return and the attitude toward marriage and family remain unchanged we will need them again. The poverty endemic to broken families and single parent households, about 7% of all American households are headed by single women with children, and because many stressed out or strung out women can’t handle the financial and emotional strain of raising children alone, the result is 4 million children, nearly 6% of those under 18 live in their grandparent’s homes. The penchant for drugs, promiscuity and the “my way” life in one generation affects the previous generation. Remember one of the sillier 60s slogan, “don’t trust anyone over 30?” Well many of those of that time and after trust them now, big time. The poverty problem, and the Census Bureau’s 2011 report shows a rise in child poverty to 22% of all children in the U.S., an all time high, has been examined earlier. It can be overcome by the lone heroic parent in individual cases but only with exhausting and all consuming effort. The odds are awfully high against it happening without something doing the father part, in particular the financial support role, be it government, a decent significant other or grandma and grandpa. The economic problems hitting the American family started long before the 2008 slump. Indeed, it dates to the moral debacle led off by the 1960s. The economy began its decline about then according to the most socially important measuring stick of all; the family. Though most families were larger than they are now, nevertheless through the 1950s it was perfectly possible for most families to make it on one income. After that time however it became increasingly difficult what with taxes and inflation generally outstripping income. The problem was compounded by an ever-increasing list of absolute, advertising induced, needs usually electronic and mechanical in nature plus the craving for larger houses for smaller families. Before long both parents were being forced into the job market in order to make ends meet.. In a short time priorities changed and in many instances children became secondary to things. In time it led to fewer children to help ease the crunch and to meet the new needs and wants. In a sense the new wants and advertising induced needs began increasingly to replace children. The family shrunk as larger homes crammed with stuff grew. Outside the two parents family things were much worse with poverty always in the wings there being no two incomes. For many of the heroic women who decided against destroying the new life they carried and were often abandoned as a result, facing a sometimes long loneliness and living on the edge of poverty on meagerly child support and bottom-paying jobs, lay ahead. Years of single parenthood not only means poverty for many but for the children, more often than not, life without father with all the set backs that can entail. Interminable research on poverty agrees that, as Washington Post writer David S, Broder concluded, “The best anti-poverty program is a stable, intact family,” and it would take a big hunk out of the budget of every county, state and the Federal government’s most of all. Consider this, according to researcher Kay S. Hymowitz, in her book,” Marriage and Caste in America,” 80% of children in families in or near poverty level live with one parent but 92% of children living with two parents are in families with incomes of $75,000 or more. Money is not everything of course but it releaves poverty and frees up time for family and the better things of life. The evidence is overwhelming, children are much better off if brought up by a mother and father who are married. The challenge is to get young men to accept responsibility for their children, which means marriage. To repeat the words of Father Hesberg, “the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother,” and authentic love means marriage. In a sense this is the reinvention of the wheel. It is precisely the Judeo-Christian marriage ethic that was abandoned in the 1960s. If rates of promiscuity skyrocketed in America, it affected marriage. The divorce rate rose to near 50% with infidelity the major factor. Evidently, promiscuity’s affects rub off but divorce’s might even outweigh promiscuity’s. From divorce often spins a vicious cycle of depleted resources, both emotional and financial. Less money and less time often equate in practical applications to less love and neglect often becomes a way of life. And a blithely overconfident culture with more faith in condoms than Popes put in God, fail to absorb the constant lesson that contraceptive mistakes are a fact and condoms cannot compare for safety with good, old-fashioned abstinence. But abstinence is almost a forbidden word, banned from schools and conferences where its very mention is sometimes greeted with boos as Bill Gates discovered at a meeting of sex educators in Canada last year. In TV land sex is always fun and consequence free but it fact it often produces tiny new human beings with a lot of wants and needs. In the nation’s capital a third of households are headed by women and four out of five single mothers have incomes below $50,000, many of them far below. Regarding loneliness, there is plenty of it mostly of the kind not envisioned by the Beatles. * The overall result was often personal and social catastrophe with great public expense for the necessary aid and remediation. One path death, the other hardship and both avoidable if upfront there had been the marriage quality love still taught by the Church, especially on the part of the irresponsible, often self-absorbed fathers with little room in their lives for anyone but themselves. This is the self-realization; self-expression and self-assertion drilled into them by a decaying and bloated educational system, badly detached from all the evident consequences of failure and wrecking lives. Marriage would help avoid much of this disaster but many males today deem it a superfluity or actually fear it. As the song says: “no one should be tied down by the ink dried up on some line.” The male who was once upon a time so enamored by what the object of his desires had and was willing to learn love and commit to get it from a women wise enough not to give it away, a wisdom that benefited all including the children, was now replaced by the predator of the grab all the gusto school. There would be none of the sacrifices that go into the “forsaking all others” that makes for a good and lasting marriage for him. Marriage was not in the game for the male who could get what he wanted without commitment or learning to love. Easy gratification to the point of satiation eliminates the fire within that in the past was a motivation to marry. Porned to the gills, abetted by many females conned into giving away for a song or less what was once a pearl of great price, the male lacks the incentive for the ancient chase and courting that once led to commitment, marriage and family and that had the effect of enhancing the natural power of women. I think it was Dr. Johnson who laughed at the idea that women needed more laws to bolster their position in society, with the thought that nature had already supplied them with so much power that such laws would be superfluous. He may have added, “if they play the powerful hand nature dealt them right” The thought is quaint and very politically incorrect now but reflects a reality too often ignored today especially by women. To drag out the old farmers again, they put the same point differently. Not always known for their sensitivity, they expressed it, “if the cow gives away the milk why buy it?” What sounds cold and clinical was in its day usually assuaged with the presence and growth of real love. Today so many women have bought into the great con of the disastrous new morality that often poverty and loneliness are now in the cards for more of them than ever before in America especially those who have no traditional family to fall back on. One thing about marriage though, it is no panacea to paradise. In many ways it is a challenge and a great learning to love experience. For many it is the first real and serious attempt at it and now that it is often avoided if not demeaned, many never get that learning experience. Campus “relationships” seldom lead to it. Like abstinence, marriage too is considered very difficult and difficult things are to be avoided. Without it though, ultimately promiscuous sex, often euphemistically referred to as “sleeping with” or by the misnomer “love” and always minus commitment, demeans and downgrades women in the short run and everyone ultimately. Nothing promotes this disastrous downgrading more than porn and nothing promotes porn more than pop media and the net. There, if they have their clothes on, women are often portrayed as down and dirty tough and vulgar, usually cops, detectives or lawyers just like the men heroes but a tad smarter. They can talk the gutter talk with the best of the males and this is considered liberation; women becoming more like the bottom feeding variety of males. If they have their clothes off, those men and women, the bozos and bimbos, to use the more colorful and less vulgar language of an earlier time, involved in the great new triumph of American industry, the 13 billion dollars a year porn gusher, are complicit in this great deconstruction of true feminism and the bimbos involved in it are in reality betraying their own sex. As Barzun and many others point out and what Dr. Johnson and the old farmer were alluding to, the strength of women is precisely that they are not men. They hold the powerful trump card that men don’t have but badly want. Many women of this generation have been conned like no generation in the past, into giving it away with no marriage, children and family involved. The resultant time freed up and the loneliness it leads to can be depressing, If the women is educated with career or has a decent job or family support it can help as can community involvements or pursuit of the various arts but on the larger scale,no posterity means no future. The co-eds of the 1960s and early 70s are a case in point. Professor Robert George of Princeton University observed the scene and wrote, “Me generation men persuade young women into sexual liaisons allegedly as a means of making a political statement, covering up lust with a patina of significance.” Soon many a university, bastions of so much nonsense and politically correct intolerance, were right there with co-ed dorms and condoms galore. Going right along too were the media corps, Hollywood, and organizations like Planned Parenthood often using tax funds and telling all who would listen that it’s all perfectly normal as it sold condoms by the ton and abortions at $350 or more a “procedure.” Again, procreationless sex is a dead end for the individual and if widespread for the society and no institution should try to popularize it if it wants a future. On the other side with single parenthood, men usually win and women and children lose. The epidemic of unattached but sexually active women many of them with temporary involvements, a good number wishing for marriage but seeing a crop of men hardly worth the effort or the men themselves not willing to make the effort has produced the several million single parents with no choice but to work and frequently living in or near poverty. Result? In 2011 child poverty in America hit 22%, almost one in four! Of course, as much of the pop media stimulates, titillates and follows along making lots of profits, it always repeats the old song and dance that it doesn’t create reality or its problems just reflects it. But in fact, it does both and while rallying to the support of endangered species from whales and abused pets to flying reindeer, the media encourage little resistance to this objectification and downgrading of women in their present plight and in fact seem more abjectly fearful of talking seriously about abstinence, fidelity and marriage than passing a derogatory remark about Mohammed. And the many prime time cop programs think they are doing women a favor by often portraying them tough, insensitive, single, promiscuous and vulgar like the type of men they seem to hold up for admiration but they are wrong. Women are different and often more admirable. But the happily married man or women on the job, solving crime, working in the office, defending the law, is nearly an extinct species in prime time TV land where they are often being chased off the set by the innumerable cool, swinging, unattached macho men or seductive and often easy to bed women with marriage not in the script. About the only marriages mentioned are the ones ending in divorce and when the subject of children rarely arises it is usually in association with abortion. If this is reality it is hellish. A society staying that course is going nowhere, literally. Only the Church, it seems, has the courage to speak, to strike a discordant note. In going against the current, leading the new rebellion, it is the only rebel the “rebels” don’t seem to support or relish. No surprise there! In some cases media programming and often certain lyrics to popular songs, far from giving women encouragement in their plight and standing up for real independence and dignity, side with the perpetrators. The lone voice crying in the wilderness is the Church and its call for abstinence outside of marriage is, if not ignored, actually ridiculed as an impractical dream. A good example of this, as we saw, is the Weisman-Becker exchange of letters. What we have when abstinence is called impractical if not impossible is a case of historical amnesia for, as we know and the statistics show, abstinence was once widely and successfully practiced before marriage and after marriage infidelity and divorce were much rarer. The statistics also show the nation’s children in a far healthier state in the generations before the 60s decline. Related to the problem of pill and condom-encouraged promiscuity before marriage if a marriage should occur is the great increase of infidelity in marriage. Marriage usually does not change a sow’s ear into a silk purse at least not overnight. Much of the tremendous increase in divorce is attributable to the unwillingness to measure up to the challenge of fidelity in marriage. Self –control and sexual continence, unpracticed for years before marriage, is not easily established after marriage. Marriage thus weakened and on the ropes at the hands of promiscuous and unfaithful heterosexuals is now being opened to further attack from those advocating same-sex marriage. The issue is addressed in Addendum #2. The institution of marriage came about because people have children and they usually fare far better when in the care of their natural parents. With same sex marriage, expect demands for multi-partner marriage to soon follow and even person-pet marriage as happened in Israel a few years ago. Marriage, every society’s most vital and basic institution for its future well-being will advance toward meaninglessness and eventually a dissolution even more widespread than it is now experiencing with repercussions not hard to imagine, more poverty for one as marriage loses its connection to procreation and is increasingly seen as meaningless and dispensable. The growth of poverty is not hard to imagine either. That repercussion is already with us. Before 1960 less than 5% of children were born out of wedlock. According to W. Bradford Wilcox in “When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America,” nearly 50% of women fifteen to forty four who have dropped out of high school or graduated with technical training, in other words the struggling middle class, who gave birth after 2000 were unmarried. The result is that instead of 5% now 35% of American children are born out of wedlock more often than not with a father who has departed from the scene. This social and moral collapse is a major factor in poverty in general and child poverty in particular because the male, foot loose and free of silly old obligations like marriage and support as understood traditionally, very frequently dances away with his own money jingling in his pocket. The woman is left to work it out often turning to family or the taxpayer for help. The economic penalty for widespread nationwide promiscuity is its contribution to badly balanced national and state budgets, rising public debt and inevitably the call for higher taxes. Countries like France with much lower out of wedlock births than the U.S., know marriage and family are the first line of defense against poverty and against government being forced in at great expense and much less success to try to remedy the mess. Such governments know too that sex education based almost solely on the condom is ineffective. Family centered sex education with prominence given to abstinence is preferred and statistically much more effective. In the U.S. however with no one pushing in that direction but the Church, and with the media signed, sealed and delivered into hands that are far from sympathetic to the abstinence cause cause, we wallow in costly dysfunction. What Betty Freidan, a bored, educated, middle class housewife with strong leftist leanings and terribly out of touch with any reality but her own and her own circle’s, disparagingly called a “comfortable concentration camp” referring to the intact homes of the 1950s, is now something to die for. It is on the bucket list of many women but good old-fashioned love and marriage with family and all the joys and challenges it brings is a fading dream. Hef’s American playboy is not up to it. And with the decline of marriage, for vast numbers of single or divorced mothers, other options are gone too. She no longer may opt to go to work pre-60s style to help the family buy that second family car or get Junior his braces, now she has no choice. She has to go. Often she has no choice but to go to work just to survive with her child. The era of choice has reduced choices. Choice has been greatly diminished in the land of “choice.” Promiscuity and infidelity, two jewels in the crown of “choice” can do that and they are hard at work. This is the typical as opposed to Hollywood actress mode of single parenthood. The new morality is a blessing…more often than not for the male and rich female and for more and more women, Freidan’s comfortable concentration camp is a dream not to come true. Out of these single parent homes and homes broken by divorce come a large segment of today’s students who are not only failing at education but at moral sense too. One English teacher reported that many of them are openly perplexed in class by Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter.” What’s the big deal about Hester and Rev.Dimmesdale “getting it on” anyway they like to know. Since the Sixties and the coming of the Age of TV and Computer many have been thoroughly educated and indoctrinated in debasement, most especially those with no strong parental influence to counteract the media and sadly too, those who see their family disintegrating under the hammer blows of infidelity and divorce. Writing long before the present, Thomas Paine observed “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” What’s wrong with Hester and Dimmesdale indeed, these kids see it all the time. It all trickles down until you get indecency descending into dullness, satiety and then boredom but for the young not yet down that path, can there be hope? For them the titillation is often of short order. Exposed from an early age, there is nothing like modern sex education to dismiss the charm, mystery and uniqueness of the subject by submerging it into the utilitarian and commonplace. The final result for many of them is that the assault of the commonplace does not wait for middle or old age to set in. It comes on strong and early. No wonder the multitude of Roman Polanskies find normal sex “incredibly boring.” No doubt a great present and future investment idea is viagra type drugs of increasingly potency. A generation that adores nature and the “natural” doesn’t seem to mind cramming itself with chemicals when nature is sated and reduced to an impotency flowing from the boredom of the commonplace. An unsurprising result of the inundation of sex in the lives of everyone including the young is titillation of shorter and shorter duration. It’s a terrible and destructive deception that only wise education and religion can penetrate. Without that, boredom and its spin off, aberration, become the norm in very many lives. The downspin is reflected often in language and humor frequently to the point of being tongue tied and humorless when decency of language and subtleness of wit is called for. With vulgar gangster thugs normalized into mainstream prime time popular entertainment along with the obscenity of a George Carlin and even the specter of misguided suburban librarians insisting on the right of patrons to view pornography, what may we expect next from our envelop pushing, a term it likes a lot, media? What Agnes Repplier wrote about the rakish and obscene audiences during the English Restoration could easily apply to our situation with audiences that relished the slangy and often gross routines of Carlin, Lenny Bruce and multitudes of carbon copies. She wrote that, “They began by tolerating indecency for the sake of wit, and ended by tolerating dullness for the sake of indecency.” De Sade made the point that obscene entertainments and activities are “important and popular to a time with a taste for aberration which it sees as a norm previously obscured by prejudice.” However what is mistaken for prejudice in such jaded societies is often not prejudice at all but just good sense built on sound moral guidelines flowing from centuries of historical experience. Such good sense continues to save many people wise enough not to throw it away in the debacle of the present time. No one had ever heard of AIDS until 1981. Perhaps the ultimate aberration will be the death of us. The long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right indeed! A society already contracepted and aborted to below replacement level and as a follow up brings on homosexuality and same-sex marriage as if mainstream and normal is flirting with depopulation. Eliminating replacement potential bears ill for the future economic health and even survival of a civilization. As mentioned, without immigration the danger would be much more apparent even now. Whole urban school districts would be bereft of students and the need for schools and teachers though the myopic teacher unions, as part of the secular coalition, raise nary a peep of objection to deadly “choice.” It remains to be seen if, and it’s a big if but worth thinking about, a nation with an academia saturated by anti-life political correctness often to the flight of history and common sense and with the backing of misguided government programs such as support of legalizing same-sex marriage and abortion on demand along with the additional propaganda power of a dutifully lined up mass media, can stave off what it seems to be asking for, depopulation. It remains to be seen if it can resist the well organized heavily financed and propagandized media establishment often parading same-sex couples as perfectly normal and of no important difference from the heterosexual sexual union. It remains to be seen if perchance it can defy odds by opting for sanity by not doing what in more balanced times would have been deemed unthinkable, namely the glamorizing of homosexuality to the point of it becoming the in thing, chic and “cool,” then there is a chance for a healthy rebound. But in a society as susceptible to media influence as ours is and filled with impressionable people who consider “trending” important, then there is great danger. We hear that nature is bendable and that gender is not biological but optional. And where do we hear it most loudly? College campuses across the nation are a brim with “Transgender Awareness Weeks” and some feature LUG dorms, “Lesbian Until Graduation.” If perversion is indeed spreadable to the impressionable then extinction is possible or if not extinction, severe decline. Already some nations are well down that path and desperately trying to slow the skid. Spain was already mentioned. According to population expert Austin Ruse, “Almost half the world’s nations now face demographic winter because their birthrates have fallen so low that their populations are aging rapidly. ”The economic ramifications are clear. Vastly increased numbers of retirees living off vastly decreased numbers of people in the workforce and putting into the system brings the whole system to the verge of collapse. It looks very much like the generations that were sold on abortion will have to pass off retirement or at least seriously delay it. What’s to be expected when over 30% of each post Roe generation goes under the abortion knife, a very shrunken economy at least? Who really gets the short end of the stick? It will be those of traditional moral standards who married and raised families. Many of the childless single swingers will end up living off their children. Belying all the happy promiscuous bed bouncing, (a term as old as Classical Greece), by the bozos and bimbos on TV and in the movies are the ghastly statistics that set this essay off in the first place. In 2009 N.Y.C reported 12,395 abortions among married women, and a whopping 72, 962 among those not married, mostly teens and college age women. These are the often hapless but complicit victims of the new media generated morality along with their destroyed offspring. The new morality is ever so supportative of male irresponsibility, the very thing the Founding Mothers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and company warned about many years ago. Condoms don’t always work and if they don’t there are always the abortion mills with Planned Parenthood, carnage incorporated, leading the way with more than 300,000 abortions annually and charging on average $451 a “procedure.” It made 85 million dollars from abortions in 2009 but on top of that the government, mostly Federal, forced the taxpayers to dish out 350 million more to it for its “services.” Such “services” a hurting nation can do without but abortions remain tragically high, well over a million a year total compared to 50 to 75,000 a year at most before 1973. And, all this destruction of life takes place in spite of years of more sex education and more condom distribution. Roe’s promise, picked up by politicians of the pro-choice stripe and Catholics of the “personally opposed but…” school, that with legalization abortion would be safe and rare was false. We can chalk up much of this nightmare destruction of new human life to that Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of death, destruction and disease, the deadly one-two punch of porn promoted promiscuity, Before the 1960s with abstinence mostly in place, marriages more plentiful, loneliness rarer and many spouses really learning love, more marriages held together, fewer children were dead or floating about fatherless than in our present age of happy promiscuity. Despite the purposely-exaggerated coat hanger myth, the number of pre-Roe abortions was comparatively small, estimated, as mentioned, at about 50,000 a year most of them in doctor’s offices as compared to today’s annual average of 1,200,000, many of them in dubious neighborhood clinics; religion to the rescue? Can lockheart be successful without it? XXXI THE HARD ART OF LOCKHEART Children are safest; do best in education and life generally, when in intact families with both biological parents. This traditional family situation statistically though not invariably supplies the most loving child nurturing environment and healthiest preparation for life that there is. On this all studies concur. So, what’s so difficult about marriage? It’s probably for the most part the “forsaking all others” of the old wedding vow. This is often the burr under the saddle and the itch that doesn’t always take seven years to develop. The objection that monogamous marriage is deadening or boring is an old one but shouldn’t be taken too seriously because, as we know, just about everything is after a while including a steady diet of promiscuity. Roman Polanski and many others have stated as much. Eschewing monogamy, Polanski remarked from experience that all “normal” sex, apparently meaning not only monogamy but also promiscuous heterosexual activity, becomes in his words, “incredibly boring.” Without reading too much into it, escape provided by aberrational sex seems implied. But, it too is no lasting escape from boredom and is often fraught with physical and psychological danger. Overindulgence in anything can turn it into a bore or as the child with too much ice cream in him knows, a real pain. If the overindulgence involves certain forms of sexual activity, rampant promiscuity and especially homosexual activity, it can even be deadly dangerous. All these highly temporary, desperate and often destructive struggles against boredom including the married person’s forays into dalliances, infidelities, promiscuities and such may provide a very temporary respite but often at awful personal cost and loss. There are other and better ways to escape boredom with much fewer negatives involved. It should also be mentioned in this matter that no study has ever shown or observation ever verified a greater degree of general happiness among the promiscuous, including the proverbial “swinging single,” than among those who have successfully built a life and family on the love of one person. On the other hand, many studies show the loneliness gage much higher among the former group. There are other serious concerns. When the aberrational sex is the homosexual variety the recent push for legalization of same sex marriage takes on farcical light considering how extremely promiscuous the lifestyle is. Many studies have shown this. A recent one reported 72% of homosexual men having multiple partners, fifty or more not being unusual. Even in places where same sex marriage has been recognized, fidelity between partners is rare and permanence equally so. A study in Massachusetts, one of the first states to recognize same sex marriage, involving156 same sex couples showed that after five years none had been able to maintain sexual fidelity. Frequently the homosexual life style results in dissipation and premature death. Damaging as it evidently is, the media fails to stress the danger and sometimes, along with many colleges, seems even to encourage it. Studies show the active homosexual losing about six years of life on average, about the same as the average active smoker. Of course, predictably the media says nothing about the one and much about the other. In its stated goal to print all the news that’s fit to print, this vital information doesn’t make the pages. The N.Y. Times is a good example of the dangerous media bias. It denied almost all letters opposing same sex marriage access to its opinion pages during the debate on the subject in N.Y. State where it was eventually legalized. By so doing it thinks it is acting justly and compassionately but it is in fact performing no public service indeed quite the opposite. Going again to the research, physical and psychological disorders are much more prevalent among homosexual men than heterosexual men. Attempted suicide rates, even in countries that are homosexual-friendly, are three to four times as high for homosexuals. Psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover has shown that no studies support the frequent assertion by activists that the high levels of this internal distress in homosexual populations are caused by social disapproval. The problem is evidently internal to the way of life. Making such a dangerous way of life a normal and acceptable choice for the young is not compassion rather it is doing them a great and dangerous disservice. The ancient race to find excitement, escape boredom and the restlessness within goes on and on and with restraint discarded in the chase, the pursuit hastens until dissipation, addiction and the usual descent into, you guessed it, boredom returns. That is if the trip is survived at all with physical and mental health still intact. American writer Hart Crane took the trip many years ago and didn’t survive. He has had a multitude of unsuspecting imitators. In spite of what many of these so called “bon vivants” imagined about embracing life to the fullest, tasting everything there is to taste and all that advertising type lingo that takes the place of thought for many, it is hardly a life at all but actually a dangerous and desperate avoidance of the real thing. It is in actuality the fleeing from the real nuts and bolts that make a good life as well as the ordinary people that help make it so, even with all its troubles. And it doesn’t work. It is not the way to contentment and never has been. Anyone who knows our restless nature knows this to be true and many echo Augustine, “our souls are restless and will not rest until they rest in Thee.” The Father created us out of love and only his love can fulfill us. Meanwhile, the married have learned, if they are open to the lesson, that marriages are not made in heaven. They are made right here on Earth with an effort resting on authentic love. Marriages never fail. They always work as long as the two, motivated by that authentic love, work at it. Marriage is sustained by the determination to give love and in rough times love is often sustained by marriage. It is indeed the great love learning institution for most people. What a life education is missed when it is purposely avoided! The work involved comes with a bonus. It opens us up to the limited happiness available to us here. But to make it work the bridges must be burned, the boats scuttled. To wax poetic, that desert island for two, that old dream must be willed to reality for husband and wife even as the tides of passion begin to recede. That is no time for abandonment but rededication to love “until death do us part.” It is magnificent. Life is no better embraced for the mass of us, or love learned. Marriage is one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments and as close to authentic love as most of us ever get here. As Barzun alluded, sex is dissipated into boredom and often impotency with multiple expressions and the persistent pursuit of variety but by truly concentrating on the one, and the one’s happy fulfillment, it is in a sense dammed and kept strong and on course. The passion for another must be forgone. The forgoing is love in action and it is not always easy. But in marriage a major difference, often confused, between sex and love is highlighted: the surrender to infidelity is sex, the refusal to surrender is love. The distinction is great. In marriage love and passion must be kept one. But in no way is boredom completely banished no matter what the path. That is the fact of life. But, in marriage authentic love is nourished and that after all is what we’re here for. The boredom everybody fears comes to us all after a while no matter what novelty is pursued and attained. To understand that is to understand our nature and its eternal restless longing and lack, until ultimate fulfillment in the Father’s house. Polanski himself came to realize a part of the lesson when he settled down to make a marriage. It’s the path to take for many reasons, health, safety, sanity, the continuance of the race to name a few; fulfillment, satisfaction in a worthy endeavor, earthly happiness , the defeat of loneliness, to name a few others. All this is likely to be foreign territory for the mind bent by media exposure. Marriage, especially challenging for the generations of our era, growing up as they do often under the media’s debilitating influence hardly ever learn to utter that smallest, most difficult but important and necessary word “no” when drives and passions are acting up. Going with the flow rather than resistance is considered the more “natural” course. Parenthetically, our politicians often have the same problem in the realm of spending, as the nation, weighed down with immense debt, is beginning to find out. On the personal level, enslaving yens, passions, drives, addictions, be them for food, drugs, sweets, tobacco, drink, sex, money, revenge, envy, violence of all sorts including against life, in other words all the old reliables, all the ancient usual suspects, are still with us and often on our backs with hooks in deep. The evidence points to drug abuse and promiscuous sex being at present the leading contenders for the crown of destruction with smoking becoming less so and obesity moving up in the standing. Campaigns against drugs and smoking have had some rather notable success. Promiscuity, considered by many the greatest of dangers now, is left untouched though it fuels diseases some of them deadly as well as abortions by the millions and family disintegration of unprecedented extent. The wave of “my wayers” flowing over our staggering, sagging, restraining institutions or what’s left of them, are especially busy battering marriage out of all recognition. Its essential permanence is out the window for many of them. Sometimes these Lotharios, blind or not caring about the grief they sow and often confusing sex with love, consider themselves great lovers with more love to offer than any women can handle. With little or no practice applying the “no,” word to themselves, “my-wayers” often find faithful monogamous love, good marriage’s heart blood, more than they can handle. Loyalty is a demanding virtue, the backbone of fidelity, but loyalty becomes a vice in a world in which “I” takes precedence over “we.” If abstention from sex before marriage is ruled too much of a challenge by the many Dr. Weismans, imagine years of fidelity to the same spouse especially as age transforms the Gary Cooper you married into a Billy Booper or a Sophia Loren into a Sophie Tucker. But the growth of love makes many difficult things possible and even pleasurable as the beloved, often far past prime, flourishes in its warming sun. As physical beauty and passion naturally wane with age, burned away with time, what remains is not ashes but gold, symbol of the stuff of lasting love. It is in the family first and foremost that love is best learned and only authentic love can pull off marriage. For many reasons that kind of love seems to be in shorter supply now than in the past. One telling factor, the learning of loveis made difficult as growing numbers of children grow up without one or both parents. The primary school is not there. In this vicious cycle divorce is learned but not authentic love, as the almost 50% divorce rate amply demonstrates. An underlying factor in these developments is a decline of faith in and love of God. It has been replaced in many lives with massive doses of love of self and a dedication to achieving self’s desires regardless of cost. Often the experts are of little help in any of this. Like Dr. Weisman and organizations such as Planned Parenthood, they often pronounce abstinence and by extension, fidelity, unrealistic, too difficult for the young and even unnatural if you reckon our nature not essentially different from the beasts. With abstinence so categorized where does that leave marriage fidelity? Is not cheating “natural?” These false and dangerous nostrums are proclaimed truth in spite of the pre-1960s statistics showing the success of abstinence and fidelity and in spite of the hardy protestations of the Beckers and the Church. The words “natural” and “unnatural” are sometimes used without precision in these matters and can mislead. For some, everything difficult is unnatural and if easy it’s natural. By such thinking most of the great accomplishments of humanity would fall into the unnatural category because almost all of them required great personal sacrifice and often hardship. Henry Sidgwick once wrote, “give a specific precision to the meaning of “natural,” since in a sense… any impulse is natural…” Impulses flowing from divided natures such as ours might well be good like George Bailey’s when he took the plunge into icy water to save Clarence or bad as the thirst for revenge that drives many terrorists. That is why Sidgwig added, “…but it is manifestly idle to bid us to follow nature in this (latter) sense,” idle to say he least, extremely dangerous. Ethics would then become applied Darwinian natural selection with its brutal concomitant survival of the fittest by which theft and murder may be as natural as love and compassion or more so. The natural that we seek to cultivate is the one working to achieve and realize the part of our nature still in harmony with and reflective of our origins in the creative will of the Father and before that original harmony which prevailed was disrupted. Nothing could be more estranged from the ethic of evolution than the Sermon on the Mount. In it Jesus states the loftiest standard ever raised for love on Earth: to love enemies and offer no resistance to wrongdoers. In the words of Professor Emilio Chavez, we are to “to overcome the natural, tribal self-protective instincts of evolution, natural selection and survival of the fittest and allow God’s grace to transform our unbelieving selfishness into a new creation…” This new creation with its high ethic is reflective of the time prior to the primal moral collapse and the triumph of destructive pride. “You shall be as gods” was the come on presented in Genesis that was not rejected by our ancestors. Well, as a result we became something other than gods though there are those who haven’t got the word. The obvious word is that the fall from grace weakened our natures and left them prone to evil. It is a weakness that often makes the good more difficult than the evil or to paraphrase St Paul again: the good I will I don’t and that which I don’t will I do. Why is that? Why are we so conflicted? Because the weakened nature we have inherited finds the evil often more in accord with it and the good more of a challenge to it. Even goods not involving moral issues are often a difficulty. What great accomplishment, invention, work of art, is brought off by submission to dominating passions and yens rather than keeping them in their place, holding them off to make room for the dedication, labor, effort and sacrifice required to bring the superlative off. In the moral sphere, faithful married monogamy between a husband and wife is the great work of art for most of us but it too requires sacrifice, work and dedication, in a word, love. Because of this wounded nature handed down to us, it is often much more of a challenge than dalliance and infidelity for the run of the mill male. But then, how often this unreliable, untrustworthy, some Calvinists would go so far as to say utterly miserable and corrupt, nature of ours throws a monkey wrench into our lives if we go too easily along with it! Consistently overindulge in anything and flirt with disaster. The parade of evidence presented in many of these pages should be proof enough of that.. The same evidence suggests that a faithful, loving, monogamous marriage is not only better for the physical and psychological health of the individuals but also far better for the children and society in general than any of the easier alternatives. Isn’t it always the way! We well know how prone to destructive and enslaving vices our severely weakened and damaged human nature is. It is clear that it must be subdued and controlled if we are to accomplish the good and avoid the evil especially that worst of all slaveries, slavery to our own weaknesses, passions, drives and vices. That kind of enslavement, the obsession of so many to on line porn for example,, an estimated 75million view it daily, is a current for many a marriage and a provocation to promiscuity with all its dangers to health and even life. It leaves little room for more beneficial recreations and has become another factor in the decline of marriage. Affecting more and more of them, the wife becomes marginalized, neglected and resentful. Slavery to ones own weakness and vices is the worst slavery of all because it robs us of our own freedom and even destroys our self-respect. For the many who have never mastered that little word, “no,” the going can be very rough indeed. We see people all the time who are forced to say it or sicken and die of any number of things, smoking, alcohol, sugar, drugs, AIDS though that last group has relied heavily on public funded searches for a cure to make the “no” word unnecessary. How many of us would like to say with that old song, “Maggie” that those lines on our face are “a well written page and time alone was the pen,” but many of us well know that time alone was not the pen. With many of us other things were at work etching our face and wrecking our bodies. For many of us over indulgence of one kind or another, abuse and even outright vice had a hand. The unprecedented amount of sexually transmitted diseases loose in America, some permanent, some causing sterility, some deadly affirms what Senator Moynihan wrote back in 1993 of the growing amount of sexual deviancy in the country and the country’s knack of ignoring it by, in his words “defining deviancy down.” This trend recently culminated in some states defining marriage down. It was this penchant for self-slavery, in a word, “the slavery to sin,” that the Church first took aim at with the liberation of all people from its mastery as the goal. With the mastery of sin, as far as it can be accomplished, all other slaveries would decline including human slavery and to a great extent it did. As Christianity spread,. Europe edged itself away from the vast human slavery edifice of the classical pagan era. With the Gospel’s persistent influence the Church gradually freed itself and civil society from its sway and by 1000 AD Europe become the one place on the planet where slavery was almost completely extinguished. Unfortunately, the wars against Islamic military expansion and the discovery of the New World breathed some new life into the old carcass and it took another three hundred or more years before Christians in Europe and America finally took the lead and killed it dead. But it persisted in many other places where that influence was not yet felt and still does in various forms. Even in the West as the hold of Christianity weakness, it is making a rebound in the form of human trafficking for sex. Coincidentally, this very motivator was a factor in the original expansion of Islam. The harems of the lusty young warriors had to be filled and mother- nature only provided a 50/50b male-female split. This meant conquest. As one wag put it, Islamic expansion, motivated by religion and economics had also the aspect of a babe hunt. Indeed in India as it was conquered by Islamic armies,the women had to be hidden. Explaining purdah, the Maharaja of Banaras remarked in a National Geographic article, “The Ganges River of Faith,” in 1971 that “”Hindus always showed restraint in exhibiting their women but the system became more rigid after the Moslem invasions. Hindus had to protect their women from the conquerors…” It was mentioned, the Christian dogma most readily observable is original sin. The detritus of our damaged nature is all around us and sometimes as close as our mirror. Freeing us from its affects and the slaveries it engenders has been the Church’s most challenging and unending assignment. Challenging too because the weakness has affected the Church itself at times as wrong actions and non-teaching policies have been on occasion pursued in eras past. The illness on board the great ship sometimes affected captain and crew. Amid all the vagaries of history and life, a good marriage then is the work of art most available to us, and worthy of our effort and talent. Like all great endeavors it requires sacrifice, sacrifice made possible by love and more joyful with more love. Instead of imagining no religion as some1960s tunesters suggested, imagine widespread chastity before marriage and fidelity in marriage; they have to be reestablished and taken seriously if we are to dig ourselves out of the calamitous problems hitting so many in our troubled society. The rise of single parenthood and a nearly 50% divorce rate are two good examples. When marriages break and families sink into poverty and disruption so does the society and the glitz of media land will not be able to sugar it over. What is hard to imagine is such a reversal happening without religion and the spread of its influence. Statistically in more than half of marital and family breakups the influence of infidelity was a factor. At the risk of again waxing poetic, Tess Trueheart and Tom Lockheart, so adept at uttering the essential “no” word, where are you when we need you? Though faithlessness is more a Tom Lockheart than a Tess Trueheart problem, the female is not exempt. For neither sex do attractions dangerous and threatening to marriage entirely abate after the “I do.” But for the many, though by no means all, those who were promiscuous before marriage, handling fidelity in marriage can be especially galling. Seeing sex as little more than self-gratification, they often see no reason to practice abstinence and while practice doesn’t always make perfect it helps greatly in preparation for the successful married state. But, the challenge of fidelity be it to marriage vows or celibacy vows, a struggle for many, becomes ever more so with a popular media pumping all kinds of sex, though rarely the married variety, into an already saturated society. At times most married men find women other than their wives attractive. Lines have to be drawn, sacrifices made, Madonna tossed in the can, to guard the vows voluntarily taken. Thus the innocent are protected, specifically the spouses to whom love and fidelity were first pledged and the children deserving nurturing that is best provided by both parents. At those times the art of lockheart comes in. Locking one’s heart to the other is called for, often not pleasant or easy and certainly unnatural by the yens flowing from the present weakened state of our human nature. This is one of those “unnatural” things that is absolutely needed and good. It is an essential for marriage and its flourishing A future of bright promise and accomplishment depends upon it. But the challenges are there and growing. For example, in today’s work place with men and women increasingly mixing on equal terms and where the “work-spouse,” a term used in a recent “USA Today” piece for a co-worker of the opposite sex who is a particularly close friend, is an increasingly common phenomena. The guarding of the heart and the uttering of a personal “no” to crossing that line is what fidelity is about. With our split nature, it is often not easy at all but it need not be entirely negative if done with humor, style and intelligence the way Tom Lockheart always did it. To pull out the poetic again, every married man must be a Tom Lockheart and every wife a Tess Trueheart. These two, by the way, were the names often given to admirable stock characters of the silent film era when hissing the villain in black and cheering the hero in white were the rage. Of course, in our much more sophisticated age such cheering is reserved for stripped to the waste, tattooed to the ears, sweaty pounding rock groups. To reiterate, in a society saturated with virtual and real promiscuity and the declining influence of faith and religion, an influence often replaced by a media diet of heavily suggestive song and dance, sex and violence type programming, the restraint required for abstinence out of marriage and fidelity in is more difficult than ever. Add a nature sorely weakened and easily tempted even among the strongest and best motivated and the problem looms all the larger. It is no good to say as some do that it is only natural and nothing to fuss about. The problem with the “only natural” ploy is it drops everything optional, difficult and discomforting into the unnatural category. In fact, our thoughts, reflections, desires and emotions, the unique and priceless components of our spirit and obviously not material in essence, are sorely inclined to evil and the struggle against that evil is not unnatural but essential for our survival. Inclined though we may be, we are not doomed to doing the wrong as if totally corrupted. The battle against our disordering tendencies and passions is essential lest they run rampant sewing destruction as they go. Individual virtue is a form of self-rule, the greatest sovereignty of all, a declaration of independence from demeaning and destructive addictions and vices. On the other side, the “do your own thing” fling is tantamount to being ruled by, indeed enslaved to our often out of control drives and desires. The call for the kind of good living urged here, an art and like all art difficult and a work in progress, is what is called for but we don’t hear it coming from the Dr. Weismans, the media or the society celebrity elite. It seems only the church is calling loudly for it. The media is often sounding a different call. It is a mistake to identify these desires with human nature instead of a fallen and weakened human nature. And kow-towing to drives and passions that often flow from and envelop this nature, as most of the mature know, is no guarantee of happiness. Quite the contrary, as the piles of problems of human making now surrounding us amply demonstrate. As an aside, in that most central area of sexuality, there is no evidence of appreciably enhanced male happiness in polygamous societies. As one humorous observer put it, monogamous Christian Europe strongly resisted the military conquest of Islam because it carried with it polygamy and “no man can serve two (four or more) masters.” (For information on the European resistance to the spread of Islam and polygamy go to Vol. I, Cha.5&6 of this 6 Vol. work.) By the way, for what it’s worth, the art of stand up comedy, indeed most comedy, is not known to be more highly developed or even very widespread for that matter in non-monogamous societies. Love is really blinded when illicit passion takes over and when blindness like that is in the driver’s seat many innocents are run over. The saddened and often broken lives of the victims to whom fidelity had been pledged that litter the centuries from Henry VIII’s good and faithful wife Catherine to the latest headlines is the living proof. As said, the challenge is great but is met successfully by millions even now who remain faithfully married. The key to that success is usually the authentic love that has been described albeit falteringly in these essays. Marriage, we saw, is one of love’s great learning centers. In its classroom, a school of emotional hard knocks sometimes, the human being can learn what love is, internalize it, and reflect in a dim but courageous way the love that motivated God to create. For most of us marriage is the best crucible in the world for learning about the kind of love that put us here in the first place. It is the reason for being. The missing motive that revelation provided for creation. The why there is something rather than nothing other than God alone. The why the necessary eternal being who must be because we and all else exist, brought it all forth with a bang. For all that, love is the project most worth working at, protecting, preserving, and making work no matter the odds and challenges. In the face of all comers, diversions, and temptations no matter how comely, charming, attractive in person or personality, that little word “no” must be uttered and in this way love is protected and the spread of more pain and grief prevented. Lockheart to the rescue! The “no” sayer must often carry some of that pain that would have with a “yes” been inflicted instead on spouse and children. It’s called sacrifice and there is no authentic love without it or the willingness to embrace it. It is part of the lesson of Christ on his cross. No one has gone on record claiming love and marriage are easy but it is ordinary man and women’s greatest achievement, their personal work of art. XXXII OF MARRIAGE, PAIRRAGE AND POPULATION Infidelity is a great threat to marriage no doubt but there are others that threaten serious derailment. By 2010 massive out of wedlock births of almost 50% to women with high school educations or less as well as the spike in illegitimacy that Moynihan had predicted in the general population materialized. All told out of wedlock births went from 6% in 1965 when things were beginning to unravel to 33% by 2008. Co-habitation became common and these innovations courtesy of the new non-morality were taking a toll both on marriage and society in general. The cost of following one’s bliss, doing your own thing, following your heart wherever it may temporarily lead regardless of the damage left behind, in other words freeing the authentic self from the stifling chains of convention and the “hypocrisy” of the old morality, what is essentially the whole collection of bad counsel sounding from almost every advice column and educational rostrum in the country was a veritable recipe for disaster. It shouldn’t have taken a master of extrapolation to see what was coming and who was going to pay. And, ironically it seldom produced the happiness hoped for, far from it as those who have tread that path are often the first to tell. It is valuable to remember the gentleman who said, “I don’t know what is in the heart of evil men but I know something of ordinary men and women and it terrifies me.” In other words, for the vast majority of us floundering human beings caution is called for. All the popular good sounding advice fits perfect beings, which we clearly are not. The woman who drowned her children was following her bliss in the form of a “devoted” lover who soon disappeared. Self-mastery over drives, passions and bliss’ is freedom and true self-determination. It is even productive of a happiness that unfettered pursuit of self-fulfillment never is. That path is the usual way often leading to self-enslavement, misery, self-destruction, despair with very little true happiness to show for it. And, it can be costly to contain the damage to people and society that frequently results. The blossoming social services budgets of every level of government, Federal, state and local, with the taxes to support them testify to that. Helping the problems grow is modern value free sex education as found in most of our schools. It seems to have quickly filled the values vacuum created symbolically and apparently effectively too with the banning of any reference to God that was achieved the Engle school prayer decision. It has been there right along with the growing debacle. No one had ever died, got sick or lost their creative, intellectual or athletic powers as a result of abstaining from sex but now for educational purposes abstinence was deemed, by the experts who eventually decided that homosexuality was natural, to be unnatural and even worse, a “religious” value. In this expert mindset, since sex, almost of any kind, was natural abstaining must be unnatural additionally so because it was difficult. The thought that abstinence had been practiced successfully by most people through the centuries, as studies and statistics will show, made nary a dent in their thinking. The age of the condom was ushered in and the abortion and single parent numbers are glaring testimony to the ineffectiveness of years of this condom centered sex education. Unfortunately in many regions it was about the only sex education being implemented during those years. A 2002 study by Dr. David Paton of Nottingham University found no evidence that Planned Parenthood type of family planning with condoms the centerpiece reduced either underage conception or abortion rates among teenage girls under sixteen. Since the study teen pregnancy has continued to rise. A more recent study by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine suggests that an abstinence only program was in fact more successful than safe sex only education centered primarily on condom usage. The study found that those attending an eight- hour program emphasizing abstinence were 33% more likely to abstain from sexual activity for a two-year period than children in the safe sex condom program. The multitude of experts of the Dr.Weisman stripe would be puzzled by the success of such self-control among teenagers thought to be totally unable to control sexual urges, however those with knowledge of pre-1960s social and sexual history wouldn’t be. Bottom line, where abstinence was the centerpiece of the approach, the results were generally better. That approach, however, was often scoffed at by a sex-education establishment dominated by the Weisman types. It was labeled unrealistic, moralistic and worst still, religious.. But the evidence is there for all to see. The relying exclusively on condoms is dangerous when compared to abstinence. Contraceptive manufacturers concede a failure rate of about 15% for married couples and a good deal higher for teens and according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, “there is no clear evidence that condoms reduce the risk of most sexually transmitted diseases including gonorrhea and chlamydia.” Thirty-five percent of all sexually transmitted diseases are incurable. The same organization estimated condom efficiency against HIV infection at 87% and that a deadly disease! Misleading young people by implying that they will have sex and that condoms will protect them is a dangerous con. The only thing condoms are safer than is nothing but promiscuity with condoms is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with your health and life. Leaving school with a sex education like that and with pockets full of condoms, marriage was going to be in for some rough sledding. It turned out that many in the generations of love, peace and music possessed insufficient authentic marriage quality love to either abstain before marriage or remain faithful afterward. Not only that but they often preferred co-habitation, shacking up in the earlier more descriptive term, with the inimitable “significant other” as a warm up for the big commitment. But more often than not the insignificant other faded rather fast from the scene often leaving a mom and child holding the proverbial bag. Statistically, those co-habitating before marriage, despite the conventional wisdom, divorce at higher rates than those who didn’t. Apparently those who don’t shack up have a higher regard for love, sex and marriage and the partner than those who do. Now add in some economic ripples. A morass of poverty came on strong and overwhelmed great numbers, especially the young women of the high school or less category, many of them single mothers, and their children. Many were left in dire straights. The idea that having children out of wedlock as a viable alternative to marriage spread and was even lauded in some misguided circles. Silly actresses with no financial worries paraded their single motherhood around thus influencing the easily influenced. They not only helped speed along the deterioration of marriage but also helped sink many women and children below or close to the poverty line. Single parenthood for most is not what the well-heeled media and movie establishment portrays. Especially hard hit has been the African American community, a community that before the disastrous 1960s had a higher legitimacy rate than Whites. Among many of them the influence of media and music replaced church and gospel with disastrous results. Illegitimacy along with divorce is the great traditional enemy of marriage, civilized progress and is a great promoter of poverty and decline. Marriage did not develop in every culture and clime on a whim but for good reasons based on human experience and learned through history and pre-history’s hard knocks. The male-female bond answers to the longings of the human heart for true intimacy. There is nothing like faithful monogamy, challenging as it is, for that. Marriage is mankind’s most ancient social institution. It has always been society’s foundation. Nearly all societies whatever exceptions they allow for divorce and separation, invest the union with the promise of permanence, a permanence weakened in the West by the new churches born in the Reformation of the 1500s. Anglicanism, for example, was born of divorce. The irony is that today, the hard won lessons of mankind’s cultural history are often being blindly discarded by those who have no clue as to what stands behind the great institution. One writer summed up that background thusly: It arose from a world of brute force where women were often considered man’s possession and polygamy was the rule more often than not. It took intelligence, grace and much human history to advance to the highly civilized state of one man lovingly and freely committing himself to one women and she freely returning the commitment in a protected family state. The arrangement provided intimacy for the partners, stability and protection for women, particularly when pregnant and helped to ensure that the children would receive the nurturing, love and guidance of two people fully interested in their welfare. Marriage helps nail down footloose males to face responsibility, support dependents and learn love. In addition, there was the practical concern of many peoples to continue the group or tribe or culture in the best possible way. Monogamy best facilitates the interpersonal bonding that frequently aids the disposition and development of authentic love between an intimate pair and though it goes against the disruptive grazing propensity of many males, a propensity to which most of the world’s Eastern religions including Islam condescend, it is by far the premier form of marriage for the close nurturing of children and for the equality of the sexes. The Judeo-Christian tradition especially as enshrined in Catholicism stands strongest in this support for this greatest form of human love and dedication, faithful monogamy. Without its impact, especially as Catholicism carried it to many peoples, how else could men in a man dominated world be induced to surrender their ancient sexual prerogatives in favor of chastity, monogamy and fidelity? It is this difference among others that made the West different. These male sexual prerogatives, to use the term loosely, are again being taken up in our time thanks to an historically oblivious media’s constant representation of swinging, to use the current term for promiscuity, playing the field, shacking up, grazing around, polyamory etc., as the “cool” and harmless. Catholicism has long experience in opposition to these damaging primarily male pursuits. It held fast when Islam almost conquered Europe. Under Islam it was a man’s world again. It propagated among other things a male dominated religion featuring polygamy and easy male divorce. Under the influence of the Gospel however the men of Europe resisted Islam and all its blandishments including that of religiously sanctioned polygamy. Mohammed, the religion’s founder, had nine wives. A few kings of Europe were tempted at times to shed wife for the harem but dared not the Church’s sanction of excommunication and interdict. The story is found in Part I, “The First Nineteen” of this six part series. Indeed, Henry VIII after leaving his wife for Anne Boleyn, took England out of the Church on the related issue of divorce. But the Church would not back down as it does not on the issue today and the even more important issue of life and abortion. Abortion takes many more females worldwide where the male is preferred, than males. Women have had no better friend in history than the Church. Tinkering with an institution that has served women, children and civilization so well and has forced the male to pull in his horns is dangerous enough as the rise in promiscuity, divorce, single parenthood and poverty all hardest on women, testify but when a misguided government decides that marriage is so unimportant as to be in indifferent to the sex of the spouses as it does when approving same-sex marriage, it must also commit itself to the belief that that most vital of tasks, the rearing of children, is also indifferent to the sex of the parents. But such is not actually the case. For long the Chinese have rightly understood that as the twig is bent so grows the tree. Having homosexual parents appears to increase the risk of incest by a factor of about 50%. According to a study of homosexual parents by P. Cameron and K. Cameron, 29% of adult children of homosexual partners had been specifically subject to sexual molestation by a homosexual parent compared to 0.6 % of adult children of heterosexual parents. If this wasn’t bad enough, encouraging homosexual activity also bodes ill for the future of a nation barely able to maintain the 2.1child per couple birthrate necessary just for replacement. Once a depopulation slide begins it is terribly difficult to stop. Unpleasant as it is to continue this litany of errors there is the problem of infidelity. Again, this is a prime cause of marriage’s decline. Heterosexuals since the 1960s have taken a large hand in this development but adding homosexuals, a group no more qualified for marriage with its essential potential for life than the completely and permanently impotent or the prepubescent child, is fraught with further damage for marriage because of the well documented homosexual propensity for promiscuity. In the Goodrich vs. the Massachusetts Department of Public Health case, of 156 same-sex couples studied none had maintained sexual fidelity after five years. Many subsequently broke up. This is precisely the kind the instability and danger marriage evolved to combat with the good of mother and child in mind. Remove that, the potential for life and motherhood, and what is left, whatever it is, is not marriage. The important connection of the permanent marriage environment to health, sexuality and population maintenance is demonstrated in numerous studies including a Danish one involving two million men and women. Its conclusions show that sexual orientation is heavily influenced by family environment. For example, intact parents with multiple children of both sexes increase the probability of heterosexual pairings in their children. A Canadian study adds the disputed observation that apparently the more older brothers there are increases the chances of homosexuality in the youngest brother. The across the board indication is that family matters and that the intact family with mother and father present encourages heterosexuality, the sole relationship guaranteeing a future. That family and social factors function to help shape adult sexual orientation is strongly suggested in the study but it is no surprise. Freud speculated a century ago that overprotective mothers and distant fathers helped make boys homosexual. Since then no special “gay” gene has been detected on any scientific screen there is however observational evidence of very early sexual orientation, a case of genetically identical twin boys in the same post-birth environment going in different directions very early on with cause yet to be nailed down. One guess speculates that the homosexually orientated boy who was born a pound lighter than his brother was somehow pre-natally stressed at a point when the brain is really developing. Orientation set so early is leading some researchers to look at hormones in the mother’s blood. But the research showing environmental influences stands very strong. Devoid of an intact family situation, children who experience parental divorce, for example, are less likely to marry heterosexually than children reared in intact families. With a divorce rate fluctuating between 40% and 50% this bodes ill for the essential heterosexual connection needed for continuance. For each additional year parents stayed married the probability of heterosexual marriage in the children increased by 1.6% among the sons and 1.0% among the daughters while the rate of homosexual unions decreased for every year of intact parental marriage. This most extensive of studies was published in “Archives of Sexual Behavior” in 2006 and concluded that environmental and biological factors centered on the family noticeably influence sexual attractions and behavior. Obviously heterosexual marriage is essential for survival. It has a tremendous influence on sexual orientation with intact marriage a factor engendering the kind of sexuality necessary for the very existence of a future. When it comes to physical health, heterosexuality is also a key factor in that it is much less promiscuous, temporary and disease spreading than homosexual unions. Governments should be encouraging traditional heterosexual marriage not redefining, defining down and deconstructing it. If the care of human life and not its destruction is as essential to good government as Jefferson says it is, no encouragement to homosexuality should be forth coming. According to the “Omega Journal of Death and Dying” homosexuals on average have a 3 to 6 year shorter lifespan than heterosexuals with the median age of AIDS victims at thirty-nine. Even fiscally AIDS, a discretionary affliction, is a disaster costing the country $13 billion annually. But the elected representatives in democratic governments and the judges they appoint or approve are very susceptible to well financed, highly concentrated and organized, media backed pressure groups. Relying on the inattention and short retention span of a media inundated populace awash in distracting trivia as well as good old fashioned lack of interest, they have given us same-sex marriage as earlier they gave us abortion on demand with nary a single referendum of the people approving either including California where same-sex marriage was voted down by the people only to see the people’s decision overridden by a Federal Judge. This is very low-grade democracy working for a very dangerous cause. But, there is hope. As the years go by the populace sometimes wakes to the horror of what has been perpetrated while so many were distracted. The rising pro-life movement is testimony to that. The decline of marriage at the hands of heterosexuals and its deconstruction and redefining by influential homosexual pressure groups has hurt across the board but the African American community especially. The disaster to family life is deepened by that community’s very high rate of abortion, a ghastly 60% in N.Y. City. Overall about 72% of births in the black community are to unmarried women. For the nation as a whole in 2008 a record 41% of births in the U.S. were to unmarried women, up from 28% in 1990 and about 5% in the 1950s. Modern sex education has been a great success! The sexperts of today would find it scarcely credible that 17th Century Europe, a society where people usually married in their late twenties, a degree of chastity was practiced that kept the illegitimacy rate-without contraceptives- as low as 2 % or 3 %. This is to a good degree religiously encouraged self-mastery. The achievement generally continued during the 1950s 5% and then came the breakdown. Artificial birth control methods including the pill stepped in with massive educational and media support, self-mastery was discouraged and the result is before us. The pathologies that Moynihan had foreseen four decades ago rising in the Black community are now widespread and growing in the whole community. Now, with marriage in such disarray mostly at the hands of heterosexuals, the same-sex marriage issue enters in. Appendix one attached takes a look. Changing the definition of the millennia old institution should cause a thoughtful pause for reflection and consideration of consequences but not among the same sex zealots. Theirs is a social-political movement with very different goals and agendas regarding marriage. They certainly do not view the begetting and nurturing of children in a loving family state and consequently the forming of a new and healthy generation as a weighty consideration. Marriage was established for that reason but no matter, marriage is a political statement of equality for most of them. They think it is overdue for redefinition. That it is every society’s premier institution for present health and future survival and tampering with it fraught with danger causes no hesitation. New social experiments, arrangements and relationships totally closed by their very definition from beginning to end to any chance of procreation are not in reality and never have been considered marriage. For the new phenomenon at hand, namely the declaring of a fruitless and sterile relationship between same sex people to be marriage, it may be more appropriate for clarity sake to coin a new term, “pairrage” for example, so that the two entities not be confused. The new word might help combat the popular confusion engendered in these important matters by a media establishment and an academic elite very supportative, under the guise of equality or freedom or privacy, of almost all rights newly manufactures by the courts including abortion and same sex marriage. This they consider trend setting and rule breaking strides toward equality instead of the actual shrinkage of the most important right of all, life and the dismantling of society’s most indispensable and ancient institution for its creation and nurturing. The heterosexual relationship with its potential for procreation should be honored and guarded as unique and essential, rather than diluted by lumping with inherently sterile and unstable relationships. But, in fact, equality is not the issue here. One may be button cute and still not make it in Hollywood, sharp as a tack and still not get into MIT, sing like a bird and be turned down at the Met, have an arm like a rifle and be shot down by the Yankees. As with marriage all these are matters involve qualification not equality and making equality the issue is tantamount to demanding open admission to just about everything with results likely disastrous. Hollywood, MIT, the Met, the Yankees would be destroyed under such “openness” and so will marriage, an institution far more important to society than any of the others. Yet, the very politicians who are unable to do basics such as creating intelligent budgets, under pressure from a tiny but vocal minority undertake to tamper with marriage. Mindless media encouraged support even glorifying homosexuality,same sex marriage and raising AIDS victims to modern martyr status similar to Martin Luther King should be rejected. The child infected with AIDS through the parent excepted of course, more often than not those sick with HIV are so through their own dangerous behavior. Indeed it is a vogue among some gay men to seek out partners who have HIV. Tammy Bruce in her book, “The Death of Right and Wrong,” cites one such man who said “When you get with someone who has HIV, it’s like being with someone greater than you are.” In a society where victims are glorified, of course it is. Is it dangerous? Of course it is. Is it costly in life and treasure? Of course it is. Should it be encouraged? Of course not! Should understanding and aid be afforded with remedial education where it may help? Of course it should. The crusade for same sex marriage creates other problems. It increases a danger already present in many Western nations, of deep population plunges and even eventual depopulation in contradiction to the usual overpopulation rhetoric. A dash of reality helps. In the thankfully unlikely event that homosexuality will ever became the norm, it should be realized that if it did the human race would be extinct in short order. That’s how radically abnormal, to use that unpopular term, homosexuality is. Practiced enough, it brings us to the brink of the very extinction that sex is there to forestall and overcome. Depopulation is a coming problem. Spain’s has been mentioned but it is not unique. It is facing a 10% population decline by 2050 but so are Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece and Sweden. A shrinkage of over 20% is projected for Italy, Russia and most of the former Eastern Block nations except Poland and Romania. Russia’s population is shrinking so fast it offers $11, 500 for the second child. The Ukraine will lose half its population in fifty years and Germany will have shrunk by 98% in 200 years if things don’t reverse soon. Who says wealth equals happiness? Existence in this most affluent of ages must be so painful many people don’t want to pass it on. Either that or so pleasant they don’t want the bother of raising and sharing it with their progeny. Affluence and selfishness seem to go hand in hand and indeed it does if recent studies are valid. The love of money spawns not children but desires for things other than children. Sometimes there are children later on as a missed experience essentially in the same kind of category as an adventuresome afterthought. Grabbing all that gusto is hard work even without the hindrance of marriage, family and children. The degree of selfishness that is involved, the contracepting and aborting of one’s own so that they don’t get in the way, brings it to a new level under the sun. In America the white majority is already below the 2.1 replacement level with minorities especially African Americans getting close partly due to a very high rate of abortion. If it weren’t for the Hispanic Americans and immigration the U.S. would be facing population decline similar to some of the nations mentioned earlier. Hispanics have an average of 2.9 children per women compared to 1.8 for non-Hispanic whites. The million immigrants a year who receive permanent resident status contribute to 82% of U.S. population growth that will reach 400 million as early as 2040. First and second generation Americans will be a third of our citizenry in fifteen years. If we legally admitted just 300,000 instead of a million people a year by 2060 the population of the U.S. would be 80 million less than it’s likely to be on current course. Though our Social Security system is far from fiscally healthy it is in better shape than the nations that are graying at a faster rate than we are. All the near or below zero growth nations will be saddled with an even greater elderly-dependency ratio in the years ahead forcing today’s shriveled younger generations to pick up the costs mostly through higher taxes and deferred retirements. The irony will be that many childless grays, including homosexuals will end up living at least to some degree off other people’s children. As we live longer we draw out more than we put into the system and without the children to eventually put into the system, the crunch will come. That could become a thorny political and social problem once the media lets the information through. The retiring baby boomers haven’t set the best example for compassion and altruism. No group was stronger for legalizing abortion. Would it be a surprise if the rationing of their aid and benefits came along? Is the fire bell in the night the voice of the embittered high schooler to the effect that the older generation gave them abortion, destroying a quarter of their generation, and that they will give back euthanasia, beginning to ring? Already we hear tinklings. In 2010 Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu argued that some people could be euthanized “at least partly to ensure that their organs could be donated.” If to save organs why not to save money? The first known case of harvesting was a woman in Belgium in 2008. Thankfully, not all are as embittered over generational slaughter as the young woman just quoted or inhumanly utilitarian as the biosthicist but there is no doubt that legalizing abortion has led to a growing callousness toward life in general and its dignity and inviolability. How could it be otherwise with 50 million destroyed lives in the U.S. alone since 1973? Life is getting cheaper, never a good development for the weak, vulnerable and dispensable. In 2000 18% of abortions were third abortions. Now that’s cheap life! The promise was that legalization would make abortion rarer instead it made it more common and life more disposable. People learn from the law and a human dignity built up through centuries of Christianity was severely damaged by Roe. Multiple abortions are plentiful. Whoopie’s six is bad enough but a woman in India has had thirty! Repercussions often unforeseen and unplanned are not unusual. It seems inevitable that as the nation becomes more killing friendly more than the pre-born will be at risk. Mother Theresa’s fear should also be kept in mind. She predicted that as people become more dispensable, wars will become more plausible. As the angry young women mentioned earlier might put it, the twenty-year old killed in action had a one in four chance of being killed in the womb. The carelessness about life, especially of the dependent, less fortunate and advantaged life and the selfish unconcern for any future but one’s own is something that is always lurking in the wings but has never taken center stage among masses of people as it has since the 1960s. It is far removed from the stated objective of the nation’s founders that their efforts in establishing the nation were not just to benefit themselves but also their posterity. But what happens to a society whose heterosexuals avoid marriage and children all the while encouraging homosexual pursuits as normal and even chic? The only group that can reproduce won’t and the rest can’t with the result, no posterity, or at least not enough to keep going. Immigration has obscured and delayed what the current U.S. birth trend is pointing to, demographic decline with economic problems hardly fully realized. Surprises are coming if attitudinal change doesn’t come first. Science tells us that the urge to reproduce is perhaps “the fundamental imperative of natural selection.” If there is anything to it then many women are ignoring the urgings of their genes. Thirty percent of German women are childless and many other nations are right there with her. Despite all the self-serving rhetoric of sex education, the fact is reproduction and even sex itself are not addictions. We still have free will. We can be chaste. We can practice abstinence. We can be childless if we want to. Unlike creatures of a lower order we are free to deny certain commands of our genes, as we are the commands of our Creator. This is a valuable lesson for the hordes of misguided sex educators and counselors who deny the possibility of propagating and promoting abstinence education. It has been done and can be done. It is a fact though that in certain ways the evolutionary aspects of nature can be foreboding and even brutal. Nature abhorrers sterility and rewards it with extinction. Survival in nature depends on the heterosexual connection. For that reason that singular relationship has been and should be protected, encouraged and enshrined by every society. The danger of overpopulation is over if it ever really existed. Concern should be looking in the opposite direction for once the depopulation slide begins it is very difficult to put the brakes on it. The prophets of doom and gloom waited for a population bomb that never came. It was a dud. There are seven billion of us now and still plenty in Earth’s bounty and space. In fact, as our numbers have climbed so has our well-being. In 1800 with one billion people, per-capita income was about $100. By 1900 with almost two billion it reached $500. Currently with seven billion it is over $5,000. Before 2100 when we hit almost eight billion and the slide begins in earnest it will reach around $30,000 in current dollars. Driving the so-called population explosion has been a real explosion in wealth, health and longevity sadly slowed by the primarily self-imposed disease of AIDS and the rebound of malaria and TB. The population of the world has doubled since 1960 and in the developing world so has income according to the World Bank along with great gains in caloric intake. Where there is hunger the real problem is not scarcity but the misdistribution of the goods of the world often due to political unrest, greed, poor planning and economic experimentation. Doctors trying to help the hungry of Africa sometimes complain that aid trucks often carry more condoms than food or water. With the population of the world peaking at eight billion the decline will set in and fast. Under population will become the problem straining the economies of graying nations. Some declare that this will spare the Earth and its environment but good planning could do as much without economic disruption. Even now eighty countries representing well over half the world’s population have or will soon have below replacement fertility defined as 2.1 children per women. Already the populations of the developed nations are static or declining, as the U.S.’s would be without immigration. In 2009 the birth rate in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in history according to the National Center for Health Statistics. To repeat, it looks like many on the road to Social Security retirement will be living at least partly off other people’s children. To the hordes of voluntarily barren American urbanites many of whom depended on IRAs and such for comfortable retirement, the reduced number of children being born means less support. This should come at no surprise to those generations who didn’t replace themselves before leaving the workplace. The 52.3 million abortions since Roe doesn’t brighten the picture. These destroyed contributors never lived to help support the generation that threw them under the bus. The Movement for a Better America estimates the economic impact of these lost lives is $38.5 trillion in U.S. Gross Domestic Product since 1970. The number is far greater than what they would have consumed and without immigrants taking up the slack its impact would be felt much more. Abortion and contraception dropped U.S. fertility rates from 3.4 children per female in 1963 to 1.8 by 1975, a tremendous drop for a country having so much fun. Obviously, children were not part of the mass amusement. Now, with fewer workers paying into the system and huge numbers of boomers retiring, Social Security’s ponzi-style financing won’t hold. The latest Social Security Trustees’ report makes it clear that costs will exceed tax revenues in 2016. 2037 is the date when all Social Security assets will be exhausted. People living longer, fewer people being born and a bad economy with 10% unemployment are the three tolling bells at the funeral. To silence them, people will have to work longer, pay more in taxes and retire later. Taxes somewhere will likely go up either in a regressive payroll tax or the general income taxes. The alternative is a government with the will and intelligence to get the nation out from under oppressive tax devouring debt through judicious, fair and serious spending cuts. The government is under a crushing debt that it created by its unwillingness to say the all-important word, “no.” Flirting with default has consequences hard to imagine. A pro-natal tax policy might help preserve the tottering system for our grandchildren by encouraging Americans to have more children. This could be accomplished by reducing payroll taxes for workers with three or more offspring and by reducing benefits for those having fewer than three children; after all, no children, no future. We can’t keep borrowing from abroad to help support ourselves. The debt becomes crushing and budget consuming. Meanwhile, what some call the “nanny state” keeps getting larger, especially with the passage of the new health care bill whose costs can hardly be accurately estimated especially as the population keeps getting older and grayer. How will the truncated generations who inherit the national debt take care of the elderly population that so vastly outnumbers them especially with so many of their brothers and sisters eliminated by abortion? Children learn from their elders but it’s not a lesson of selfless concern for others that they will be getting. Will hastened death through rationing of care and various forms of euthanasia eventually become treatment options? Involuntary terminations have already euthanized some in extremis in Holland where the Dutch Medical Association conceded in 1999 that 25% of Dutch physicians admitted to ending patients’ lives without the patient’s consent. Start with withdrawing protection from the pre-born and all sorts of doors open. Is it a surprise that the terminally ill would soon join them? As for Down Syndrome children, they are already fast disappearing. The list gets longer, life gets cheaper and we are right back to that survival of the fittest that the love taught in revelation has held in check for a long time. But, the murderous philosophy of utilitarianism that measures life by its usefulness to society has grown stronger since preached by J.S.Mill and Jeremy Bentham many years ago and is carried on by today’s secularists. The Church fights back with the Gospel in hand. In it utilitarianism has no part for every individual holds great valus for everyone is a child of the loving Creator. The U.S. Government use to think so. “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator…” but now we have presidents and powers busy tinkering. They must be carefully watched and confronted. If the depopulation implosion continues, by 2050 Russia will have shrunk by 25 million people, Japan with a mere 1.2 children per couple by 21 million, Italy by 16 million, and Germany and Spain by 9 million each. All of Europe and Japan will lose half their population by 2100. Countries below replacement rate fertility will eventually die out. It’s just a matter of time and its called self-extinction. Only a handful of countries have fertility rates above 3.0 percent. Nevertheless there are still dinosaurs that believe people are the problem and that each new child adds to it. There are even fanatics who will not have children because of their “carbon footprint.” To many of these people the planet is god and people the problem. Many practice sterile, often out of wedlock sex and think they are helping. The present administration is caught up in this thinking. USAID sent out over 755 million male condoms mostly to Africa at over three cents each in 2010. The aim is to reduce population but more urgently attack the AIDS epidemic that has already taken about 25 million lives there. There are several problems with this approach. Countries encouraged to put sole reliance on condoms in accord with U.S and UN policy do not fare as well in the AIDS struggle as nations making abstinence, the elimination of “grazing,” the center piece of their program. As mentioned, by misallocating resources in an area in need of food, water and medicine, especially anti-malarial aids by flooding it with condoms instead lives are lost. The condom fetish is indeed dangerous. For many impoverished areas it is not too many people that is the problem it is this misallocation of resources. Many doctors on the scene there assert that poor nutrition and water sources are the basic nightmare in Africa. One was quoted as saying, “Our most effective vaccine is a glass of clean water. The billions of dollars being spent on HIV and AIDS vaccine development would be much better spent basic food and water.” For all countries the economic fallout from the coming demographic winter will be serious. By 2050, according to Steve Mosher of the Population Research Institute, persons aged 65 and older will be almost twice as numerous as children 15 and younger. This will lead to the closing of schools with attendant unemployment, declining stock markets and moribund economies. More education is usually accompanied by smaller families but less than two children is by no means a given and must be avoided. The monogamous heterosexual who is capable of having twenty children can easily avoid that without him becoming a latex lover or without her crowding chemicals into her body. Education opens up family limitation by simply observing and respecting nature’s ways. Natural family planning which must certainly appeal at a time like ours when what is natural is highly valued, is even more fool proof now than total reliance on condoms. From nature’s point of view, fully contracepted and abortion addicted heterosexuality is as much a dead end as homosexuality. It is almost literally the amusing of ourselves to death. In that light, encouraging fruitful marriage and discouraging trendy homosexuality often of a fashionably pseudo variety, far from offending equality or being an example of homophobia is just good sense. And regarding the encouragement of marriage and the nurturing of future generations, even that cause is not served well by massive distribution of condoms among the young. There is plentiful evidence that encouraging sexual activity among teens as condom distribution to them inevitably does also encourages divorce in later life. Studies show sexually active teenagers are twice as likely to divorce later in life than the abstinent. It’s another reason why abstinence education in important.. Nature is not forgiving and cannot practice the mercy of the Creator. It prizes prodigious procreation, fabulous fecundity, in other words, life, because it too, as we have observed, is split in upon itself. It, like us, and the rest of the natural world confronts death with life. It is divided against itself. There is so much in nature going against life, from diseases to natural disasters, all without mankind’s help. But nature also provides the winning weapon, fertile sex, by which the triumph of death and extinction can be defeated. Fecundity through healthy heterosexuality is our best weapon against annihilation and the ultimate enemy of all life on Earth, extinction. Procreation makes possible the triumph of life and the continuation of human love and intelligence by which we are to make our way against the forces of dissolution but again if those who can won’t and the rest are of no help because they can’t we are in a serious pickle. Especially in the West the three gurneys upon which the human race is being wheeled toward painful decline even demise among some groups and nations is sterile, contracepted marital sex producing few children, abortion and the promotion of homosexual activity. The latter can be successfully advanced especially among the impressionable, vulnerable and malleable young who are susceptible to media hype and who in growing numbers come from those very types of homes that studies show increase the chances of homosexual orientation. Toleration must be protected and can be sustained even as concern rightly grows and corrective solutions are sought. A turn around is possible with proper education and proper tax schedule inducements. Raising children is extremely expensive especially for those eschewing the often failing public schools. In reality this growing group faces double taxation for exercising their parental choice regarding education. Little tolerance for their exercise of choice comes forth from the government and indeed they are penalized for it even though they and all parents deserve more than just tolerance. They deserve help and encouragement. They form the future. That they got the respect and praise often dished out to the gays. Not so in media land important as they are. Yet tolerance of the homosexual community can never be a buy in or an acceptance of any life denying or life destroying way of life nor the swallowing of the line that homosexuality is the natural equivalent to heterosexuality. That line is almost as destructive as the one that purports abortion to be simply the other side of the birth coin. To avoid a population implosion without reliance on immigration the U.S. needs a birth rate of at least an average of 2.1 children per women and that just for maintenance. Women may make wonderful cops, scientists, magazine editors and bankers but men can do that stuff too. The woman, of the two sexes, is the most important in the most important work of all, procreation. Only she can give birth. She is the key. All depends on her. She must be willing. She forms and is the center of the family upon which the future health and even existence of any society rests. By not giving herself away, by not being an easy mark for the male, she enhances her innate value and dignity immeasurably. She has been badly abused not the least by the sexual revolution and the feminist movement. Expecting liberation at last, they in fact got a society in which women almost have to work and men can get what they want from women, sex-without responsibility or commitment. In short, tragically with “liberation” came disaster for multitudes. At the same time the evidence mounts of spreading discontent. Few people in this most affluent of ages, seem happy. Numerous studies, government reports and polls reveal abysmal numbers in suffering depression. Prescriptions for anti-depressant medications have gone up 40% in four years. For one thing, women are increasingly frustrated in their desire for home and children. All the lonely people the Beatles sang about have increased tremendously and are not who the Beatles imagined. But, women can have great power to make the man attend, be a serious partner rather than a grazer. He must be induced to grow up and she can do it. In other words, he must cease being Hef’s Playboy and become the man he was intended to be and must be if we are to survive in descent shape or at all. Then the two, women and men can love and work together in a stable married state. Its nice work too, though it is truly work bringing about the happy result of humanity’s continuation in generally sound and contented condition. Like the old “Dixie Cup” song said, “We’re going to the chapel and we’re going to get married, and we won’t be lonely anymore.” Loneliness is a major contributor to unhappiness and depression. Marriage is a great anti-dote. Humanity was created to survive and thrive, to overcome and to be the natural world’s wise custodian. It’s the message of revelation. If you are against life, your own excepted of course, with no concern for posterity, you are against humanity, its future and its very continuance. You are a dead end. By far that condition, the survival and thriving of humanity, is best achieved within marriage. In marriage the equal personal dignity of men and women is achieved when they give themselves with a love that is total and therefore unique and exclusive. Many studies show that that exclusiveness is more often than not lacking in the homosexual scene. If same sex couples want to live together its their decision of course but the situation should not be confused with marriage for several reasons especially because, unlike marriage, it is a relationship totally closed to procreation whereas the male-female relationship isn’t. In brief, without homosexuality the world would go on just fine. Without heterosexuality it wouldn’t go on at all. The two things are vastly different hence the two sets of terms, hetero and homo, marriage and pairrage. It is important that words have accurate definitions. Hence we distinguish two different sports, baseball and softball, for example, rather than baseball for both because they are not the same and have different rules and different tools. So too we need two terms to highlight the important difference in marriage, one word for traditional life producing marriage and another for the recently promoted but sterile same-sex union. So as not to confuse the two, as suggested, a different terminology should be adopted with “pairrage” appropriate for the new legal category. The homosexual union is not on the same plain and should not go by the same name. They are essentially different with pairrage capturing the prevailing temporary nature of homosexual relationships. Although marriage has been greatly abused by heterosexuals with Henry VIII kicking off the new path toward deterioration in the West. No doubt they were all following their hearts in ditching spouses for new models. Bliss can be fickle. Probably there is hardly a man or women among us who could not have done something similar. Why they didn’t is part of what authentic love is about, sacrifice. But desire is not love and as such often extends beyond the bounds of marriage. Unchecked by the art of lockheart with grace in support, it can destroy marriage and family. But there is no need to be enslaved by unchecked desire. It can be checked. We are free beings and can, by working at authentic love, forego enticing but destructive desire for the sake of the rightly beloved that includes spouse, child, and family. With homosexual desire it is different. As said, it is a sterile and often destructive form of sexual desire that, in itself, provides motivation for escape. As Andrew Sullivan made clear, promiscuity is almost a given in the homosexual life style but even there evidently with effort and will, remediation and redirection is possible. The evidence for change is plentiful for those wishing out of the life and there is much to motivate such a desire. A heightened will to change sometimes moved by grace has done it for many as. in like manner a heightened desire to be faithful helped by grace for the asking, has saved innumerable marriages and families. It is needless to tell anyone that any of this is easy, it isn’t and never has been. With porn now in the air we breathe it is more of a challenge than ever. A 2011 report by sociologists at the University of Buffalo found that popular media are increasing their “pornified images of women,” which negatively affects both men and women. Resisting this negative onslaught can be difficult and for many sexologists difficult is tantamount to abnormal and though the media parades these sex experts out for interview at the drop of a hat, their information much like Kinsey’s research is often bogus. It is the Church again that calls for resistance because of what authentic love is and because revelation explains how love should be practiced and how it was intended to be lived. If, sadly, that message floats fewer boats than before, how about the basic default position that faithful love leads to the reduction of heartbreak, depression and betrayal in a world increasingly full of it? Or, perhaps the avoidance of a dead end and often disease filled sexuality in favor of one with a future would induce change. I must follow my heart is often the hollow retort but desire has to be distinguished from love. They are not the same. We are called to a life of love not desire. Love one another is not desire one another. Desire hits randomly and often without the asking but love has to be cultivated. If desire is random love is aimed. If it is kicked off by desire it is targeted at a permanence and exclusiveness that raises it above the random desires and infatuations that buffet us. The world depends on love and if it seems to border on the impossible and without faith it increasingly seems that way for many therein lies a big part of the decline we are in. Marriage quality love is faithful love, the greatest gift children can get, as the statistics from innumerable studies demonstrate. As the state has redefined life freezing out a whole segment of it in the Roe decision it now attempts redefinition of love and marriage. When this happens the law changes but not the reality. Society is thrown into turmoil and division because of the violence committed against science and truth through legal redefinitions adopted under lobby pressures that defy both. Hence human life no longer begins at conception though before Roe it did and scientifically still does for as Walker Percy put it, “all other points are completely arbitrary.” So too with marriage, it no longer involves only male and female but a same sex variety though scientifically it is still only the heterosexual relationship that has the potential for producing the new life that is part of the defining reason for marriage in the first place. If Roe created division and social tensions that seem to grow rather than heal, will not this most recent legal redefinition do the same? There is great danger in all this. It creates division and weakens the necessary consensus of thought and outlook on the important things that keeps a society up and going. This does not a call for lockstep legions marching in mind numbing conformity but a basic core consensus on the vital matters upon which a society rests. Things like the value and rights associated with each individual life and the best way to form and nurture that life for its and everybody’s good. When widespread basic agreement or consensus is lost that which makes for a vibrant and healthy society is lost. Line crossing is a mere ornamental pursuit of questionable value though usually tolerable to a degree but that vital core consensus must be in place. It is that which forestalls descent into the chaos and confusion that is sometimes a prelude to gradual dissolution through loss of heart. Loss of heart means loss of the vibrancy and faith that keeps inertia at bay. For every society a descent into impotent, aimless second rate-ness is always in the wings especially if the things conducive to it are given center stage and the originating, motivating and creative consensus is derided. We have already witnessed a President and others altering the documents upon which that consensus was built. When that happens, when the bold Madonna like tinkerers with their contingent of happy line crossing devotees are in the driver’s seat, things begin to unravel and the first to feel the solid ground slipping away are usually the society’s most “useless” and vulnerable members because the happy line crossers are usually avid utilitarians. Abortion, euthanasia, cloning, infanticide, same sex marriage, pedophilia, bigamy, polygamy, even incest, you name it, for once lines are sufficiently crossed they soon become obliterated. The old male games from promiscuity to polygamy complete with gaggles of bimbos or houses full of “bunnies” and such, which the Church has always stoutly frowned upon, can now be dusted off and given new life along with much else. Shortly it should be expected that the media will jump on many of these causes. It is adept at selling stuff from underwear and cars to abortion and homosexual marriage, why not polygamy? Playboy was highly successful in selling porn and promiscuity. Sadly, as the communication-entertainment industry becomes more amazingly sophisticated, the stuff it communicates as entertainment becomes more banal, violent, vulgar and tasteless. We end up with playboy mansions, runways with prancing screen queens and eventually moral and mental decrepitude. Don’t hold your breath for a glowing special on those unsung, and thanks to media land, unknown women who would not play ball with Hef and his centerfolds! That’s one reality show that will never see the screen. The media doesn’t exactly raise them up for praise. For all its posturing about cutting edge it usually avoids the real boat rockers especially when its their boat being rocked. Hence it idolizes a Bette Davis who had an abortion for career sake but does nothing remotely similar for Loretta Young who didn’t. Breakthroughs in adult stem cell usage gets little mention compared to embryonic stem cell research that involves the destruction of new life. Even parades are filtered. Four hundred thousand can march in Washington protesting abortion with hardly a notice while five hundred protesting Wall Street or war get full exposure. The media shouldn’t fear censorship, it’s well practiced at it itself. Marriage it seems is in for similar and intensified legal beating with media help, this time with the polygamy hammer. But the Church will always be there to fight the old fight for human dignity, male and female, and will always stand by marriage in its original and essential meaning, trendy alterations notwithstanding. It cherishes the man and women who, sometimes out of blazing lust as a starter, marry and with patience, work, and with fidelity make it into authentic marriage quality love and devotion. By so doing they transform the world simply by keeping it going with children capable of right living, problem solving instead of making, and who will give more than they take. The other way around sinks the boat of state as the bulging debt of many nations testify. Marriage is much more than a social custom or malleable convenience but the bedrock upon which a healthy society thrives. Marriage, in spite of the abuses of pairrage, cohabitation, no fault divorce, single parenthood and such still has that ancient and glorious permanence to it that it is supposed to have in defiance of all that drags it and us down. It will always have that in Catholic teaching. An item in the Los Angeles Times a while back attempted to equate opposition to homosexual marriage with opposition to inter-racial marriage as enshrined in the laws of some American states prior to the Civil Rights movement. Those laws reflected a very regional prejudice during a very specific moment in history and were never universally accepted. In fact inter-racial marriage was common in South and Central America and has always been recognized in the Church’s Canon Law going back to the its beginning. In other words the American anti-miscegenation laws reflected a particular and aberrant culture in a particular time and were never universally accepted whereas heterosexual marriage is a universal and all-important institution. Same-sex marriage advocates with their close connection to the media especially PBS channels are trying to hijack the Civil Rights movement, a movement led by Christian clergy, by equating homosexuality with race and ethnicity. Even scientifically, the comparison is bogus. Race and ethnicity are genetically set as is one’s sex. Much homosexuality, as was examined, is to a far more extensive degree than at first realized, sensitive to environmental factors. Race, of course, is not. This dishonest ploy has nothing to do with equality or civil rights and everything to do with 2% of the nation’s population trying to remake marriage in its image. Colin Powell, himself African American said it best. “Skin color is a benign non-behavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.” The laws opposing inter-racial marriage were recent in origin and biased in motivation. The laws making marriage exclusively heterosexual pre-date written history and go to the very purpose of marriage, namely love, sex and the potential for children. These objectives have nothing to do with bias and everything to do with survival. The environmental factor associated with homosexual orientation and practice presents another social concern, the danger of the spread of a pseudo-homosexuality similar to campus LUGs, the homosexuality of the incarcerated and that of the impressionable emulating what they consider trendy and “cool.” Historically, homosexual activity has come to exceed its usual 2%-3% of the population under certain very specific circumstances usually where women were secluded and isolated from general social contact. In societies where this happens and women are basically quarantined before their usually arranged marriages and afterwards out of reach through isolation and purdah type seclusion, males pretty much associate with males exclusively for a good part of their lives and attachments are formed. This situation existed in Classical Greece where women were severely isolated and removed from society leaving males mixing and mingling almost exclusively from adolescence on with males. In such an all male society man-boy love became widespread. In the later Roman period, this sort of thing was emulated by many Roman admirers of Greek culture. They called it “Greek love” and apparently the Emperor Hadrian who was so devoted to things Greek that his nickname was “Greekling,” dabbled in it. Juvenal took a rather bleak view of Rome’s ubiquitous and corrupt homosexual scene writing disparagingly of “buggering old men…” A similar situation developed in polygamous Islamic society where the Caliphs, often satiated with women, would turn to homosexuality for a change. It was a sentiment that was echoed centuries later by Roman Polanski. At the same time in the lower strata of Islamic society strict purdah would create an environment for homosexuality and a motivation for conquest and acquisition of women from conquered societies. We saw the Indian experience as an example. Ottoman Turkey, another Islamic society, was almost exclusively male since there was no permitted association of men and women outside the home. According to Durant, “the Moslem found companionship in homosexual relationships, Platonic or physical.” Lesbianism flourished in the Harem even though the punishment was beheading. Under Islam a class of homosexual “mukhannath’” arose who imitated women in costume and conduct with long nails and perfume and specialized in obscene dancing. After some resistance, homosexuality made rapid progress and became prevalent in Harun’s court. In brief, according to Durant, “the Moslem male was separated from women before marriage by Purdah and surfeited with them after marriage by harem,” Filling the harems was motivation for conquest since nature doesn’t cooperate. It inconveniently provided a basically meager one to one male-female match thus providing motivation for expansion. The military bent of the religion and the desire for loot also played a part. It is hardly surprising that in the societies being described, many fell into irregular relations. Social environment was key here in spreading homosexual connections among people who were essentially heterosexual. Apparently environment can push some people in one or the other sexual direction. It is important and this fact should raise concerns now with our media seemingly adamant about pressing homosexuality into the spotlight as just another form of sexuality equivalent to heterosexuality. The most basic law of nature according to John Locke is “the preservation of mankind.” Homosexuality does not accomplish that and as if acknowledging that fact exclusive homosexuality was quite rare in preliterate societies where survival was a pressing consideration. It evidently rises in circumstances like the ones described above or when leisure and wealth accumulate along with boredom. It was ironic that the European Renaissance, shortly before Islamic Persia experienced a severe decline in population that was observed by a European traveler there at the time, Chardin, who attributed it to the “unhappy inclination which Persians have to homosexuality,” with widespread abortion an additional factor, began breathing new life into the moribund practice of homosexuality. It was stimulated by new contact with classical Greek culture and with the Islamic East. The Renaissance worshipped everything Greek and “Greek love” became an obligatory part of the Greek revival. According to Durant, “the Humanists wrote about it with almost scholarly affection.” As it was explained to Robert, Bishop of Aquino at the time by an observant penitent, “Fornication is no sin. Chastity is old fashioned and virginity is on the wan.” Ariosto judged they (the cultural elite) were all addicted to Greek love. In all these historical eras environmental and social factors played a major influential role in pushing homosexual activity and practice into segments of the population far above the usual 2% to 3% with a more or less strong homosexual inclination. This is the same type of pseudo-homosexuality that we see the very trendy media and campus scenes today drawing many of the impressionable. It is considered “cool;” high praise indeed in some circles! In cases like the Renaissance and today’s scene where women were not secluded, the factor at work is sometimes satiation with the normal mentioned by Polanski but also is sometimes the adoption of a style that is considered brave, novel, line crossing, convention defying, attention getting, social raising, even a reaching out to a group perceived as a persecuted underdog. There is no denying that the current milieu with media replacing religion in the lives of many has a lot to do with what some people do. Thankfully, what milieu and environment does can sometimes be undone. If we take the present American scene with a very homosexual friendly media, the PBS series “In the Life,” comes to mind, playing the influential role that the image of Classical Greece held in the Renaissance, the result will pretty much be parallel. The many easily influenced will be influenced. But what is presented is, as so much media information, tilted. Although it is a back street topic forced into the famous closet vacated by homosexuals, there are indeed many who by changing environment, both mental and physical, have left the homosexual life. And why wouldn’t they? The Royal College of Psychiatrists in Britain released a study several years ago demonstrating that homosexuals and lesbians suffer higher rates of emotional and mental health problems and are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than heterosexuals. As acceptance of homosexuality as mainstream and “normal” has successfully been pushed these problems have not gone away. The authors of the study conclude that”…gay men and lesbians may have lifestyles that make them vulnerable to psychological disorder.” Not only that but AIDS and 65% of syphilis cases effect homosexuals. With problems like that plus an almost six year shorter life span on average than heterosexuals, many consider seeking help to change their sexual orientation. The clinical success rate approximately matches the success rates associated with the abandoning similar types of dangerous tendencies from depression and alcoholism to kleptomania and drug addiction. Adding to the incentive for escape are depression and suicide rates among gay people. They are high even in homosexual-friendly countries. This life regardless of media hype is not gay for great numbers and so often change is sought. Twenty four percent of the men in one study, 15 out of 63 and 14%, 2 out of 14 women succeeded in the effort; this, in spite of the insistence of some homosexual activists that they cannot change. At least some can and in time maybe more could. Indeed the cannot change claim was attacked by Gareth Kirby a homosexual activist and managing editor of “Xtra West.” In an editorial entitled “No Need to Lie, he decried for one thing the 10% propaganda and the “born that way” explanation for homosexuality. That last argument, he claimed, sounded like a plea for pity. He wrote that he choose to be homosexual after a number of relationships with women implying that many others did too. ”Psychologists Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse of Wheaton College argue that homosexuality is quite changeable and claim success rates in the 33% to 50% range. The topic is covered in at least two books: “Homosexual No More” by William Consiglio and “Coming Out of Homosexuality” by Bob Davies. Needless to say the media mostly ignores them and if mentioned it is with derision. In reality, the whole same sex marriage program, call it pairrage, call it anything but for accuracy sake don’t call it marriage, is fraught with danger. The rationale for same sex marriage would equally support group marriage, bigamy, polygamy, incest, pederasty or any other imaginable sexual arrangement including even human and animal, as long as the other is “loved,” of course. Marriage is a good thing and a fine remedy to much that ails out society. Many studies show married people to be happier, more adjusted and leading more fulfilling lives but marriage is built on fidelity and redefining it to fit new likes and trends that often place little value on fidelity does not spread happiness. Rather it further weakens the vital institution. Redefine marriage, dedefine love, and roses become tulips, meaning becomes meaningless, and words themselves cease to reflect reality. The great strides toward sexual equality in the world have occurred in the West because it has the only world religion that has always opposed the things that hurt women, including concubinage, prostitution and easy male divorce. In Islam by contrast, a divorce is effected when the husband intones four times, “you are dismissed.” Christianity’s opposition to polygamy and all infanticide which in fact fell heaviest on female infants and still does were additional factors in the advance of women.. An interesting point was made in the musical “The King and I” when the King of Burma sends a women as a gift to the King of Siam destroying her relationship with the man she loved. This kind of extremely demeaning use of women for barter and negotiation was common all over the non-Christian world including pre-Columbian America and the religions of those people offered no serious objection. It has been the Christian concept of marriage that was the great bulwark against this sort of thing. Nevertheless, it is under widespread attack most recently the drive for same-sex marriage. But again, let Tom and Dick “marry,” or Lulu and Rose then why not Tom, Dick and Harry or Lulu, Rose, and Bill? If equality devoid of requirements and rules of qualification is the aim, Harry must not be discriminated against. To take it a step further into absurdity, Sharon Tiedler loved her pet dolphin and wanted to marry it so she did in Israel three years ago. Making marriage indefinable and therefore meaningless is possibly the greatest damage that can be inflicted on a society and its greatest resource, family and children. With state laws against same-sex marriage going, what logical line in this march of defineless freedom is there against the rest of the formerly illegal bag of tricks from incest, bigamy and polygamy to mixed group marriage and bestiality? Many lines need to be drawn and deserve not to be crossed. Without discipline, lines, limits, the West’s great gifts to the world, flowing from its formative religion, Christianity, namely individual dignity, with its inalienable freedom and rights, can quickly go to seed and in their place we get privacy and diversity as defining values. Diversity is a two edged sword. Trendy academics made almost all colleges co-ed some decades ago under its banner with the result there now is less diversity in academia. Equality is too. Under its banner the Church is being forced out of one of its ancient ministries, adoption services, because it refuses to place children with same-sex couples thus leaving the Church and the children it wanted to place second-class citizens. Being able to see future effects of often misguided but well-intentioned moves is a challenge. How much abuse, for example, can marriage take before it descends to a private preference of no great thought or import since any permanence about it has long since been eroded away? Care to extrapolate? Marriage is tough and tough is not today. Help is needed to walk the walk but don’t look to the media for it. Every female character in TV land is out doing everything that men can do which is fine but they are not doing what only they can do, have children and nurture them as only mothers can do. Again, Chesterton’s observation may be exaggerated but it has a kernel of truth, a very big one. “A child is only sent to school when it is too late to teach him anything. .The real thing has been done already, usually by a woman. Every man is womanized by being born.” Outside TV land where being almost any occupation is superior to being a wife and mother, women sadly watch the median age for marriage pass them by and worry more and more about the declining numbers of marriageable men and their own disappearing fertility. The sated male has little incentive to marry and the U.S. birthrate continues below replacement. We have the dangerous situation where those who can won’t and the rest can’t. As mentioned, if not for immigration our economic pickle would be more bitter than it is. Progeny? The founders of the nation evidently made a false assumption. They assumed people would want some. They assumed that the selflessness founded on strong religious beliefs would not be displaced by the happy housewives of New Jersey and swinging Sex in the City. John Adams wrote that the Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It sure isn’t up to a remedy for what is ailing our nation now. Anyway you cut it, creeping depopulation does not make for a healthy economy or and happy society. Add in some perversity and sex is turned into a major death dealer and our vaunted freedom into a breeding ground for unhappiness. Social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has concluded from her study that “today’s young women, in particular, are discontented with their love lives…Romantic disappointment has emerged as a generational theme.” We remember what the old farmer said. Too bad they didn’t. The predatory male still has a field day. Fueling the whole fiasco is a media flooded with childless attachment-less females solving crimes and winning court cases, males on the make and scoring almost at will and same-sex marriage accepted as being as normal as the accompanying canned laugher. Easily forgotten in media amusement world are the hard won lessons of human history and evolutionary biology that point to the unique and vital necessity to human success on Earth of heterosexual pair bonding focused on reproduction and child rearing. The Church says the same thing more romantically and poetically, “to have and to hold till death do us part.” All else is tantamount to sexual buffoonery surrounded by protestations of love but laced with high degrees of infidelity and promiscuity. This puts us on the path to “an evolutionary dead end” according to Ronald Immerman of Case Western Reserve University in “The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology.” He presents marriage as important but we can almost bet that when humanity agrees on the importance of something be it marriage, the intact family or sexual abstinence among the young, as Chesterton said, “some sort of humanitarian will want to destroy it.” In the present media-gay mindset with polygamy biting at the bit in the wings all marching under the misleading banners of freedom, equality and compassion, marriage is in for a continued rough time with its fate in doubt. It is the church that is marriage’s champion and often vilified for its efforts when those efforts necessarily include criticism of projects to radically change marriage into something it isn’t. The successfully married know it takes some true grit at times, at times the art of lockheart, and truth be told at times some prayer for the help to get through the rough spots and there will always be those spots. That poses a problem for those people who are into a lot of things, prayer not being one of them. The infidelity issue deserves attention because it is a factor in so many marriage breakups and of course a milieu in which premarital infidelity is rampant and media glorified, doesn’t help. Nor does same-sex marriage, which is far more prone to infidelity. A leading spokesman for the homosexual movement, Columnist Andrew Sullivan is to the point. “Gay men have a need for extra-marital outlets.” And that propensity for promiscuity has led to the expenditure of vast sums of tax monies to control diseases that self-control would gave prevented at much less cost. So the public subsidizes the “need” of gay men! But the Church is blind to the differences between gay and straight.needs. It rejects promiscuity totally whether hetero or homosexual. It might be termed in this regard an equal opportunity condemner. But in media land it is quite different. It welcomes all promiscuity. What media or movie hero is happily and faithfully married these days rather than a “cool” promiscuous swinger? This is not helpful in many ways, national health being just one. The condom-health fixation has been a flop. For decades literally tens of millions of condoms have been distributed all over N.Y. City including schools yet the rate of sexually transmitted diseases continue to skyrocket. If sex education was approached like the smoking-health problem was, in other words abstinence, a breakthrough might be had. That’s the kind of envelope pushing our cutting edge media and progressive politicians are just not up to. Not only that but their reflexive promotion of homosexual rights and same sex marriage should give them pause. Even a superficial and cursory look around should tell them that a form of sex that produces more disease and death than life is not exactly what nature intended nor what law should encourage. Far from homophobia this is simply good sense based on observable fact. The importance of marriage extends out in many directions and infidelity is not the only threat. Not only are good marriages essential for the future of a healthy society but also personal health is involved. Marriage is productive of health and happiness for so many as numerous studies testify. Research statistics have married people on average happier and healthier than the unmarried. The sexual alternatives to married life out there, the ones incessantly paraded through the media without the health downside or the fact that that downside is often contained by resorting to deep plunges into the public wallet, are not conducive to either health and happiness. In addition to divorce, loneliness and a plethora of kids with disestablished and blasted lives often in or near poverty, we also have the shadow of death beclouding what was once productive of joy and life, namely sex rightly used rather than blighted by abortion. On top of the massive use of artificial contraceptives and pills ironically in an age that relishes the natural and deplores the artificial, especially the cramming of the body with chemical concoctions, we have a national abortion rate that destroys over 25 % of new life in the nation though much higher in New York, turning the womb into a tomb for million. That’s not natural either. There are serious economic repercussions too. Many families have few children but, oddly enough, are often living in larger houses. These Mac Mansions so called are houses fit for the larger families of the past and with larger mortgages to show for it. Those mortgages by the millions were a key link in the economy’s recent economic bubble and recessional bust but the overall situation poses another problem in the long haul. As we have seen, to support the growing number of oldsters in their Social Security years we have a proportionally dwindling number of working age people in active employment kicking into the system. Social Security must do painful adjustments to head off bankruptcies. Higher taxes, later retirement and even the scepter of rationed medical care for the elderly are all hanging out there to make life more dismal. There is even the increased threat of more legalized “mercy” killing for the handy removal of those costly sick and burdensome. That regimen already exists in some states and foreign countries. It is one area where one need not look for altruism. In the Netherlands for example the line between the voluntary and involuntary dispatch of the elderly has been blurring, as was pointed out, for quite some time. Again, there’s the disease problem. Sex by its nature life giving has been turned into a disease spreader and death dealer. About one in six teenagers has a sexually transmitted disease. Prior to the 1960s practically no one had. Then there is AIDS with over 400,000 dead here so far and about 18,000 new cases each year. The numbers bear repeating. Picture a Viet Nam type memorial over five times longer. In the U.S. homosexual intercourse and drug activity account for 85% of AIDS cases. According to Brian Scully of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University,” It is likely that a sexually active HIV infected person who uses condoms will infect partners at some point whether after, 5, 10 or 100 acts of intercourse.” The HIV virus is 1/450 the size of the human sperm. But nobody lobbies for virginity, abstinence or a lifetime of sex with one mutually faithful, uninfected partner except the Church. Too boring! But condoms just don’t hack it and we should stop kidding ourselves. We’re not laughing all the way to the bank anymore. All these escapes from boredom cost society dearly. Behind a lot of the debauch is a culture saturated with porn almost to the point of inescapability. It is no great feather in our national cap that Japan has recently overtaken the U.S. as the world’s number one porn producer dropping us to number two. Nor is it consoling that Africa has the AIDS epidemic worse than we do. Heterosexual promiscuity is the deadly engine over there with homosexual activity comparatively rare. There, many millions have died with the awful specter of millions of orphans living in poverty. While the churches rush in to help, foreign governments and the UN often rush in with truck loads of condoms sometimes in lieu of more essential supplies, food, water and medicine in the erroneous belief that condoms can stem the tide though there is little evidence that it can or has after years of trying. Abstinence and fidelity programs have been more effective where implemented and allowed to work. In Africa the epidemic is spread by the usual suspect, promiscuity or as the Africans phrase it, “grazing,” mostly, as mentioned, of a heterosexual kind. The push there to reduce grazing for health sake has been effective. In the U.S. on the other hand, the promiscuity spreading the disease is mostly homosexual, a lifestyle excessively prone to rampant promiscuity or grazing. To reemphasize, as of now over 400,000 have died here with about 18,000 new deaths annually according to the AIDS Related Community Services of Dutchess County. To try to contain this calamity and help the suffering victims, the generous heart of the country has poured forth billions of dollars of taxpayer funds without so much as asking, not to mention demanding, some consideration be given to lifestyle change. Our courageous media, so effective in the crusade to curtail smoking, drop the hot sword of change on this one and utters nary a peep for sexual restraint. That unpopular but vital task goes to the Church though some non-Catholic churches have given up or even joined the promiscuity parade. As novelist Walker Percy wrote upon becoming a Catholic, “Take away Rome, and what we’re left with is Berkeley.” Taking into account an already below replacement birthrate, the psychological and the disease spreading problems, the encouraging of homosexuality under the cry of equality is deadly dangerous as the numerous studies show. Also, it has already been shown that studies reveal the environmental-social-family combination as an important factor in sexual proclivities more so in the absence of any discoverable “gay” gene. Nevertheless, deep-seated tendencies appear at very young ages in some children to which no one theory is entirely satisfactory. Research shows that the sexes form bonds from infancy with those nearest them. Frequent contact increases attraction, which is a reason why arranged marriages often worked in ages past and sometimes prisoners fall in love with their captors. This is a theme in the popular film, “The Searchers.” It is also a factor in so called office romances. There is a subtle bonding factor at work and for that reason homosexual adoption should be carefully looked at but of course the media neglects to do that. Instead it hopped quickly on that questionable cause too, again as usual, under the banner of non-discrimination and equality. Doctor Judith Stacey, a sociologist at the University of Southern California and sympathetic to the gay marriage cause admitted on ABC’s “Primetime Thursday” that research shows children raised by homosexual couples were more likely to have “either considered or had one same sex experience” than children raised by heterosexuals. . In another study by Fiona Tasker and Susan Golombok printed in the “American Journal of Orthopsychiatry “ found that 24% of children raised by lesbian mothers had “been involved in a same gender sexual relationship.” This is about eight times the rate of the general population. Exposing children to all the attending problems obvious in an environment that fosters homosexual activity must be considered by rational legislators as extremely dangerous to the health of the children. Not only that but the future impact of the effect of environmentally encouraged homosexuality on a faltering population should be taken into account. There is some good news however. While the crudification of the culture steadily advances, it is meeting resistance. Not everyone is happy with the public parading of indecorum. Generation Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) seem to prefer monogamy to divorce it we can go by the declining rate of divorce and many of the better educated even frown on pre-marital sex to a greater degree, 21% up from 15%. Many of them were evidently badly bruised as children by the 1970s divorce and promiscuity boom. Large numbers in the “make love not war” gang apparently turned and made war on their own offspring. After all, legalized abortion came in 1973. And, to give family another body blow, no fault divorce was right there on the scene. California was the first in 1969 to legislate it, the Hollywood lobby machine must have been at work, and it quickly swept the nation. Evidently the “make love not war” crowd in this regard didn’t have real permanent love in mind. With all this heady freedom the little ones were largely forgotten. Again, researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead summed up the situation thusly, “The truth is that divorce involves a radical redistribution of hardship, from adults to children.” Perceptive teachers became adept at predicting divorce in the family. The student’s grades would begin to plummet. Apparently the kids suffered but learned. The number of divorces per thousand married women peaked at 22.6 in 1980 to 16.4 in 2009. The average couple marrying for the first time now has a lifetime probability of divorce closer to 40% than the old 50%, still too high but an improvement. Studies show the likelihood of divorce declines the higher the education level and the practice of religion. What happiness promoters and tax relievers that fabulous combination is! For one illustrative story of how “non compos mentis” many in America are today here’s a little slice of the zeitgeist and a recipe for improvement: “There are too many problems to list. There are so many, I don’t want to gravitate to just one.” So said Mick Cornett, the Mayor of Oklahoma City, probably with the above discussed facts and information partly in mind, when he refused to allow the “Lingerie Football League” to use a public field in the city. The LFL is comprised of ten women’s teams playing in very skimpy underwear. The lineup of bimbos in America and the bozos willing to make a buck on them seems unending. Typical of the media mentality that loves nothing more than to go on in depth about freedom and choice was chief bozo and league president Mitchell Mortaza who complained that the Mayor was taking away the freedom of individuals to choose what sporting events to attend! Who said there is no underestimating the taste of the American public or some of its loudest spokesmen? Should we add common sense too? If promiscuity is the chief culprit in the spread of a dangerous disease we may not legally be able to shut down the bathhouses or get the porn out the computers but do we want to encourage it with semi-nude Victoria Secret type bimbos pushing football tickets and footballs in their underwear on public lots in the middle of our cities? One wonders if people would get the point if the game were played on the High School field during lunch recess. Lock up the coeds when school gets out! Ah! The courage to draw lines! If the media lacks it, surprisingly some politicians do not. The Mayor put himself on the line and should be admired for that. If the people of Oklahoma City don’t like what he did they can get a new Mayor on Election Day. Such is democracy. In the meantime, in a democracy we must live with what we elect except when the body politic is stressed by non-elected judges overruling the electorate. The next election out there should be interesting. We can only hope that sense and taste isn’t all that dead and that the continued trashification of America can be slowed. The Mayor wouldn’t be facing the possibility of election defeat if Christianity ‘s influence was as strong as it once was though the mayor demonstrates it still has clout. In the parts of the world where Christianity’s touch has been light or almost non-existent other problems have affected marriage. As was mentioned, only Christianity refused to kow tow to male propensities such as concubinage, polygamy, bigamy and easy male divorce. It demanded and taught faithful monogamy in marriage for both the male and female as well as chastity before marriage as the epitome of love. From it derived a once thriving social order in which kids were welcomed and nurtured by the two people who love them most. Never had the playing field of the sexes been so leveled nor the problems flowing from the low status of the female in so many places been better alleviated. Not only does polygamy rate the women lower than the man it skewers the population leaving many men without a spouse. If one man gets many some men get none and women as usual fall far shy of equal standing. Nasty nature provides only an approximately fifty/fifty split, male and female as was mentioned. The implication is an essential equality between the sexes. Nothing fits that scheme better than monogamy. On the other hand, polygamy and homosexuality disturb it. They damage the balance the further they are spread other damage follows. Brown University’s Rose McDermott writing in the Wall Street Journal explained it this way. “Women in communities…where one male has more than one wife –get married younger, have more children, higher rates of HIV…sustain more domestic violence, succumb to more female genital mutilation and sex trafficking, and are more likely to die in childbirth. Their life expectancy is shorter than their monogamous sisters.” She describes the cultures this way. “Where a few men possess all the women roughly half of the boys must leave the community before adulthood. Such societies also spend more money on weapons and display fewer social and political freedoms than do monogamous ones. When small numbers of men control large numbers of women, the remaining men are likely to be willing to take greater risks and engage in more violence…in order to increase their own wealth and status in hopes of gaining access to women.” An aspect of the latter was part of the fuel motivating the dramatic military expansion of Islam for centuries. We have been spared much of what McDermott describes by Christianity’s high regard for women as fully equal to men in dignity and as children of the loving Father Likewise, large numbers of homosexuals of necessity leave many loving women without prospective husbands the way polygamy leaves many men in an analogous position and the problems spread with their increased acceptance. Again, polygamy essentially means some men have multiple wives and others no wives. This can lead to aggressive behavior and sometimes social destabilization. We saw that history indicates that this did indeed happen. It is reasonable to think the hunt to fill harems was an important factor in the history of the aggressive expansion of Islam early on. A feature of Islam’s rapid military expansion was, to put it crudely, the babe hunting aspect. Mohammed had nine wives. Adding to the imbalance created by polygamy are nations like India. It is losing 600,000 girls a year by sex selection abortion and even infanticide. This too we had been spared thanks to Christianity until the fairly recent resurgence of a pagan like morality under the advance of modern secularism. They were non-problems in the Christian West till then. Abortion and female infanticide were common in the Roman Empire before the rise of Christianity to the point that the avoidance of having children led to a birth dearth, a problem that eventually contributed to the decline of the Roman state. The Emperor Augustus like the heads of state in the growing number of nations experiencing similar problems today offered tax incentives and such usually with less than hoped for results. Horace, that most admired Roman poet wrote a song for the great Roman festival of 17 BC praying, “O gods! To our youth swift to learn grant ways of righteousness…and increase of sons…” It didn’t happen. The earliest Christians worked to change the world, lift it up, in part by not killing baby girls as the pagans did, because they saw the world differently than the pagans. In the world that the Christians were trying to build everyone, male, female, rich, poor was equally a child of God with all the dignity that went with it. Where the influence of Christianity wanes the problems under discussion return and where it has not reached, still exist. India now has only 914 girls six and under for every 1,000 boys. Soon there will be ten million missing women, missing wives. Marriage is damaged and to find mates, eschewing violence and the use of prostitutes, many will be forced to emigrate to other parts of the world where more women are available and marriage possible. Also giving marriage a black eye is the practice of child marriage in parts of the world. One of Mohammed’s wives was nine when he consummated the marriage and as a result the practice is sometimes excused or ignored. Rampant promiscuity, cohabitation, divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, the push for same sex marriage and the flirting with polygamy especially as the West repudiates its Christian roots and, in the East, polygamy, female infanticide and abortion, child marriages, indicate clearly that in both the East and West faithful monogamous marriage is under siege and with it the equality and dignity of every individual not to mention the very inviolability and dignity of every human life. Only Christianity stands at the gate and in many instances that means Catholicism. XXXIII THE COMFORTABLE CONSENTRATION CAMP “It is embarrassing to live in the most materially comfortable time in history and not be happy.” So wrote Federal Judge and author John Noonan on observing post 1960s America. Loneliness and boredom made excessive by the decline of marriage and family are little alleviated by the tedious titillation offered as a substitute by a media weighed down by a steep decline in originality and artistic talent beyond the presentation of sexual promiscuity and computerized violence. For many the decline of the family and the rise in its place of an excruciatingly repetitious, banal, and violent entertainment media in desperate need of quality and variety but largely lacking in the talent to produce either, were major contributors to the unhappy situation. To make matters worse this ubiquitous media conglomerate, because of the growing lack of innovative talent increasingly fell back on lurid sex as a substitute in order to draw and hold an audience that was then set up as pigeons for horrid minutes of vacuous advertising. Increasingly, there was little produced that was uplifting above the noisy often sweaty rock concert level and nothing remotely approaching the challenges, fulfillment and happiness that comes from living in a family that has not been broken or dissolved. But the years following the 60s, far from building up family life, helped put it on the skids. For one thing, easy no fault divorce was a brainchild of the times. One effect was to transfer happiness from the children to at least one of the parents. Robbed of an intact family with sustaining, value imparting love and beliefs as so many were, exterior influences especially from mass media were quick to rush in as a substitute, often a damaging one. The hands on lessons families impart because of their importance for life together such as working and sacrificing for others that are productive of real satisfaction and happiness were gone. Other values dished out in much TV fare were often damaging instead of enhancing. Indeed, the value of serving others even at personal sacrifice, a value confirmed throughout history as conducive to real happiness and demanded by Western religious tradition, is not part of the picture for large numbers of people because it is not part of the picture on the tube. There the remedy to hardship is more often quick divorce, the “moving on” often sung about, rather than sacrifice. The damaging change that overtook America had multiple causes not all of them easy to trace but one at least was, a severely decayed and corrupting media. Betty Friedan was one unhappy and seriously bored lady back in the 50s and in 1963 she kicked off the serious siege of marriage in America with her book, “The Feminine Mystique.” She herself was well off, well educated, a married at home mother with children but discontented with the weariness of an affluent domestic routine that left her unfulfilled. Her home was her “comfortable concentration camp.” That she of Jewish descent could put the two words together is indicative of a seriously weak grasp of reality. She had come from a dysfunctional family background and became involved in Marxist politics before marriage. Instead of examining herself and her background to get at the malaise she was experiencing, in true Marxist fashion she blamed society. She went outside herself and targeted the American culture at the time. That’s where the problem was. And again in typical Marxist fashion she saw it as one of class struggle though not entirely economic. The scenario was a female underclass against a patriarchal society. In reality her thesis was a long stretch for the suppression of women in America comparable to the oppression of African Americans before the Civil War or the removal of the Native American to reservations and even the discrimination some immigrant groups experienced, did not exist. However rather than challenging her personal problems in order to develop the skills with which to overcome them, she, like a good Marxist, put her focus outward and aimed to revolutionize the society. It would be a revolution that would get women out of the concentration camp and into careers just like men. This would achieve the missing fulfillment and self-actualization. But there was a problem. At the time most women did not share her feeling of unfulfillment and discontent. They were busy finding plenty of work and fulfillment in raising families often with three or more children and in some cases working outside the home to bring in extra or needed cash. Divorce was relatively rare and families far more intact than now. Still, the book succeeded in influencing a class of women similar to Freidan in culture and background who took up the cause and with the help of a media always thirsty for novelty succeeded in spreading the discontent. They did it better than they ever knew. Today, as many studies show, discontent is at levels undreamed of in the 1950s and ironically many of Freidan’s remedies contributed to the disasterous change especially the denigration of traditional marriage as being one one of the creators of the concentration camp. Their solution, no fault divorce, has hurt many more women and children than men. It was a solution made in heaven for the male and in hell for the female and made things worse. Solutions and revolutions often do that because ramifications are not well thought out and the value of what exists and is being attacked not well understood. All the targets of their discontent however were not unworthy. There existed a disparity of pay between men and women for the same tasks that was left over from the days of immigration and labor strife. The solution, equal pay for equal work was a good and obvious one but the revolution wanted more. Freidan and company saw a traditional old boy network blocking careers for women as in some cases it certainly did but not content to fix what was broken they deduced that women were also hindered by the traditional roles of women involving marriage and children. So, along with easy divorce abortion became part of the cause. Instead of the old view of children as a blessing, they now became an anchor and obstacle to the advancement of the new women on the go. Though the revolution succeeded in doing some good, in the process great damage was done to family life by divorce and abortion on demand that was followed by a severe decline in personal sexual ethics. And still the original objective eluded them, female fulfillment. The fact is today so many more women report themselves as being unfilled and discontented that it might be said that the revolutions greatest and most tragic success was making discontent and unhappiness more universal than it had ever been before. The revolution, as many of them tend to do, backfired. In an article, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” appearing in the “American Economic Journal,” researchers reported that while the lives of women have improved by many objective measures, “yet we show that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.” It seems that as women have gained the objectives set up by Freidan and the feminist revolution they have become less happy. What is the problem? Why was more ground in essentials lost than gained? One possible answer involved the mindset of Freidan and her supporters. Because of it the revolt was poorly aimed. It neglected the natural strengths of women assuming fulfillment for most would be found outside the home. It was a wrong assumption. It ended up destroying too much of the good, replacing it with the less good or worse. For most married women in 1950s America work outside the home was optional. However, in short order with the revolution it became a necessity for most. Unfortunately, the revolution played into a 1960s and 70s economy plagued by a growing inflation stimulated by a government that had taken on too much, a war overseas and a war against poverty at home. War is inflationary and two wars at the same time doubly so. In addition, during the 1970s U.S. manufacturing ran afoul of foreign competition abetted by poor management at home. Unions demanded and management gave extravagant wage packages, in a sense severely crippling the golden goose’s ability to compete with foreign goods. We were also importing more oil and OPEC held the spigot. With double digit inflation and wages not keeping pace families now needed two incomes so the women, some happily many unhappily, marched into the marketplace never again to attain the freedom of economic choice they had enjoyed in the 50s. Now they had to work. As the years went by for many of them the “concentration” camp began to look awfully good but tragically less attainable. The birth control pill gave the green light to promiscuity for many and marriage became less necessary for sexual satisfaction. Then came the flood of electronic porn. All this led to a crusade for legalized abortion, evidently pill and condom were not enough, and widespread single parenthood with the tremendous growth of women and children living in poverty. An unheard of 22% of American children were living in poverty by 2010. Another unheard of 25% of the newly conceived were destroyed by abortion. Well over a million a year since 1973. The new morality means death or poverty for many. \Most families prior to the 60s didn’t need two incomes to make ends meet and there were far fewer single parent families flirting with poverty. For many poverty went hand and glove with promiscuity. Yet incessant TV advertising jacked up not needs but wants while an inflationary economy turned work into a necessity for great numbers of married women. As mentioned, the comfortable concentration camp began to look pretty good. It was often viewed with longing eyes through the rear view mirror as women along with men piled out to work in the morning. For other women the feminist message of sexual liberation turned the job into an end in itself, a path to independence while the rise in sex outside of marriage and the decline of marriage itself played its part in forcing the vast number of unmarried women into the job market to support themselves. These developments did serious damage to family life. It became common for many mothers to farm out the care and nurturing of children to strangers who were usually in it for money. Daycare became a necessary industry. The economy was now one far less family friendly for the standard of living had slipped to the point that most families needed two incomes to make it or, and this was a factor, believed they did. A combination of economic necessity generated by inflation plus the new desires and demands for attractive but unnecessary things generated by a TV in every home, acting as a conduit for constant advertising, combined to make more work rather than less necessary. The dream and promise that machines and computers would free up more leisure time was gone and feminism even made career work for women a good to be strived for. All contributed to driving women out of the home and into the arms of the economy, not known for its warmth and caring. As the years advanced, widespread loneliness, discontent and unhappiness registered in all the polls and studies. Ironically, instead of an increase of freedom and options for women the revolution produced a decrease by removing the greatest option of all for many, a home and family. And to boot, the new feminism was a blatant betrayal of the old feminism in that it made abortion a do or die component of the movement. The founders of the original feminist movement saw abortion as a great male convenience to the detriment of women and that’s precisely what it turned out to be. It also betrayed today’s women by disparaging the real power that women had always possessed. With legalized abortion, often now the male walked away if the female refused to abort. “Her decision, her child.” Women’s liberation was a great success in liberating the male. Before the rise of modern feminism of the Freidan type, women usually held the upper hand in most families. They made most of the household decisions, freely spending the husband’s paycheck to run the home and had the laws of fifty stated behind them. Each state required a man to provide financial support for his wife and children. As Durant, Barzun and so many others have pointed out women turned marriage into an education for men, a school for learning the most important thing of all, the meaning of love. Provided by nature and nature’s God, women had something men wanted and needed and everyone especially women knew it. Only a fool would forfeit it and few women then were fools. One of the great changes the new feminism brought about was to produce a bumper crop of vulnerable females for easy male pickings under the guise of sexual equality defined as equal opportunity promiscuity. In essence feminism encouraged women to imitate the worst of men but most couldn’t do it well and were damaged in the attempt because women really are different, in many ways more perceptive, more feeling and more vulnerable to hurt. Ignore these mores and elements in the female psyche as Freidan did and welcome disaster. And sure enough, it soon arrived in the form of millions of divorces usually hurting the women and children, millions of abortions and millions of single parents, needless to say of what sex. Pre-feminist women equated sex with love and it had to be seriously pledged because the man knew he couldn’t have what he wanted and needed, sex and eventually family, without the women’s consent. There were other benefits. Boys quickly became men instead, as often happens today, remaining boys through their 20s and 30s while being “cool,” “partying,” often indulging in casual sex, or watching porn, playing video games…and frequently still living with mom and dad. Men became better human beings and society was better for it. George Gilder author of “Men and Marriage,” put it this way: The crucial process of civilization is the subordination: of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality. In creating civilization females transform lust into love; channel wanderlust into jobs, homes and families; link men to specific children; rear children into citizens. The prime fact of life is the sexual superiority of women. According to the happiness gage it even produced more real happiness across he board than the footloose and free, career driven life. Of course, Gilder was named “Male Chauvinist Pig” of the year by NOW, the National Organization of Women. Betty Friedan in fact was a founder of NOW. Its most vociferous cause at present is the defense of abortion on demand for any reason at taxpayer expense. It fought tooth and nail to keep even partial birth abortion legal. It’s glorification of careers over marriage, work over family and motherhood has won over TV land and is reflected in many of the popular series and movies that, whether reflective of realities or not, often love to portray unmarried frequently sexually active women as happily empowered, often staffing and running police departments, detective and investigative units, law firms and so forth while relegating motherhood, the very life’s blood of the future to an unimportant accessory of life rather than a full-fledged, worthwhile and vital calling. Nick and Nora Charles where are you now? As Terrell wrote in his essay “Camouflage-The Feminist Mistake,” “NOW…is clueless about the soul of womanhood, especially when it comes to motherhood.” It sloughs off motherhood and the grit and glory of the mother while elevating careers to the end all of female life. It is perhaps the worse case of shortchanging is recent history. This then is what NOW and the radical feminist movement birthed by Freidan’s book has reduced women to. Women in the past had legitimate grievances. To take one example, they got paid less for the same work. This problem has been much though not completely alleviated thanks to feminism. But, throughout our history there were other problems that needed addressing and this was done without great collateral damage. They were successfully handled without damaging society the way feminism has. At one time children often faced child labor in factory and mine in place of school, men at hard labor worked twelve-hour days or more six days a week, farmers were at the mercy of railroads. The problems of the past should not be forgotten and the solutions looked at and studied. Doing that reveals the weakness of the radical feminist approach. The downgrading of motherhood and promotion of the promiscuous life under the guise of freedom and equality as NOW is still prone to do has been especially damaging. Part of this collection of “pearls” has tried to illustrate that bitter pill. NOWs main achievement has been to replace problems with greater ones. Today women grieve about balancing work and home, about exhaustion, about loneliness. All the new career opportunities available to women in education and career work can be a very good thing. Women are indeed multi- talented, no surprise there, but for the good of society and evidently the happiness of women themselves, marriage, motherhood, home and family must not be removed from their ancient and central position as is done by organizations like NOW and its faithful lackey, the media, and they must never be denigrated. If the women of the past had legitimate grievances as they did although they were not entirely what Freidan imagined, the revolution did not come through for the majority of them. They evidently still have grievances and the falling happiness gage clearly indicates it. All the career chasing doesn’t seem to be doing it for many women. Though more may be running police forces, banks, schools and law firms we see fewer and fewer running homes and families. These tasks brought great worry and great happiness to the masses of women in the past and were much more essential to the healthy future of the race than catching bad guys. Today’s woman is often split between work and family and much more often is on her own in caring for family and children than ever before thanks to the sexual revolution that Freidan and her feminist followers helped bring about. The revolution was early in championing the new birth control pill, legalized abortion and unfettered sexual expression. All were to produce a new plateau of feminine liberation and contentment. They were even supposed to lead to an actual decrease in abortion and illegitimacy. Both have since skyrocketed. Who are the net losers? Not men. Women have suffered the most by far and Black women more than most. Seventy percent of African-American births are out of wedlock and half of all young Black women have Herpes along with record numbers of whites. Poverty among women and children is more widespread than ever.before. Joining the women as losers are the children. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, 43% of Black children, 35% of Latino children are living in poverty, This is part of the price of promiscuity and especially male irresponsibility. Indeed while children make up 24% of the country’s population, they compose 35% of those living in poverty. Promiscuity, divorce and family breakdown are surefire poverty spreaders. However, whoever it hurt, the revolution did liberate homosexuals. It was another unforeseen consequence. The sad fact is, before liberation homosexuals were a relatively healthy segment of the community but now an unprecedented number, also beneficiaries of the new sexual liberation, were sick or dead. And the plague continues, killing rather than liberating its practitioners. Unbelievably, a new wave of promiscuity among Homosexuals has lead to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases since 2009. A June 2011 report by the NYC Department of Health stated, “We are going backwards on preventing sexually transmitted diseases among gays.” Homosexuals account for 60% of all newly diagnosed HIV infections, this after distributing 40 million free condoms annually in the city at taxpayer expense. The icing on the crumbling cake of the sexual revolution is that everyone still has grievances only they are more grievous than Freidan’s genteel feeling of discontent and boredom in her comfortable concentration. The revolution she helped initiate with her book in 1963 was very successful in empowering women to be like men, work like them, get paid like them, be sexually irresponsible like the worst of them with a tidal wave of discontent, loneliness and unhappiness resulting because in reality they are not like them in essential ways…thankfully.. All this has led a well- documented surge of depression among young women. Never have so many anti-depressants been sold in America since liberation. The reasons are not hard to find. For many, having no option but to work along with the shrinking prospect for marriage and if with children often raising them alone without the support of that family structure so disparaged and underestimated by the propagators of the revolution, is no panacea. However the depression is even more acute with those who bought into the “hook up” culture encouraged by the revolution. This the revolution hyped as true sexual freedom. If the bottom feeding species of male had been promiscuous before, now it was the women’s turn. But the revolution overlooked the most basic fact of all, that the sexes are different.. The swinging predators among the males, the ones liberation held up for emulation, do not seem depressed much at all by this happy turn of events. They march to the “Playboy Philosophy,” not those old obsolete Commandments of faded memory. Their nightly prayer of thanks is to Freidan and company for providing them so well. The interesting question is, could all this have been predicted and avoided? Were the miserable consequences foreseeable? There were those who could see and cared but the tribe of Freidans had nothing but derision for them. They were largely ignored. For one, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” was very clear and forward looking regarding the damage to marriage, family life, and their great benefits to individuals and society that a new promiscuous contracepted morality would bring, even seeing the coming onslaught of divorce and abortion. Many Catholics joined the howl of protest against the encyclical’s continuation of the Church’s ban on artificial, mechanical and chemical methods of birth prevention when the Pope declared that the conjugal act must remain open to at least the possibility of transferring new life. Completely shutting out that possibility would do extreme damage to marriage leading to its decline. That decline, with all the attending problems that have been discussed here, arrived on the scene rather quickly and is still with us. Governments now run to contain the damage while budgets and taxes swell with negligible results. Abortion, abuse, child poverty, educational failure has never been more widespread in America. Nothing, really nothing, takes the place of functioning families for a healthy society. Freidan and company would have better foreseen the consequences of what they called for if they had a better handle on male/female psychology and had paid more attention to history and the consequences good and bad of moral revolutions in the past. If they had had a conception of the great benefits to the West of the Christian moral revolution and compared it to the situation of women in the rest of the world they may have had enough sense to hesitate but to a great extent in this regard ignorance blinded them. They were absorbed with their own piques and nothing else seemed to matter. The drive for liberation, come what may, was more their attitude and it blinded them to many consequences that the clear seeing feared. It is the women who are buying the anti-depressants in record amounts today not the men. As William A. Donohue wrote in the July 2011 “Catalyst,” the sexual revolution savaged our society, coarsened our culture, and left many for dead,” and many more desiring an anti--revolution. Therein lies the crux of the problem. Needed reform is going to be difficult without widespread media support similar to its crusade against smoking. We look vainly for it. And sadly the sexual revolution has even savaged the Church, the old hospital ship, with 3% of its clergy accused of sexual misconduct. The force of its protesting voice has been weakened but nevertheless it still can be heard. It is sorely needed now.. XXXIV IMAGINE: ROLE OF RELIGION VS SECULARISM Like Mayor Cornett, religion too is a pretty good line drawer but not quite the kind Madonna had in mind. This is why the Madonna types who detest the Mayor’s action (see previous “pearl” XXXII) also despise the Church even to the point of resisting the needed changes it calls for. One wonders, for example, whether the Mayor of New York would have done what the Mayor of Oklahoma City did if the lingerie football game were scheduled for Rockefeller Center during Christmas week. There is reason to doubt. Last month loud political and celebrity voices in N.Y. City, the very voices first and loudest to defend freedom of speech and expression for things like semi nude football or when it came to art, Robert Maplethorp’s opus of Christ’s crucifix submerged in urine and a dung covered Blessed Mother by another “artist” displayed at the Brooklyn Museum a few years ago declaring them well worth displaying, spoke out in hypocritical horror at a pro-life billboard in SoHo of a Black infant with the caption in bold print: “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb.” Even though well over half of newly conceived Black children in N.Y. City numbering in the thousands are destroyed before birth, they called for its immediate censorship and removal. From Mayor Bloomberg, so sensitive to the value of health and life that he shuts down city eateries for using below grade cooking oils with their French fries due to the health dangers, came not a peep of protest for either life or free expression! But Archbishop Timothy Dolan was heard publicly decrying the hypocrisy, the selective outrage and selective tolerance. Needless to say, no support from Madonna came forth. It seems the really “in” dogma of tolerance, the one preached day and night on TV from Oprah and “the View “ group to Jay Leno and other late nighters will not tolerate the Church’s protest and its teaching about life or recognize that one of life’s great enemies, abortion, is destroying communities and dehumanizing our society. There is little room for radicalism like that on the airwaves or on the Billboards of NYC. In an almost neo-Fascist New York, the former bastion of true liberalism, free speech applies only to the one side approved by the government, the pro-abortion group not the pro-life contingent. This is a double standard with a vengeance. Shortly afterwards the tolerant heart of the City opened again allowing anti-Wall Street protestors to camp out in a downtown park for weeks on end but still no pro-life billboards allowed. Granted, NYC under Bloomberg has become even more imbalanced regarding rights than before. The Mayor banned public prayer at the dedication of the 9/11memorial at ground zero though the victims’ families objected and refused to allow manger scenes in schools at Christmas time though Menorahs are approved. On top of that the schools may dispense condoms for the asking but abstinence education and parental notification regarding abortions are resisted. Many of those protesting against the right of free speech for pro-lifers often detest the moral restraint in sexual matters preached by the Church but their own restraints on the Church’s right to free speech are quite acceptable. And this same group often delights in pointing to the hypocrisy of churchgoers! As was said, needed change is going to be difficult. Even without the fact that so many in politics and popular media often crusade against the restraining rules and responsibilities urged by traditional Judeo-Christian moral standards, a high moral standard is difficult to maintain even in the best of circumstances. Without strong religious underpinnings it is nearly impossible. Most philosophers, Nietzsche included, would say absolutely impossible. Hugo Rifkind a London Times journalist observed that “People with faith have a stronger moral code than people without. …It’s harder for non-believers to explain what good means. We have to talk about respect and humanity, but both go back to ethics and without God ethics goes back to …what? The best answer he came up with was “convenience.” Gad, better not become inconvenient! There has never been a moral regime without religion but some types of religion would be of little help in this regard. For example, the decline in public and personal morals following the disruptions of the 1960s and 70s were not stemmed by the concomitant rise of “New Age” religious beliefs. Non-dogmatic and defuse, these beliefs had little in their quiver for the fight. Non-demanding deities such as Mother Earth, Goddess Gaia, Universal Energy, the Life Force with all their “sacred spaces” and such, and with a central commandment little more than not to harm the trees and animals, fine as that is, are hardly strong enough to stand up to the forces attacking human life and in fact just do not serve much beyond the wishes of the holder. By contrast, the God of Christian revelation is no mere intangible life force, sacred energy, soul of the universe, sacred spirit, pie in the sky and such but a very earthy and in your face presence. The Incarnation made it so. God not only created but entered his creation by becoming a human being, treading the Earth with us and even suffering and dying as we do and all to bring about the flowering of love among those uniquely free creatures of his, us. The goal? To make possible the grace, not of oblivion or re-absorption, but of abundant life. The promises of Christ are astounding, “Ear has not heard nor eye seen what the Father has prepared for those who love Him.” And it must be added, by loving thy neighbor too including the not so lovable, helping them when needed and forgiving them when asked. While it is important to love “mother nature” and protect it and going green is great, it is by no means ennobling of man to worship any aspect of nature, a fellow creature and a non-thinking lesser one at that. That is what happens when God is equated with nature as happens in pantheistic ideologies. Such systems often vacillate between man the divine spark and man the speck of dust and they often endorse such religious crudities as reliance on dreams, crystals, charms, chants, tarots, palms and other rank superstitions. Nevertheless, all in nature are rightly deemed our fellow creatures though on a much lesser unthinking plane for the fact is we know and they along with nature as a whole know nothing. It makes all the difference. Nature follows laws of which it is totally ignorant. We follow or abuse laws of which we are aware. The gods of nature and of the East are, in the final analysis, as unknowing as nature itself. Far better the God who knows, who IS and who commands that we love one another and do good. Indeed, for those who stand before this, the God of revelation, and are in awe of mind and power, love and grace, the idea that fellow thinking beings would worship the mindless powers, forces and energies that are part and parcel of the material universe, is astounding. Gods that are as unknowing as mother Earth, goddess Gaia, the universe itself and all the rest, as said, follow rules and laws of which they know nothing and lack the freedom to violate. It is demeaning that free creatures with intellect and mind should worship the clueless and mindless or as in the case of astrology’s devotees, allow themselves to be influenced by mindless celestial objects. It is an example of the blind leading not the blind so much as the intellectually gullible. Think about it; science is very limited. It tells us all about the laws of nature but never answers the questions, from whence these laws come and more astoundingly, why should nature obey laws at all? That is because its tools are limited to questions of how but the mind is impelled to go beyond that to questions of why. We can’t help it. That is why metaphysics came to be and in a sense acted as a vestibule for the profound truths of revealed religion. If by the measurements of science a man and a woman are no more than a buck worth of elements we know we are much more and revelation confirms it. Otherwise, would a buck bag of elements that accidentally happens to think but is nevertheless destined for oblivion have inalienable rights? Why? From where do they come? Those of the Judeo-Christian heritage answer the Creator, those outside it or who reject it answer convenience or some variable of it. But we in the Christian West had the advantage of the Judeo-Christian God of Revelation. It is only from such religion that the social changes discussed and sorely needed, can originate. That is why historically the West, Europe and America, made up of societies based on Judeo-Christian revelation has led all the rest in the ways of beneficial change and needed reform and even when parts go off the track as Germany under Nazism and Russia under Communism, the rest battle to correct the evil. As English essayist Alexander Smith wrote “If the sores that fester in the heart of society weigh heaviest on the (Western) mind we have to thank the Judeo-Christian tradition for it…The Sermon on the Mount makes the morality of nations ghastly.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger put it this way. “It is to the Western standard that groups in other societies appeal to redress injustice.” This may be changing now as America forges ahead in less noble areas such as porn production and record levels of promiscuity, single parenthood, divorce, child poverty, abortion and debauch. As was said, the change and reform we need will not come easily now that religion is being marginalized and its voice gagged. This puts success in doubt. More doubt than in the past when the voice was stronger and people of strong religious beliefs like Wilberforce in England and William Lloyd Garrison in America led the abolition movement and later when Rev. Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights movement. Imagining no religion, denigrating religion or banning its public expression as Bloomberg did makes needed reform more problematic, There have been great do-gooders in human history, to happily use a term much despised in the very circles combating reform. Though often a putdown term for religious people right up there with hypocrites, they were men and women of great moral strength, determination and goodwill especially toward the weak and disadvantaged. But many of them would escape much notice today, pushed off the tube and screen that is often the only source of information for many, by singers, dancers and performers over whom many go GaGa. To bring about change it helps greatly to believe we human beings are really special. But the idea that humans are indeed on a different level from the rest of creation with a dignity deriving from their being made in the Creator’s image, an image involving freedom and intellect has been severely weakened. It’s hard to see how it could be otherwise in a world tolerating massive destruction of new human life. Abortion equates the new human being not to a child of God with all the dignity and rights that implies but to disposable trash. Mother Theresa even saw a connection between abortion and war. Mass destruction of life in the womb makes mass destruction of life on the battlefield less unthinkable, abhorrent and reprehensible she thought. It weakens the great inalienable right to life for both represent the destruction of life at different stages. Adding to the cheapening and downgrading of human life are those who claim to be impressed by mankind’s “insignificance.” They are particularly impressed by our smallness of stature. They relish being humbled by things larger than we are. These are the folks so in awe of the sheer size of universe as to lead them inexorably into insufferable self-depreciation. The universe is indeed impressive to say the least but should it reduce us to, as some like to say, mere insignificant specks? Indeed, can we not maintain true humility and appreciation without groveling? Gazing into the depths of the Grand Canyon one admirer said it helped her “realize for the first time my own utter insignificance.“ Really? An “intelligent” being insignificant before a gloriously magnificent big dumb ditch, is telling. The greatness and beauty of nature is admirable indeed but to the inheritors of revelation, humanity can never be insignificant, never dust in the wind not even the pre-born. When that label gets placed on any segment of the human family, slave, Jew, handicapped, the dissenter, the pre-born, the incompetent elderly or cognitively disabled, the death wagons are often not far off. The Christian can admire the great creation without this need for downgrading. It is not boastful to say that though we may be small apparently we are different and the difference makes a big difference. All evidence thus far indicates we alone in the universe have mind. We alone can know and understand the workings of a vast creation that has no ability to do the same. We are of greater value than all that we know of for the simple reason that we alone can know and understand. That’s because, as revelation makes clear, we are made in God’s image. We have mind and a freedom of will undiscovered in anything outside us. We can think, act and love or not as we choose. It’s a choice beyond other creatures and in spite of scientist Stephen Hawking’s comment to reporter Diane Sawyer that human life is “insignificant in the universe,” we are not insignificant by any means, quite the opposite. Some think it remarkable that there are animals that have larger brains than we have and we should be humbled by that fact but what really is remarkable is that we are vastly superior in thought nevertheless because brain is not mind and we have mind. There is much more to cognition and reason than brain. In the human being, it is mind that tells brain what to do: concentrate on that or don’t think about this. And when it comes to love, our mission here if we accept it, it is to love and do no harm. And when we love we never say to another, “my brain loves you.” It is I who loves you because a lot more is involved in thought; will, decision making and love than brain. The brain is the necessary but not sufficient condition of thinking and consciousness. It processes and provides sense experience and it is a bodily function affected by bodily things. Fever, for example, can disturb it much as when Scrooge blamed his visions of Marley on a uncooked piece of beef or undone potato. But conceptual thought, mental reflection, personal discontent, guilt, along with the freedom to choose good or evil are beyond brain and matter. They are distinct non-bodily operations transcending materiality. Endowed with spirit and the inalienable rights that flow from it, insignificance is not part of our resume but we should not get carried away. As someone wrote, “man is the only creature who hunts his fellow man for sport or hate.” Mind and freedom can be misused drastically but only by us because we alone, as far as we know, have them. What then are men and women but unitary beings of both matter and spirit, material and non-material, body and mind but so intimately together and unified that the one can effect the other as bodily ingested drugs can alter the mind. The Athanasian Creed recognized this intimate unity 1,700 years ago. “For as the rational soul and flesh is one, so God and man is one in Christ.” The brain cannot account for this abstract reflection that raises humans above other seeing and feeling creatures who also have brains. The brain cannot account for the spiritual power that man possesses and uses to direct its operation. That power focuses brain’s attention and questions its accuracy. To know and to love beyond mere sex and instinct, that is man’s resume and it is more than brain can handle or account for. Love removes us from the rest of creation. In the Catholic marriage vow with its “in good times and bad… till death do us part… forsaking all others,” we see an ascent of the body almost beyond body. We see lust governed by the unbreakable promise of marital fidelity. For the words and promises to be honest and true and full of meaning the Church insists on their irrevocability. No room “for as long as our love will last” here. The pledge and commitment is made and the great and honorable task is to make it work through mutual love and dedication, Love makes the formidable project possible This is not the child’s play of the “Playboy” venue. This conscious decision is beyond the demands of mere flesh because we are in reality more than mere flesh. The mind of man is far beyond brain. Though, of course, it cannot not eliminate dependence on brain and body with their unruly urges and ways, it can nevertheless transcend and transform them far beyond the ability of other living things. Such a power flows from spirit, from a mind beyond matter and is well above other creatures whose sex drive governs them in entirety. As physicist Eugene Wigner admitted long ago, the brilliant successes of physics and chemistry cannot overshadow the obvious fact that “thoughts, desires and emotions are not made of matter.” We are endowed with a unique freedom that allows us to look inside things and question, to root out truth, to ascend beyond material imperatives and we have the ability to change. We alone have the capacity to feel guilt and what a difference that makes! What life changes, what awful harm left undone or corrected that a healthy and realistic dose of good old-fashioned guilt can help bring about! This ability to feel guilt is a great spiritual gift. According to Wilfred M. McClay of the University of Tennessee it is surely “one of the essentials of our human makeup…and a spur to many of the noblest acts in human history.” These things are ours alone. Indeed our fellow animals are admirable in their way, strength, beauty and speed for example but lions do not throw up, shaken to the core at not being adequately leonine. That’s guilt and they don’t have it. Neither do Elephants vent their desolation at being so grossly elephantine. And as Leon Kass, Chairman of The President’s Council on Bioethics (a field badly in need of more Kass’) was fond of saying, the Monkey, for all his leaping, produces no ballerinas nor is he disconcerted about it. It doesn’t make him discontented with himself at all. With brain but no mind it’s all beyond them. None of them can self-reflect, be disenchanted with self, change and improve on what they are. They are locked in against basic life change. They are programmed to a degree far beyond us. We are allowed freedoms beyond anything found in the rest of nature. We can transform ourselves, and the world. That is what Christ meant by telling us we must be the salt of the Earth. It is something few Buddhists or Hindus would understand. Someone once wrote, “To imagine transfiguration and acknowledge disfiguration is what makes us human and separates us from animality.” Well, at least it’s one of the many things that do. Add to it change, the ability to turn around in life like the prodigal and also important, the ability to laugh at a good joke and at our selves. Finally, we alone know that we must die. We may be a lot of things but insignificant isn’t one of them, thanks to God. So, what is this unique creature to do? It is the consensus of historians and a conclusion of detailed studies and research by scholars including Jacques Barzun, Will Durant and many others that there has been no moral society in history without a strong religious base. Most moral philosophers admit that even a secular ethic ultimately depends on a set of fundamental religious-like assumptions. Even Nietzsche predicted that the elimination of God and dogmatic religion would lead to the “total eclipse of all traditional morality.” God eliminated and replaced by convenience or a utilitarian version of it and of course the first to feel the brunt is usually the most defenseless among us, the despised racial, ethnic or religious minority, the poor, the pre-born, the handicapped, cognitively disabled and the elderly incapacitated. The road to hell is paved with the kindly intentions of compassionate people who have removed God from the equation. The abortuaries are waiting and the death with dignity cohorts are in the wings always ready to swoop in, often flying the compassion banner when if we look hard enough the convenience flag or bottom line banner would often be the more honest choice. If human life is special from the Creator, we must work with it not destroy it. There is something sadly ironic in an age where pain containment has never been more advanced that the call for assisted suicide has never been louder. To “suffer with” may be the literal meaning of the word compassion but few want to push it that far. Giving aid and support without stint to the decrepit and useless, “life unworthy of life” as the Nazis used to say, is senseless to many “compassionate” people as it would probably be to all people without the example of Christ and his cross. He put value into our suffering. His suffering and death revealed the great love of God for us, and life in abundance. Our suffering and death can draw out love and care from others and the true compassion of Christ that calls forth aid, comfort and support not suicide. In that way both sufferer and comforter are ennobled. The person on his deathbed is no insignificant entity to be disposed of like an unwanted pre-born or is he? Why not if we are all only cosmic accidents, value one dollar? Then Abortion at one end of the life spectrum and euthanasia at the other with dog eat dog survival of the fittest in between is hardly a surprise. On what grounds can it be objected? On what grounds can it be protested? Inalienable rights based on convenience? Or, are we the special creatures of a loving Father who endowed with inalienable and intrinsic value and rights? Who offers us not insignificance but eternal life and who wants the victory of love in return. If compassion means we should suffer with one another, support and care for one another then obviously killing the weakest and most defenseless among us will be repugnant. But that is precisely what will happen if we continue to replace the Creator with a compassion of convenience. And if in moments of weakness a suffering brother or sister should ask for relief in death the thought should be dispelled with a rush to love and serve and with all the scientific pain containment available. Let gentle love and heartfelt caring work its magic. The gift of life is such that no one should take it upon himself to end it. In this way we confirm the dignity and self worth of the person and our own by emphasizing his importance to all who love him and if there is no family to provide love we become that family. Let those who protest capital punishment also rush into the hospitals with loving arms. Let us hold in love those dying as long as possible without abusing nature with extraordinary measures or machines. True love and compassion supplies modern pain dispelling medicine when needed where the death with dignity squad would supply the pill. And if there was loneliness and no one to supply love, step up to the task. None of this requires going to extraordinary lengths with ridiculously expensive means and machines, just the love that puts compassion into action. Just the actions governed by the kind of love Christ lived and taught us. Practicing love requires faith and hope and as faith fades away as it seems to in many today so very frequently does love because authentic love always requires sacrifice. Already there are almost no Down syndrome children being born. About 90% are destroyed, sacrificed on the altar of convenience. The decline of traditional morality and Christ-like love has turned pre-natal screening, what should be a blessing, into a lethal weapon in he hands of many men and women in this era of mini-morality and sacrifice free “love.” They may love heroes on the screen but not in themselves and as a result those ninety percent never see the light of day. And of course, the question is who’s next? It is not only imperfect children who are at risk. Sex selection abortion is growing in popularity. It non-Christian parts of the world it has taken millions of pre-born females as has infanticide. But even in formerly Christian areas the Christian life ethic has weakened as will happen as faith fades, replaced with convenience. In countries such as the Netherlands non-terminal seniors have been given the needle without their knowledge or consent and the trend is little protested. This at a time when, as was mentioned, the science of pain management has never been more effective! Compassionate feelings alone without the "suffer with" component of Christian love are often hollow and frequently self-serving. They are no match when convenience or cash is jeopardized. It is hard to see value in not offing certain of our “useless” or terminal brothers and sisters unless we look with the eyes and love of Christ and the admonition, “thou shall not kill.” Efforts at love and comfort would dissipate many requests for the lethal injection. Only love can do the job and love goes beyond compassionate feelings. It is neither new age religion nor Eastern philosophies but precisely revealed religion that puts that kind of value on each individual life and demands that kind of authentic love along with compassion in the true meaning of that word. Those dedicated to personal convenience, the unending finding of themselves and the avid search for self –realization and fulfillment will always fail in their quest unless the lesson of authentic love is understood and embraced. Here’s the key, it starts with other than self. Serve others and the rest will be given unto you. Above all else, suffer for and with another at personal inconvenience and you are on the way to that elusive self-fulfillment. That’s the ancient Christian message of Christ-like love confirmed by long centuries of experience. It’s almost always been counter-cultural. For most of us it requires a basic change in attitude. To bring about this change from overriding self-concern to empathy and altruistic concern for others especially the weak and “useless” even at personal cost requires the forgetting of self and that requires a religion with more moral depth and demands than can be found in Earth Day antics, winter solstice celebrations, the worship of Gaia, fields of Energy and their “channeling “or the ever popular Life Force. This is because empathy does not develop naturally through some evolutionary process. It needs the jolt of revelation, especially the Gospel. The fact is, the empathetic love revelation calls for is anti-evolutionary in that it protects the unfit and helps in their survival. To flourish, that kind of love must become a cultural thing permeating its media and laws. It must be cultivated and nothing cultivates it better than revealed religion epitomized in Christianity but with the Gospel almost derided in much prime time, the road back is going to be a long one. As we know, the unrevealed religions are not usually strong in this love activity. The Buddha even called upon people to free themselves from concern and troubles by renouncing all worldly attachments, including even our children. That leaves little room for love. It’s hard to be the salt of the Earth if you renounce the world, turn your back on it, even despise it. To the Christian the world is not a horror to be escaped but good, damaged goods yes but well worth loving and making better. This is very different from popular nature spiritualities that often mistakenly worship the creation rather than its Creator. As Chesterton pointed out, the adulation of nature beyond normal appreciation belies lack of due thought for in fact nature has a very dark side, damaged as it is. Eastern and new age spiritualities are not the only detriments to the kind of real love the world requires. Left without the Christian example, there never would have been a Red Crescent or a Red Wheel, if there is one now, were it not for Christ’s call to love and its workings in the West exemplified by Red Cross, Salvation Army and other such organizations to emulate. Nor is the new secularism, a growing force in the West, noted for developing altruism. Statistics make clear a point already alluded to, that secularists and New Age devotees very seldom staff the AIDS hospitals, poverty and communicable disease wards and orphanages around the world. As a matter of fact 25% of AIDS victims worldwide are in Catholic institutions run usually by Nuns with other church supported groups making similar efforts. Again the statistics and studies mentioned earlier show that traditional religious believers give much more to charities and sacrifice more supporting efforts such as these than do secularists and non-believers. As mentioned too, it tells a lot that the farmers of South Dakota give more per capita than the sophisticates of San Francisco. It is true that some of a New Age, Scientology, Space Visitors and Crystals mentality, when in a warm and pleasant mood, find it is nice to imagine that we are all one and part of a great mysterious Energy or Force rolling through the universe into which we will all eventually be blissfully reabsorbed but such thought usually produces little by way of hard sacrificial giving and doing. The example of Christ on his cross evidently has a much different effect. On the other hand, if you want to do something rather shabby, the Life Force or Energy steam being only blind forces with no morals and no mind, they will never interfere with your despicable plans. Certainly not in anyway like those dogmas and commands put out by the troublesome God revealed in the Jewish and Christian scriptures and more vaguely by our consciences. And those secularists who do go out of themselves and get involved are often unknowingly working off the batteries charged over the centuries by those very Christian dogmas they rejected. Dogmas, rules, commandments, strictures are not easy to deal with but following them produces much good while disobedience has often wrecked havoc. Rule breakers, my wayers and line crossers have a tendency to leave much ruin in their wake. In the vast majority of cases it is in breaking rules not following them that havoc is wrought. Though today’s popular media prizes the maverick, the “breaker of all the rules,” and the guy who does things “my way,” few would want to live with or near them for long. As the Romans from whom many of our legal concepts derive well understood, the primary goal of law is to protect people from one another, the weak from the strong, the citizen from tyrannical government. And when, on the usually rare occasion a rule or law must be broken because its legislation violated an inalienable right such as liberty, then the causes and consequences of breaking the law must be carefully and fully considered as the Americans did in the beginning of their Revolution when they debated the Declaration of Independence. These were no “lines are meant to be crossed” lightweights. They did not relish breaking the law that connected them to the mother country but could see, after much thought, study, deliberation and debate, no alternative. Ordinarily law is an invaluable asset because the alternative is often chaos or worse, death. As for those poor benighted slugs who day in and day out follow the rule of law, seldom grabbing all the gusto, breaking all the rules or crossing all the lines and about whom no song of adulation by Sinatra or anybody else will ever likely be sung but should be nor any TV series glorify, one can only imagine the crimes not committed, the lives and families not wrecked, the havoc not sewn because of the often heroic sacrifices made due to the prodding of their religiously sharpened consciences. The Founding Fathers including Washington, Jefferson and Adams fully realized how indispensable religion was for a republic of law. Religion is not just a preventer of harm but a healer too. If rules are transgressed the conscience formed by religion produces that powerful sense of guilt that reduces the odds of future breaches thus sparing untold heartache and hell on Earth. That, and the reparation and repair of the damage that was done to others that just law demands and religiously engendered guilt requires for forgiveness, are benefits of religion seldom given due recognition. Because of honestly held religious beliefs and the moral demands flowing from them, there are innumerable unsung lives through the centuries that have prevented more damage to others and more hell on Earth than we will ever know or imagine. “Imagine no religion,” somebody sang. Imagine unending nightmare. The so called wars of religion of the 17th Century, if that is an accurate designation for wars that seldom simply or exclusively involved religion, pale in comparison to the secular confrontations of the first half of twentieth century with its world wars and holocausts, death camps and Gulags, all brought on by secular often anti-religious ideologies. As the weakening of the influence of Judeo-Christian revelation and morality continued in the second half of the century, it brought on the post 1960s moral debacle that has been examined in some detail on many of the preceding pages. The facts, studies and statistics cited give us a fearsome foretaste of what happens when religion is banished or imagined away. Together, both halves of the century piled up bodies in unprecedented numbers. Wars, death camps, AIDS epidemics and millions of abortions will do that. (The second and third titles in this six volume effort, “Holocaust and War” and “The Sixties Legacy” give much more detail on these matters than can be given here.) Rest assured, as we swiftly move into the new century, that crystals, incense, tinkling bells, oils and holy spaces would not and will not sustain the crosses and sacrifices needed to preserve a semblance of civilization as increasingly the strong turn on the inconvenient, weak and vulnerable, be it in the form of abortion and euthanasia, child abuse, child poverty and even the slow advance of pedophilia as an acceptable form of sexual activity. Already items are appearing in scientific journals, especially in Europe, on the feasibility of justifiable infanticide reminiscent of the articles appearing on justifiable abortion in the years before Roe. It would and will take revealed religion if this building slide into utopia for the powerful is to be halted. Unfortunately though even that is under siege. It is indeed devastating and heart wrenching to see the wreckage created by the moral decline associated with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. The sad statistics tediously but necessarily recited in many of these “pearls” underline the point and tell much. What makes it doubly tragic is that it could have been avoided. It flew in the face of what we know happens historically with the abandonment of self -control and sexual restraint. It often leads to disease and death and ironically in time, depopulation. We should have picked up the lessons of the past but didn’t. Years ago the author of a famous American anthem captured the main lesson succinctly in a song that we all sang but apparently didn’t let its message sink in. If we had, perhaps much suffering and death could have been avoided. From “America the Beautiful,” we have these lines: “Confirm thy soul in self control Thy liberty in law.” “Thy” is us, the people of America. It obviously wasn’t done. Without the practice of self-control prisons get filled, families get wrecked, children get abandoned, education fails and civilization sinks. Without law there is no liberty. XXXV GUILT, EVOLUTION, REASON, THE WRONG ROOTS AND RIGHT ROOTS OF RIGHT IN DEC. OF INDEPENDENCE. Mindless Life Forces, holy spaces and Steams of Energy are indeed nice tame new age gods to be switched on and off when we want but they will never bother us. And, it might be added, never create the healthy dosage of guilt that is one of the great catalysts for needed change. So writes C.S Lewis, concluding that these amorphous energies and forces have “all the thrills of religion with none of the cost.” With them guilt is often replaced with therapies of many popular stripes designed to banish maladies such as guilt. According to many of them guilt damages self-esteem and for those of the Dr. Spock era that is the greatest sin. Thus the catalyst is lost, society suffers and often the joy of achieving needed life change is foregone. In its place comes not joy however but an epidemic of depression. Numerous studies reveal abysmal numbers of people today suffering from it. In England alone anti-depressant medical prescriptions are up 40% in the past four years according to that nation’s Department of Health. It is telling too that Dr. Spock’s own son committed suicide. Sadly, suicide among the relatively young has also grown in our guilt free depression wracked society. What is needed? One massive study of the topic by Dr. Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University points to one possible answer. The study revealed that women who have had abortions are 81% more likely to experience mental health problems including suicidal behavior, depression and substance abuse than those who have never had abortions. Would that reason and education were enough to keep us moral and moving in the right direction but we know it isn’t. Trying to force meaning into a basically meaningless world, if that’s the belief, does not produce relief it produces depression. Step one, the world must be made meaningful for us by something beyond us. Professor James Matthew Wilson of Villanova University alluding to St. Paul’s remarks to the Athenians puts it this way. “One can only raise so many altars to the unknown God before desiring to know his name. One can only greet the universe with awe and gratitude for so long before desiring to bow down in worship before the founder of the feast.” And obviously even reason fortified by revelation doesn’t always succeed in thyat gratitude as the sins of the passengers and crew of the great hospital ship, the “Bark of Peter,” the Catholic Church, amply demonstrates from time to time. Hypocrites! So say some critics but “those who are well have no need for doctors (or hospital ships for that matter) only those who are sick and at risk. As someone once said, “hypocrisy is the tribute the sinner pays to the saint.” “I have come to call sinners,” said Christ the Good Shepherd. Those looking for a perfect way or perfect church will always be disappointed for clearly, as the wag said, if you find one and join it, it won’t be perfect anymore. It is very obvious that all our best tools including knowledge, reason and religion, though of great help, do not necessarily lead to virtue. Damaged goods are we descendants of “Adam and Eve” but though we are down we are by no means out because goodness was initially and fundamentally built into us. Yet we have been so deeply wounded by the loss of grace in the Great Fall that, with all peace to Pelagius, knowing what is good and doing it are two very different things. Two people as different as St. Paul who knew this well and wrote clearly about not doing the good he wanted to do and nihilist Nietzsche saw eye to eye here. So did Darwin who was puzzled by the question of why people are moral at all and even altruistic in the face of an evolution that is supposed to encompass all reality but cannot explain sacrificial love. The love that cares for the world’s weak and damaged ones goes against evolutionary theory and that motor of evolution, the natural selection of the fittest. If evolution with its center piece of natural selection explained all as proponents claim, it would surely sift out all these altruists, our race’s great lovers, the clowns of Christ, those who suffer with the weak, unfit and “useless, the very pride of humanity, but they are still with us. In the dog eat dog world envisioned by survival of the fittest there should be no room for them. The type should be as extinct as the dinosaur, weeded out long ago like the newly conceived Down syndrome child of today. There should be no George Baileys jumping into freezing rivers to save drowning strangers, old and unfit. They should both be gone. Both are evolutionary anomalies. Evolutionary change should leave as survivors not the do gooders certainly but the ruthless and their equally damaging relatives the my-wayers. It is symptomatic of the modern flight from value judgments, commitments involving personal sacrifice and reality itself, as reflected in the spiritual but not religious mentality popular today, that many do not see what Nietzsche plainly did. When God and religion are eliminated, life does not go on as usual and for many, the burdensome, “unfit,” weak, sick, useless, inconvenient, costly and vulnerable, increasingly it doesn’t go on at all, for without some fixed (dogmatic) sense of rightness, how do we distinguish what is evil from its opposite? Evolution doesn’t do it. To get around this problem, the redefining of evil as a mental glitch in the wiring, as some propose, will not do. The really important things, God, inalienable rights, equality, the definition of evil, will never see laboratory proof just all the evidence based on the powerful combination of revelation and reason. Why, for example, weren’t all Germans Nazis? Confronted with Hitler’s rejection of Christianity many Germans realized they had a choice to make and many made bad ones sometimes out of fear for survival, a very evolutionary choice, but not all did and that’s the key. Evolutionary logic does not convincingly explain a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Franz Jaegerstaetter. These great lovers, some would say daring clowns for Christ, made their choices and unlike today’s abortion choices, paid the price themselves with their own lives. And the type is still with us, still popping up in spite of evolutionary theory. What separated them out from the mass of Germans? As one author wrote, “unless one was prepared to take a relativist view that all values are a matter of personal taste (and if that is true what fools Jaegerstaetter, Bonhoeffer and the hundreds like them were) one could hardly avoid asking the question they must have asked themselves: ‘If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?’ That is the question that bedevils our relativistic and utilitarian age. ” What indeed? Or, to up date the thought, if, as I am convinced, pro-choice is wrong and pro-life is right what is it that validates pro-life and invalidates pro-choice? Speaking personally, if anything gives choice a bad name it is abortion. By turning the pre-born into disposable trash what are we but walking, talking trash, and the older we get the more worthy of disposal we get according to evolutionary theory but not Christianity. What a terrible teacher abortion is in so many ways! Mother Theresa truly said, “If a nation permits a women to kill her own child in abortion, they teach their people to even use violence to get what you want.” But, the question is by what standard is this opinion valid and the opposite not? By what if anything can opinion rise above mere personal preference? If there is something else to go by and evolution does not fill the bill, what is it? Might there perhaps be another law beyond evolutionary law, beyond human laws? At the Nuremberg trials after WWII, prosecuting the Nazi war criminals posed a legal problem. Under what law were they to be prosecuted? Not under German law because, based partly on evolutionary concepts popular with the Nazis such as survival of the fittest, the atrocities they had committed were perfectly legal. Not under American, British, French, of Soviet law either because they were Germans. What then? Is there another law, a law beyond the merely national, beyond even the human? If so, who or what legislated it? To best answer that question we must look at the present situation with its culture wars raging. There seems to be a dwindling supply of things we as a people agree on but whether red state or blue state we do agree on democracy, government by the people. We reject government by any elite. But what are the moral foundations of democracy, of civility and of law especially that most basic of all laws, the one opposing the killing of innocent people. Are these things more than personal opinion, cultural conditionings, taste or preference? As George Weigel pointed out, can there in fact be democracy if the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than a social consensus based on the personal tastes and preferences of the hour? Such a consensus in Nazi Germany first declared open season on the handicapped and then on Jews early in the 20th Century and later in the century did something similar in America to the pre-born. But in the U.S., it should be pointed out, it was not a consensus of the majority of the American people that legalized abortion on demand but rather a judicial coup pulled off with much deception by a powerful cabal of thoroughly secularized liberal elites. The last century saw the target list grow. First the handicapped and dissidents, followed by Jews and Slavs but then there was a pulled back. At Nuremberg after the war the killing was condemned. Twenty-eight years later Roe targeted the pre-born and the officially condoned killing of the innocent began again. This latest assault has not been condemned and the law is still there. The question is, who will be added to the list as this century moves on and away from its Judeo-Christian roots, the useless aged perhaps as the rationing of health care looms as a possibility? How do we escape this deadly dictatorship of relativism based on passing, often popular and frequently deadly opinion and preference? Can we still make value judgments that are permanent and right, the kind found in the Bible’s Ten Commandments, the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights and Gettysburg Address? Obviously the judgments in those documents were based on something more solid than popular opinion. They were value judgments based upon the innate dignity of every human being. But, to declare such dignity and rights one must assume as even some honest atheists do that there exists somewhere in some mode of being, a realm of rightness that does not owe its existence completely to people, to Darwinian selection, social construction, popular opinion, national consensus, personal preference, taste, congressional legislation or human invention. Call it the law of humanity as they did at Nuremberg or an endowment by the Creator as the Declaration puts it or the natural law or the law of God as the Church has held from its beginning, but whatever it is called it is something beyond the vagaries of human tampering. As long as an atheist or any non-believer can so reason to this conclusion there can be no accusation here of an imposition of religion, though it must be said that many people, including the Founders of our Republic, would designate such a mode of being or realm of rightness, the work of the Creator, Author of Nature, God. Without a legislating power outside ours be it God or the Creator or if you will just leave it a realm of rightness outside our tampering and alteration, can there be any other basis for the absolute values, truths and rights? Not, it would seem, according to the three seminal documents just mentioned. Dangerously of late, the hold of these rights and truths in academia has been greatly weakened even to the point of the recent excising of the “Under God,” from the Gettysburg Address at a conference of scholars and “endowed by the Creator” from the Declaration by the President in several speeches. We saw earlier Drew Faust’s remark as the new President of Harvard, that “truth is an aspiration not a possession.” Until fairly recently we thought we possessed solid truths and rights in the Declaration, not mere aspirations. Aspirations are not known to be a solid foundation for rights or anything else for that matter. Modern philosophy seems to have become clueless in this regard as University of Maryland Philosophy professor, Susan Dwyer, candidly admitted recently. An obvious believer in the aspiration approach to truth, sometimes termed the “unending quest” school and often popularized as “the trip is more important than the destination” mantra in which the goal is never reached and the quest seemingly never quenched, satisfied or even satisfiable. In this school there is no firm goal in sight apart from experience. Everybody ends up in possession of his or her own version of what is good and true. In this school such banalities as “the journey is more important than the destination” are common. There is no one truth identical for all people. Truth is like a salad bar. Everyone puts his or her own plate together. You say potato. I say potahto. I say the holocaust is a great moral wrong, you say it never happened or, who says its wrong? Why is it wrong?. I say abortion is the destruction of new human life, you say it’s not human yet. Everybody has a right to his or her own opinions. That’s equal rights! In this relativism gone mad atmosphere truth takes a beating. The challenge is to remain civil and on talking terms without shelving truth as if incidental or unimportant. That is the danger of making diversity or inclusiveness, important as they may be, the centerpiece of a philosophical outlook. Truth becomes indefinable and undiscoverable and relatively unimportant. When that happens situations easily arise that can become extremely dangerous to the life and the human rights of the innocent and problematic that are the underpinning of civilization. Professor Dwyer is a case in point. Upon discussing the issues of slavery, the holocaust and abortion, she candidly admitted “I haven’t got a clue what makes killing human beings wrong.” Of course she wouldn’t, and given the philosophy professor’s philosophy, how could she? Here’s the problem. When we disregard the absolute it doesn’t go away but, as Terrell Clemmons observed in “Salvo” magazine we simply become ignorant of it. That’s when the heads begin to roll. Then truth serves the cause rather than the cause serving truth. As Lenin said, “truth is what advances the Revolution” and the revolution took millions of innocent lives. The Declaration of Independence took a different approach. It termed such rights as life and liberty “unalienable” and “endowed by the Creator.” The Founders knew what was the root and mother lode of all rights and it wasn’t relativism or utilitarianism or choice or convenience or evolution or even unaided reason and could never be. The Founding Fathers clearly understood this but many today do not. Read Jefferson’s letter to Washington during the Constitutional Convention, “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are a gift of God?” Yet, the modern secularist often denies such a God and tends to hold that moral truth cannot be grasped. All we have are personal preferences based on convenience. Philosopher Richard Rorty, of an agnostic bent, claimed that whatever their origin human rights are presumably true and solidly established now. There is no longer danger of their being lost, especially in the West. The naivete is dangerous. On such sandy footings, as Jefferson well knew, our liberties could never be secure. Rights are based on truth and both are of God. Tocqueville, for example, was well aware that by teaching the dignity of ordinary men, Christianity first initiated the equalitarian impulse and ultimately made modern democracy and the concept of inalienable rights possible. Remove that underpinning and we get atheist Sam Harris who maintains in his book “The Moral Landscape,” that such rights are merely the expression of cultural preferences produced by evolution. Presumably, as evolution rolls on the preferences will change. So it seems the roots of right and our rights come down to either secular utilitarianism or the revealed morality of religion. It’s a no-brainer if we value life and liberty. Thankfully, the Founders were not secularists but mostly Christians. Secularists could not have written the Declaration but they can and sometimes will alter it. When these lobotomizers get to work wielding their scissors and scalpels amazing things happen. As was pointed out in an earlier “pearl,” in November 2010 President Obama quoted the Declaration leaving out the words “by their Creator” after “endowed” and a prestigious academic society recently published Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address with the reference to God expunged. Such secularist censoring is becoming endemic. Some medical schools have even altered the ancient Hippocratic oath by removing the ban on abortion from it. From such antics it is but a short slide to the opinion of Sir Stephen Wall that “individuals have their own values…changing moral code is a normal part of social evolution.” This could serve as the secular anthem. How dangerous can that be? All rights, values, truths are thus cut afloat. Here is relativism gone mad, everybody equally a law unto himself or herself and all equally right. The Founders understood what these modern secularists fail to, that the public morality of the new Republic required, indeed could not do without, religious faith. Essay writer Wilson Carey McWilliams calls the equal dignity of each person the “supremely important human fact.” In his thought it is a confidence that derives from no human consensus but ultimately from the religious insight that each person is made in the image and likeness of God. A thoroughly secularized culture and society from which transcendent reference points for human thought and action have been removed is bad for the cause of human freedom and dangerous for democracy because it leaves no solid foundation for the inalienable dignity, value and rights of the human person. Of all religions it is Christianity that places the highest value on human life and dignity regardless or age, sex, situation or condition. From such a source came the Church’s attempt to protect the pre-born and even the mandating of strict requirements for a just war. These teachings are increasingly ignored but they will not be effaced. It is difficult to impossible to imagine the Declaration of Independence being written 235 years ago by anyone outside the influence of Judeo-Christian revelation. Having seen the results of the dethroning of absolute human rights especially in Germany, the lesson was not lost on the U.N. of that time. The new organizations’ post WWII Declaration on Human Rights, modeled partly on the inalienable rights cited in the Declaration of Independence, was written, among other reasons, to give legal basis for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. It firmly rooted the rights and dignity of the human person with his and her inalienable rights in both faith and reason. Reason alone could not sustain the principle. It had to be shored up by faith in something beyond mankind’s often wavering and easily influenced opinions. In today’s media saturated narcissistic environment the wavering is more notable than ever as faith in anything beyond self is buried in an avalanche of sex driven drivel. What’s to be done? Is there any viable alternative to the old Baltimore Catechism’s answer that served as the foundation of Western Civilization’s sense of the dignity and worth of all human beings? They are not tools of government. They are not disposable trash. “Men and women are made to know, love and serve God.” They are made not in the image of natural selection or survival of the fittest but in their creator’s. Is there another way to keep the wolves from the door? The question is far from new. With the pagan barbarian invasions raging around him and human rights and dignity in danger of being submerged in the flood, Pope Leo the Great declared c.460 “Christians recognize your dignity and, now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return to your former base barbaric condition.” This was said as that former base condition was on the rise as it is again today. Today it is not a barbarian flood of paganism but a media engendered flood of sex-saturated neo-paganism. The dignity-God connection is not pagan, is not traditional Eastern religion or its new age type spirituality spin offs, is not modern secularist but is uniquely Judeo-Christian. We are all, regardless of race, gender, nation, station or religion created equally the children of a loving God who endowed us with inalienable rights upon which our dignity and freedom rests. Needless to say we have not always lived up to our beliefs or to the dignity and rights the Creator endowed us with. But the thought and ideal was old long before the Declaration and its writers used it. It goes back to Genesis, the Gospels and a Pope holding back the barbarian assault. Fifteen years after our Declaration, the French in their revolution tried to use human wisdom alone divorced from Judeo-Christian theology. But a religion of pure reason without God was slim ice as an anchor and the rights were severely curtailed under a reign of terror that saw more thousands than ever the Inquisition took marched or rolled to the guillotine.. Oblivious to history, recently politicians and academics, as we saw, have tried to discard the Creator-inalienable rights connection all the while keeping the rights right there by their side but their hide and seek game is not only fruitless it is also dangerous because it never has worked and cannot. Warren Nord in his book ‘Does God Make a Difference,” puts it this way. “Respect for the political rights of others is grounded most solidly in the profoundly religious principle that all human beings are equally children of God. Any alternative, secular justification for respecting political rights, such as reciprocity or humanism, is prone to situational ethics that admit of exceptions of convenience,” And as we saw, German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, seeing what happened in his country, held that the very concept of inalienable rights is rooted in and cannot be sustained without the Judeo-Christian dogma of God the Father and creator of all. The Nazi terror like the French terror earlier, attempted to discard that belief. Today many misinterpret such pronouncements as Habermas’ as being discriminatory, and non-inclusive. God and religion, especially the dread “organized” variety, often meaning Catholicism, frequently elicits negative responses from many including of course the secular academics in control of many colleges. They are reinforced by those narcissistic souls of whom there are many who see themselves engaged in a spiritual journey of their own uncompromisingly unique and authentic selves devoid of all dogma and obligation except of their own often self-serving construction. This is the viewpoint of Wall’s “individuals have their OWN values.” The last thing these people want is values imposed from the outside especially by the “Creator” no less or a religion claiming to speak in his authority on matters of faith and morals. Breaking all the rules is a common mantra among them and a disastrous one if taken seriously especially for a democracy. The inscription over the portal to Harvard Law School states the case against this deterioration of clear thinking and succinctly captures the thought behind the Declaration of Independence. “Non sub homine sed sub Deo et Lege.” “It is not by men but by God and the law,” that we are ruled and governed, is the meaning. Most certainly the Founders would never want government by men of the “my way” variety who dreamed of being Wall’s law unto themselves with their own values subordinate to no one and nothing. The Founders wanted to limit government power and they knew the ultimate source of that limitation had to be outside us and could never be of men. It had to be God and the law of God, the natural law, as they understood it, written on the hearts of all men and women. We are governed, they believed, by a universal law writ deep in our psyche and revealing itself as self-evident truths that are reasonable and valuable but beyond logical debate or scientifically demonstrable proof. They have to be accepted. They can’t be proved. “All men are created equal.” as long as the majority, says so? Not according to those who wrote and approved the Declaration of Independence. Where is this equality except as the children of a loving Father? Certainly we are not equal in talent, abilities, intellect or wealth. “They are endowed with inalienable rights among them life, liberty etc.” The endowment is by the Creator or else the rights can’t be inalienable. Certainly they can’t be inalienable if a government endowed them by legislation or court order. If that was the case the government could as easily take away what it gave by legislation or court order. Herein lay another danger and threat from the abortion license. A government that cannot grant or create life deems when it can be removed unhampered by due process based on inalienable rights. It turns new life into a negotiable commodity like asparagus. Some like it and keep it, some don’t and toss it away like trash. This is what happens when you don’t believe in the intrinsic dignity of the human being in all his or her up and down stages from conception to first drooling to last babbling. The Founders aimed to limit what government by the people or any government could do but those limits are slipping dangerously. They certainly did not envision a government, especially government that was economically incompetent verging on insolvency by spending above its economic means yet feeling mysterously qualified to redefine important life matters that it had no hand in forming in the first place, the nature of marriage for an example. Marriage is an institution the far predates both state and church and is a creature of neither. Nevertheless, this burgeoning government has also taken upon itself to redefine not only when human life begins and decree its taking to be legal at a certain stage without any due process whatsoever but also what marriage is. Such a government, in the thinking of the Founders, would have already far exceeded its competency as well as its ideal limits. Remove God from the equation as President Obama and some secularist academics are trying to do now and expect what the Roman historian Tacitus termed “Corruptissima Republicae, plurimae leges.” As the Republic is increasingly corrupted” (in our case by the removal of a God based morality from its public life) expect “a lot more laws,” in other words, a lot more government and government unrestrained because the people are becoming themselves unrestrained and with dire results. From religion comes the self-sacrifice and implicit virtue necessary for the democracy that Tocqueville observed in early America. They provided the compelling reasons that the new secular religion cannot provide for obeying laws that conflict with our natural desires. The statistics and studies cited throughout these “pearls” show what happens when those desires get free reign. Lets just start with an over 40% divorce rate and a 22% child poverty rate in today’s America. If a people fail in restraining their base impulses, and religion is an essential aid for multitudes in that regard, “coorruptissma Republicae” will certainly occur leading to more government and more laws in the attempt to contain the spreading disorder, decay and decline. We already have large expensive government with multitudes of laws, the very things the Founders didn’t want. It looks like we’ll be requiring even more of the same unless a reversal is achieved but with media in the driver’s seat and religion increasingly in the closet, it’s hard to see that happening in the near future. XXXVI A CASE IN POINT: ROE AND DRED SCOTT The people who established our republic 235 years ago believed in the necessity of rules and laws but as few as possible. They believed that a religious people would not need a great many. That is why religion was so politically important to them and to ne encouraged. It made limited government so much easier. They would likely be horrified at Engle vs. Vitale. They would be distressed no end by people like Madonna or “Lady Gaga” with their nonsense about rules were meant to be broken and lines were meant to be crossed. Not meant to be broken though sometimes, very rarely, they did believe they had to be. When they did break the rule of law binding them to the Mother country as they most certainly did when they broke away in revolt, as was mentioned, it was only after long and serious thought and debate. Law was important to the Founding Fathers and that is understandable. They were civilized people who were by trade mostly lawyers though some were farmers and sometimes, like Jefferson, both. As such they were familiar with the two kinds of law, the natural moral law that formed the guiding basis for most of the law they, as lawyers, dealt with and the laws of nature, so important to farmers. As philosopher J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas puts it, these men were convinced that “a created moral order exists as certainly as does a physical one,” and neither were the work of mankind. The created physical order, what is sometimes called the laws of nature, were well known. Everyone knew, for example, that plants need light and moisture and that they produce seeds in order to reproduce. The created moral order, what is sometimes called the natural law, was well known too. Everyone knew without being told by legislation that men should not murder or steal. As with the created physical order and its laws governing the workings of the material world so too with the created moral order with its laws governing the actions of men and women, but there was a major difference. Whereas nature had to obey its laws, men and women, made in the image of God with intellect and free will, didn’t have to obey theirs. Nevertheless, the two were alike in that the laws governing nature and the laws governing morals were undeniably there. And, as the laws governing nature were true for all known parts of the natural world, so the laws governing people were true for all people, at all times and cultures and known at some level by all. They contained familiar moral precepts such as the rightness of acknowledging the Creator, of loving family and neighbor and the wrongness of stealing and committing murder. These precepts were underived. We don’t need a law on the books to tell us about them. They are simply known to men and women, engraved in their hearts to be poetic, whether we choose to follow them or not. In the individual, this moral code is usually called conscience and when it is broadened out among all people in general as a kind of world conscience, it is often referred to as the natural law. This natural law is the law that was resorted to at Nuremberg, sometimes under the name law of humanity, for a legal basis in the prosecution of the Nazi war criminals after World War II, their own nazified national law being of no use. Our lawyer, farmer founders were very familiar with both kinds of law and knew that if men and women were guided and restrained from doing harm by this God created moral order, as they conceived it, implanted in all, all would be well with the Republic they were setting up. Since they were also to a great extent Christians they believed the best expression of this implanted moral conscience was found in the Ten Commandments, known also as the Decalogue. There, and from Revelation in general, came the all-important and at the time uniquely Judeo-Christian belief in the essential dignity and equality of all men and women. Few outside Judaism and Christendom believed this at the time because few outside of Judaism and Christendom believed that men and women were created in the image and likeness of God. For the Christians, this originally Jewish belief was unimaginably enhanced by the Incarnation, the central belief of Christianity, that human beings somehow merited the Creator becoming a creature for love of them, the Christmas miracle. How much more dignity can be bestowed on human beings? God became one of us! Using our free will as God intended in creating us was how we were to fulfill that dignity. To help in doing this and help was provided, we have the law of conscience, the law of the Ten Commandments and man made law based on them. Yes, law was important to the Founders for it conveyed not only civilizing duties but also important rights too such as life and liberty. All this spoke to them politically when it came time to write the Declaration. They called on these deep-seated beliefs when they felt a Declaration of Independence had become necessary. They realized that good foundational law was derived from these basic concepts and must be put in place. The Declaration of Independence besides being the birth certificate of the nation was to be that foundational law. It would later be safeguarded by the working rules built into the Constitution. In the Declaration they laid out the issues that impelled their break with England and those basic beliefs that they held so dear and hoped would guide the future of the possible nation they were establishing. With these principles implanted in the hearts of the people and enshrined in the nation’s founding document, as Jefferson said, the Republic would be secure. It would prosper with little government and the need for few laws. Recent events have put the hopes of the Founding Fathers to a severe test. Now the question is, how much hacking and amputation can these basic beliefs take? With a ubiquitous media that can only be escaped with determination at work day and night preaching quite different principles, with academics and politicians amputating parts of the documents and with a people who often know more about the latest celeb. faux pas on American Idol than what’s in the Declaration, the edifice is loudly creaking; the latest symptom? The world economy shows the strain. Here and worldwide nations cannot lay their hands on enough money to contain the problems they face without going deeply and dangerously into debt. These problems are the very kinds the American founders feared when the religiously enhanced self-control, self-discipline, and self-responsibility necessary for a healthy republic were cast aside. The statistics cited in earlier “pearls” about the debacle of the 1960s and afterward when freedom for many became more willful license than anything else tell part of the story. The widespread social dislocation and personal pain, disease, depression, poverty, loneliness and dependencies that ensued and that a better understanding of history, the Declaration and religion might have helped mitigate if not avoid, tell part of it too. Government can’t get the money and spend it fast enough so great is this social dislocation. The billions spent on AIDS containment, massive jailing for drug related violent crime and drug rehabilitation programs are expenses that didn’t even exist prior to the 1960s. Obviously the Republic is paying a heavy price in its economic, social and family life as the traditional moral standards, never perfectly realized in the past but of great guidance always, are replaced with a grab bag of personal values, self-realization nostrums, law unto oneself preaching, grab all the gusto you can get cons and the “we only come this way once” song and dance that are so popular with many of today’s captains of media and the impressionable, mostly but by no means only young people, influenced by it. Private morality declines and with it the economy of the republic, as a quick look at the higher than usual level of low-grade ethics and dishonest practices plaguing politics and business in recent years indicate. Individual conscience can be greatly dulled and submerged if surrounded by a seedy society and, can anything be seedier than what is dished out daily by so much of our popular media? The Founders well knew that a strong sense of morality, of honesty, of right and wrong in elected officials, in the business sphere and most importantly among the people themselves are essential for a vibrant society and a healthy economy and it could not be achieved without a strong religious base. Listen to Washington. “Reason and experience forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.” Many of the others said the same thing. It is what Franklin was getting at when he told the women who asked what kind of new government they had come up with, “It is a Republic madam, if you can keep it.” Adams was even more adamant in that he believed it could not possibly work well or be “kept,” except in the hands of a strongly religious people. The evidence of our present difficulty is all about us as the long parade of disastrous social statistics presented earlier testifies and the budgetary insolvency of governments faced with these problems screams out. The growing gross thievery in business is an added blight. The end result, the Republic goes into a decline that any of the Founding Fathers would have had no trouble predicting. In addition to being economically hurt, the nation has not been so deeply divided socially since the fight over slavery a hundred and fifty years ago. At the present time the nation dividing catalyst that has contributed mightily to the red state, blue state split with no end in sight is not slavery of course, though that’s on the increase with great growth in sex trafficking arising since the “liberation” of the 60s, but the issue now is life itself. Our Fort Sumter was Roe vs. Wade. What happened afterward was predictable with a rudimentary grasp of American history but missed by those calling for the convenient shrinkage of the right to life. Like a receding wave leaving a beached whale high, dry and dying, the right to life was withdrawn from those of our kind in a similarly helpless and vulnerable condition, the pre-born. The “pro-choice” forces, oblivious to the tearing effect on the national fabric that was bound to result, completely missed the boat as the silly headline in the “New York Times” the day after the decision demonstrated, “Supreme Court Settles Abortion Issue.” As if Sumter settled the secession and slavery issue! What the Supreme Court had done was fire a gun into the heart of the American creed as laid out in its birth certificate, the Declaration. Far from settling anything it began the present deconstruction of American life, its confidence, hope, health and optimism, turning us into a much older and more cynical nation in the course of a few decades. And the media with its blaring rock scene and the spreading seediness of MTV –Jersey Shore type programming, almost as a placebo for narcissistic devotees, cannot forever sedate the crowd. Even they must wake eventually as they age and find the blues just won’t go away that way. It was a susceptible Supreme Court, with flimsy reasoning, legally, logically and scientifically, as much subsequent examination and commentary on the decision make clear and the papers and argumentation at the time reveal, that decided to overrule the opinion of the American public and the laws of most of the states to create a new category of sub-humans to join the “sub-humans” of the past. Now we could add the pre-born to slaves and to the Nazi’s list that started with the handicapped, “life unworthy of life,” and continued with Jews and Slavs. The U.S., that had painfully overcome the slavery and later segregation issues, now found itself plunged into the abortion issue by the Judiciary. The decision put us in some fine company! The nation would never be the same. Especially telling was the misinformation contained in the Roe decision rationale of Chief Justice Blackmun, the decision’s architect. In essence the court kow towed to the loud and rising tide of liberation mania from college campuses, radical feminists, liberal academicians and supporting media like the N.Y. Times to overrule a large segment of public opinion and the common understanding of the Declaration. This is always a risky proposition in a healthy democracy because the “silent majority” doesn’t always remain silent and neither does the nation’s conscience, as a little reflection on American history especially the reaction to the Dred Scott decision and even to a lesser extent at first, Plessey vs. Ferguson, would have revealed. It sometimes takes time but injustice irritates and agitates minds that eventually must come forth. All three decisions were blows against justice, the dignity of human life and the concepts enshrined in the Declaration. Those concepts will always give rise to strong opposition in a society still sensitive to the document’s beliefs and values or at least not completely sedated. What brought the disastrous change about is not difficult to discover. Loud cries against “the establishment” from anti-war demonstrators of the 60s soon called for “love not war” and as usual with many of the “liberated,” the “love” became sex. Something had to be done about the usually unwanted result. The liberated kiddies were not ready to measure up, after all children can get in the way of freedom, liberation, career paths, degree expectations and vacation plans and condoms never have and still don’t stand in the way of passion. With promiscuity soaring and a condom failure of about 15% on average, many “mistakes” happened.. The dignity of human life was in for a body blow. An understanding Supreme Court of the Engle type mentality agreed. Liberation from the “mistakes” that the happily liberated often made and those obligations and responsibilities that they happily shunned in spite of what justice, honor and life itself may call for, were the way to happiness and fulfillment. In a curious reversal of trends, all of a sudden a government increasingly involved in various areas of American life couldn’t get involved in this one. A new “right to privacy” was created by the Supreme Court to fill the bill. Concepts such as laissez faire and privacy may have been in increasing disregard in economics, but in the social realm they were now in vogue with a vengeance, specifically in this small but all-important area of new life. There, the government, it was decreed, may not get involved. There a new laissez faire was in. Government could not impose. A child could now be destroyed even when half born on any altar, inconvenience being the most popular one. Government could impose in your pocket book, in your smoking activities, in your driving habits with belts and halters, in how you discard old oil cans and batteries, to whom you rent a room, even in the use of spanking by parents and in what you do to your pooch, but for new human life it was now open season. His or her right to be born and continue to live would not be allowed to interfere with the fun and games. This was the new “privacy.” It allowed “choice” to trump life itself. So much for the hard won revelation based dignity of every individual human life, rich or poor, young or old! Pro-abortion forces were often heard to say that abortion would be rare for it would never be an easy decision. That is until it was revealed that almost forty percent of abortions were repeats like Whoopie Goldberg’s. New life became so cheap that many people used abortion as if it was just another form of birth control so low the value of each life had fallen thanks to Roe. In N.Y.C 40% of conceptions ended in abortion on average though the percentage was higher among minorities. Abortion proponents also predicted that child abuse would all but disappear. This was held out as a lure for the easily conned but with the abortion genii out of the bottle and the value of each life severely damaged, problems that should have been foreseen developed and that particular one, child abuse, worsened in ways undreamed of. We have already examined the telling statistics. Now, in the area of sex, everybody could indeed become laws unto themselves, as long as it was “consensual.” But, in the new morality it became increasingly difficult for women to resist the media and new establishment built pressure to chuck out the old nonsense about chastity. (See the Weisman-Becker letter exchange) and withhold consent. Imagine the pressure build up on the young women when even their schools began to distribute condoms to all for the asking giving the whole debauch an imprimatur. And, of course, no consent from the new beings being terminated was practical, nothing like the Church’s requirement for a Devil’s Advocate in its canonization process to argue the case for the absent or speechless subject was devised as a sort of substitute due process. Planned Parenthood even fought against periods of counseling and consultation including with parents! So, the value of new life was thoroughly trashed. Inconvenience was deemed quite enough. Nothing was lost save human dignity, honor, and human life in abundance. What happened as a result is a nightmare of extreme proportions. Over 50,000,000 new lives destroyed since 1973. If it wasn’t for the forty million or more immigrants pouring in and filling the vacuum, the whole national safety net would be in tatters specially the programs for the aged not to mention the condition of the economy as a whole. No need to drag out the rest of the statistics on post 1960s America all over again including the child abuse statistics. In spite of all the wailing rock groups, delirious fans, porn in every electronic gadget, abortion on demand, no fault divorce, pot for every “medicinal purpose,” the anti-depressants are being handed out hand over fist like never before. And, the face of America seemed much older, worn like no war had ever done and its spirit grew darkened with the passing decades. The plethora of tattoos couldn’t cover all the lines. When it short circuits a healthy democracy on a life and death issue like Dred Scott did on slavery and Roe on life, the nation is asking for trouble. The division, dissent and even disenchantment with what America is, what it stands for, what it is supposed to stand for continues to spread and grow even with Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, Monday night and Thursday football and all the rest of it. The country is not nearly as healthy or happy in many ways as it was before. In spite of all the diets and gyms, the girth of the average American swelled even as the heart of many seemed to shrink. We won’t go to the record book again. You can look at the preceding “pearls” if you wish. If the life and death matter of abortion, much like the similar but less directly life threatening issue of same sex marriage now, were put to a vote of the people of the several states they would never have passed. This is true of the latter in spite of historically inaccurate comparisons with the earlier racial segregation laws in the U.S. as the 2010 passage of Proposition 8 banning same sex marriage in liberal leaning California demonstrated. That is, until the Judiciary got into the act at the behest of the defeated group and overturned the vote of the citizens. The Judiciary seems more susceptible to certain trends, sometimes as in the case of Roe, while ignoring the well established belief of the vast numbers with little time to protest as they silently go about the daily task of working and raising families. Meanwhile the courts are at work trying to reshape America in their image most recently with regard to same sex marriage. They are often devotees to social reconstruction made achievable by the adoption of an increasingly bendable view of the words of both the Declaration and Constitution. Realizing this, the forces behind these radical changes shy away from democratic decision-making such as referendums in favor of the court route. Sometimes bogus historical parallels are called into play as we have noted, the comparison between laws forbidding racial inter-marriages and those forbidding same-sex marriage. being an example. It may not be in the spirit of democracy but since Roe, judges have proven an easier and more pliable target in these matters than plumbers, farmers, firemen and the whole gang of those who are taken up in the business of earning a living and bringing into being the new generation. With Roe, their will and the laws of almost fifty states protecting the unalienable right of pre-born life were all swept away. A similar phenomenon is apparent in the same-sex marriage issue. But the plot thickens and that precisely is what it was, a plot. Norma McCorvey, aka Ms. Roe has come clean and made public the lies that her National Organization of Women lawyers constructed for her for the consumption of an easily swayed court including the claim that she had been made pregnant in a gang rape. Phony statistics on the extent of “back alley” abortions were supplied too as Dr. Bernard Nathanson, part of the plot, later confessed, all designed to grease the deadly skids. But, the deed was done though the story was far from finished in spite of the fatuous N.Y. Times headline. In all this, the unmentioned goal of the choice forces was to make room for more carefree sexual freewheeling, that being an important part of liberation, and kids are certainly a care. Indeed, the pre-born child had become a danger, an inconvenience, a mistake, reducible to disposable trash by the decision, much as the slave Dred Scott and all slaves had been reduced to saleable property by that Supreme Court decision with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the role of Blackmun. So much for the human dignity inculcated through the centuries by the teachings of the Church. All that was reduced to trash too by the freewheeling, instant fulfillment, grab all the gusto, do your own thing society that, with the help of much of the media, was striving toward center stage in the national consciousness. Its success became apparent in 2009 when the media tripped all over itself to glory in the 40th anniversary of Woodstock and its magnificent heritage spiritual liberation of all things, all the while passing over with nary a headline the 20th anniversary of the crashing down of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain along with the demise of the Soviet tyranny that had engulfed a good part of Europe for decades. Millions enjoyed freedom and real liberation for the first time. The media seemed confused, this time on the real meaning of liberation. If the victorious end of the Cold War had freed millions from communism, the new society emerging would take millions of new and innocent lives with not so much as a scintilla of due process or a fraction of the notice Woodstock got. The defense of these innocent targets had been in the hands of a Supreme Court willingly self-deceived or bamboozled if possible by much pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo about when life began as well as doctored social misinformation about things like “back alley” abortion and coat hangers (see Part III, the 60s Legacy and Part IV “Don’t Take the “A” Train, for the full story). To its disgrace there was only one lone dissenting voice to cast a vote for life over convenience and human dignity over the human disgrace of one generation destroying much of another generation, No country built on the inalienable right to life was going to rest long with a Supreme Court decision that trumps life with choice and a distorted form of privacy. In the deep divisions disturbing our nation today, abortion with “choice” trumping life has been the main catalyst. Result: an abortion rate taking about 25% of each new generation doing irreparable damage to the value of human life and its dignity. A dignity painstakingly developed over the millennia since Exodus and the later rise of Christianity. Poor Pope Leo the Great, urging Christians in the 5th Century as they were being inundated by the rising tide of pagan barbarism, not to give up their dignity as creatures made in by God in his image! They didn’t. They eventually overcame the onslaught. We shall see if we can. Perhaps a better grasp of American beliefs and history along with stronger religious beliefs could have held off and even defeated the attack on innocent human life launched in the 1960s and 70s. But in much primary and secondary education history had been neglected for lessons in self-realization or self-actualization and Christianity itself, the religion of the majority, did not pose a united front even on such a vital issue as abortion weakened and divided as it had become since the Reformation. Basically, it was the Catholic Church, the largest of the churches that almost alone first led the opposition. On the issue of slavery too American Christianity had been divided north and south like the nation though often taking the lead in the northern anti-slavery movement. In the north it strongly opposed the Dred Scott Decision as the Catholic Church opposes Roe today. In the 1859 Dred Scott decision the issue was essentially the freedom to choose to own slaves trumping the human personhood and liberty of the slave. Dred Scott maintained that he, a slave, had become free when his owner took him to live in the free state of Illinois and was still free when he was moved back to live in Missouri, a slave state. Justice Taney, speaking for the court majority, declared that not only was Scott not free but that slaves were not even citizens. In other words, they were property. This was analogous to Roe declaring pre-borns not only possessing no human rights including the right to life but essentially not even human. As a result of Roe millions of lives have been destroyed. As a result of Dred Scott, 3,500,000 people were kept in bondage and it took a war that destroyed 600,000 lives to undo the damage and right the wrong. Our history, indeed human history, tells an important lesson. There is an evident need for absolute, divinely commanded norms to anchor the moral, political and religious life of a people and they have to be strongly proclaimed especially by religion. However, it also teaches that even that doesn’t work all the time because we are free to ignore them and because our intellects, sometimes clouded by passions and misinformation, do not always see clearly what those norms call for. These norms are however of great help and when abused often tend to rebound and push movements to bring about the repair and restitution necessary and required in the name of justice. In our history movements and programs have attempted to help discriminated at risk sectors of our people including the Native American, the African American, The Nisei, children and women at labor, for example, with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, societies that intentionally subdue religion or where religion atrophies, correction is often slow or non-existent and worse still, the odds that humanity is more likely to see concentration camps, Gulags, genocides, abortuaries, destruction of the weak, inconvenient, non-productive, vulnerable, “useless,” damaged and resource draining, “life unworthy of life,” are greatly increased. In such societies the rug of revelation upon which such groups stood with an innate dignity reflected in their creation and likeness, however imperfect, to God has been pulled out from under them and they will quickly begin to fall, targeted by the social engineers and secular ideologues who are more often than not as crassly utilitarian at heart as a Dr. Singer in their quest for utopia. As debate raged in the U.S. after the Dred Scott decision and the Abolitionist movement spread with the Civil War eventually descending upon the nation, so debate and political war rages today over Roe. Looking at Lincoln, especially his debates with Stephen Douglas, the main choice spokesman of the day, may supply help in our present mess. How did Lincoln get away with confronting the “choice” mentality of Stephen Douglas and the slaveocracy in the struggle to over slavery? Wasn’t choice at the heart of democracy? To many who agreed with Douglas, slaves were property not people and slavery was a neutral institution. Like abortion today, one could choose it or not as one saw fit. Similarly today the pre-born are not new people but like slaves, disposable property, but even worse, discardable indeed destroyable property to some. People are free to destroy them or not as they choose. People should be free to choose, that’s what democracy is all about went Douglas’ argument in his debate with Lincoln. Lincoln disagreed. To paraphrase Lincoln’s point, he said we are talking here about human beings, not Nebraska turnips or Maine lobsters. That was his great caveat, humans are different from anything else and that’s why Lincoln rejected choice as far as he could without ripping the nation apart when it came to what was called, the peculiar institution. Ideally, he would have been rid of the blight, lock, stock and barrel. But, and here’s the question, from whence his conviction that human beings were different, not chattel as in the south, not swine as later the Jews and Slavs under Nazism, or unproductive parasites as Capitalists under Communism, but so different as to have special rights? We can be grateful he grew up with the Bible as his reader and later the Declaration beside him along with his Blackstone and Shakespeare or there would likely have been no Lincoln, no Gettysburg Address, no Second Inaugural and very likely no United States of America as we know it today. He answered that slavery was an evil that must be set on the road to extinction because slaves are people and it violated those inalienable rights short-listed in the Declaration. These were things that should be beyond the will of the majority or any government for that matter, because they don’t derive from either the people or government. They are the inalienable rights that are ours by neither majority vote nor government decree and could be removed by neither of them. That equality, that dignity, that life and liberty, are the endowment of the Creator according to Revelation and as such reflected and stated in the Declaration. Slavery violated those rights. For that reason, far from a neutral institution, slavery was an evil one and outside the realm of choice for that reason. Evil? Again, who or what told Lincoln this? Likely it was the same thing that told Jaegerstetter, Bonhoeffer, and other Germans that Nazism was evil; that tells millions today that abortion is evil. Who or what told them that? Slavery was evil? Nazism was evil? Who or what tells millions today that abortion is evil? If there is nothing beyond personal choice when it comes to these “neutral” things, there is no evil. Slavery, holocaust, abortion are neutral institutions. And, down the road, perhaps the dispatching of the less than fit whether in infancy, puberty or old age in the name of “compassion” or economy will be neutral too and for the common good. Unless, of course, there is that “ realm of goodness” that some agnostic philosophers talk about against which we must measure ourselves, or more convincing for most, that endowment by the Creator that the Declaration proclaims. A natural law beyond human law but reflected in the consciences of human beings, the law that was called upon at Nuremberg. A law implanted, later revealed and enshrined in the Ten Commandments of Jewish scripture and later still, on a more positive level, in the Beatitudes and Works of Mercy proclaimed by Christ. In it all the worth and dignity of even the “least of my brothers and sisters,” as Christ put it, was put forth to all. Facing the evil of slavery Lincoln did not hesitate to call upon the source of that higher realm of goodness. “That this nation under God will have a new birth of freedom.” Those who recently censored those words out of the Gettysburg Address and the growing number of secularists who agree with them clearly do not understand what’s at stake. That something beyond personal autonomy, beyond Wall’s each a law unto themselves logic, beyond my rationality is as good as your rationality subjectivism and relativism and the priority of personal privacy and choice above even new life, is most certainly needed for a safe, sane, just and free society. We are not laws unto our selves, This should in itself be self-evident but in our deeply confused age with hardly any grasp of history and with consciences often dulled and muted in the cacophony of pop-media world, it is no longer. Modern science can confirm over and over that human life begins at conception and can ratify what author and medical doctor, Walker Percy, wrote at the time,” any other point would be completely arbitrary” yet a Chief Justice with an agenda can nevertheless be conveniently confused on the issue and happily kow tow to the gathering anti-life forces that proclaim and raise privacy and choice over life. Thus the shot was fired leading to the current national malaise. Wherever private choice reigns, or the convenient ignorance of a Chief Justice Blackmun, it can easily checkmate a modern science. The Founding generation as did Lincoln took the lessons of history and the message of revelation about these life and death matters seriously but we seem to be loosing grip. The retention of them is needed for the Republic to prosper. They are essential in avoiding the debilitating reign of feel good mysticisms and ghost hunting delusions. Remove God, specifically He who Is, the God of revelation, and the result is low maintenance morality that cannot serve a free society or protect the vulnerable when the urge is strong to remove inconveniences. No other source has ever been discovered for our cherished “self-evident” truths. Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher and faltering atheist has admitted, “Christianity and Christianity alone is the ultimate foundation… of conscience, human rights and democracy. To this day we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is post modern chatter.” Ever watch “The View” and such? Our Declaration of Independence has four references to God as the author, creator, supreme judge and the endower, of our “unalienable rights.” Remove the strong internal guides that God and religion provide and people will need help guiding and controlling themselves. Government of necessity will have to loom large in providing that help for social control purposes. Remove God and religion and a thoroughly secularized government fills the vacuum assuming those same roles and thus achieving the exact opposite of what the Declaration and the Constitution intended. Limited government becomes government supreme, expensive and unmanageable for the people have become unmanageable and socially destructive. XXXVII FORGETTING THE ROOTS OF OUR SAFTY AND FREEDOM The “strong” disdain it. Indeed, the very word “obedience” sends shivers up their unbending spines. The buckaroos of media land prefer anything but, opting instead for the envelope pushers and breakers of all the rules. Obedience to rules and laws is for the dull and adventure-less. It earns low grades in a media land full of pop heroes who are above such mundane things and who achieve greatness not by obedience to law but by bending it or breaking it when they see fit. Of course, on TV they only do it for the general good but how long will that last before they or others get into the act for other than the good. They become laws unto themselves. The weak better hide and the vulnerable head for the hills. Pundits like England’s Sir Stephen Wall, we saw, lent support by decrying unbending moral principles. To repeat his point, “Changing moral code is a normal part of social evolution.” But where does this leave our unalienable rights based as they are on an unchanging moral code? These rights have to be grounded in something beyond personal whim, public consensus or court decisions else they become easily disposable. And as we saw, George Weigel wrote in “First Things,” “What are the moral foundations of democracy…civility, tolerance, and the rule of law (and the rights of man)…if the moral principles underpinning (them) are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus?” Social consensus today is almost nil in many areas if you go by the reds and blues on our political map. With nothing more than political pragmatism and moral relativism to go by in place of rights endowed by the Creator, this should not be surprising. And when it comes to popular moral consensus, sexual promiscuity, as we saw, went from disapproval to approval almost overnight during the 1960s, a perfect demonstration of Sir Wall’s changing moral code based on social evolution. Result? Millions of lives ended by abortion and more dead from AIDS than were lost in WW II. Flexible moral evolution gave us legalized abortion in 1973. Of course the rising promiscuity had a lot to do with that and more recently, with strong media pounding, public opinion seems to be changing on homosexuality and even same sex marriage. As the waves of fluidity in opinion and law flood over us and the idea that the only thing that counts is what works or what the loudest or most monied, visible and connected voices want or can convince the public to want, the weak, incompetent, useless, inconvenient and less empowered will be washed away along with their formerly inalienable rights as inalienable rights become increasingly fluid and negotiable. What we end up with is not inalienable rights endowed by the Creator, as the Founders of our Republic held, but the rights of man coming not from the hand of God but from the generosity of whomever runs the state. Those with little influence get little by the way of inalienable rights. A hint of what may be fast coming was the recent curtailment in Massachusetts of the inalienable right of freedom of religion and conscience. For over a century Catholic Charities had worked out of love and concern to find homes for unwanted orphans without regard for the child’s sex, religion or race. It is now denied that good work because it refused, in accord with its religious principles and recent research as we saw, to place children with same sex couples. Studies, it was mentioned, show that situation fraught with dangers but nevertheless, the thick and sturdy ice of established and inalienable rights, in this case religious freedom and freedom of conscience, upon which we once stood, has become thinner. The Gay Rights lobby is well organized, well financed; media backed and increasingly vocal and effective. Many homosexuals have a lot of time and often money too on their hands, freed up as they are by the dearth of family concerns and obligations, and so can exert inordinate pressure on pliable and susceptible politicians. The history of Prohibition shows the damage even a well- intentioned lobby group can do. Today’s champions of tolerance apparently cannot tolerate the toleration of religious freedom and freedom of conscience if it opposes its will. To these moderns often of what amounts to a pseudo-diversity credo and pro-choice conviction, how much more in keeping with their conception of democracy as seen in the Roe case is a Laissez Faire approach whereby government does not impose its will but stands off. But, if that had been consistently applied in Massachusetts the Church would have been spared this attack. Government however is anything but consistent especially under pressure Indeed it often bends under well heeled media backed clamor. So toleration of Religious conscience and freedom was pulled for toleration of Gay demands for same-sex adoption, in spite of the dangers. True tolerance, it should be pointed out, presupposes disapproval, objection and opposition or there is nothing to tolerate. As Andreas Kinneging points out in his book “The Geography of Good and Evil.” Otherwise it (tolerance) is not needed.“ What we have today as eminently demonstrated in Massachusetts, though it will hardly be confined to that state, is actually a pseudo-tolerance serving the chosen. We need to protect our unalienable rights in order to enjoy the basic safety and freedom upon which the pursuit of happiness and the security of our civilization rest. Remove God and religion and the republic must find a new foundation for its self-evident truths or they will fade. The explorer or innovator in search of such a replacement foundation often falls back on pragmatism as a basis. But for the morality and the rights we depend upon to make life free from unending fear, pragmatism and utilitarianism make a very dangerous foundation. Frequently such a basis is almost indistinguishable from might makes right. To avoid that dangerous dead end, the searching secularist sometimes ends up unknowingly borrowing from revealed truths and from that universal natural law chiseled in our hearts as the Golden Rule and codified in the Decalogue and the rest of revelation. This is what Habermas meant when he wrote that Christianity alone is the ultimate foundation of liberty and that secularists continue to use it, sometimes without realizing it. This is done often without asking the obvious questions, from whence these principles, this Golden Rule? From what does conscience derive? What’s the source of natural law as epitomized in our “self-evident” truths? Obviously, as Darwin admitted, the spirit behind the Golden Rule is not the product of natural selection or survival of the fittest because it protects the “unfit” along with the strong and “superior.” The self-evident truths apply to “all men,” fit and unfit. Well then, as with the material world and the life in it, the same question has to be asked, from where? An evolutionary theory that asks us to believe that inanimate, dead unthinking matter, origin unknown, is a masterful practitioner of natural selection and eventually produced living, advanced thinking beings with inalienable rights is more hindrance than help as an answer because it is unbelievable to most rational people. So, from whence “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal and endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights among them life…” The God of revelation, “AM” he who IS, provides the only good and reliable basis for an answer though modern day secularists perform amazing logical contortions to avoid that conclusion. But, what it amounts to is Habermas’ “post modern chatter.” Failing in their search, some secularists, as we saw, simply censor God out of our national documents as earlier the Supreme Court banned prayer from our schools in the Engle vs Vitale school prayer decision of the early 1960s. Not only was school prayer banned in that decision but subsequently even the very mention of God and the religious roots of our nation was discouraged in various ways. They were, at least, heavily downplayed by a growing number of timid teachers. In this regard our nation’s great documents can cause trouble for the new wave of secularists so their hands, often led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), go to work with scissors and jackhammer. Lines from documents disappear, crosses and Ten Commandment plaques are pulverized. Their dream is to build a tall wall of separation between church and state far higher than anything Washington, Jefferson and the supporters of the First Amendment had ever envisioned or considered necessary. The statistical consequences of this national moral lobotomy are hellish on the most obvious levels some of which we examined earlier and especially on educational achievement. After something occurs need not mean on account of or because of that event but in this instance the effort helped bring about the results. Putting the influence of God and religion into retreat led to some sad innovations in American education. Our nation now has many schools with metal detectors, drug sniffing dogs, security guards in the halls, bouncers in the cafeteria, pregnancy counselors in the health office, condom distribution centers and abortion referral procedures. Social activity and “cool” communication devices have, to a notable extent for many of the young, pushed aside “reading, writing, rithmatic whether taught to the tune of the old hickory stick or not,” in many parts of the country. Abortion may be “in” and the old hickory stick out but what in essence we have is a minor cruelty being replaced by a much greater one.” The old stick, found useful at times in the schools of old, it is now shocking to the sensibilities of some of today’s discriminately sensitive souls who often have no problem with condom distribution and abortion referral services in middle schools. But with odd logic they shudder at the thought of corporal punishment with or with out sticks at least not in the hands of increasingly overwhelmed teachers. Ironically, the barbarism of abortion and even the sexual abuse of children in public schools are growing blights but hickory sticks are deemed barbaric!. Though there were some fearsome old public school marms in the classrooms of the past and some pretty tough, rigid Nuns in the many Catholic schools of those days, the vast majority of both contingents were remembered well and respectfully by those who learned in their classrooms. And they got results for the little they were paid as comparative achievement scores illustrate. Sadly, in many areas of our country today the new and very bleak educational accouterments found in many schools and listed above are now common necessities. They have replaced the old dunce stool for those who didn’t prepare the assignment and the paddle or hickory stick for the disruptive, disrespectful student. The switch has not been a boon to education. Even the prized goal of self-esteem that called for discarding dunce stool, hickory stick and the “go stand in the corner” order has not been realized. And needless to say, learning achievement in many areas has slipped badly. Today we rank near the bottom among industrialized nations in math and science achievement. “Reading, writing and rithmatic,” may be a sideline for many perplexed and dysfunctional students but ranks of counselors and remedial learning classes are there trying, often with less than striking success, to take up the slack. Often little can be done to enhance self-esteem in the avalanche of dysfunctional and broken families now plaguing America and helping to produce the 22% child poverty rate. And of course unsupervised hours in front of the tube can be a severe encumbrance to learning and with mom or dad or both often not there. Sadly, this horrific home situation, rather than nurturing, can become a severe life handicap with immense social costs and expenses. With the other factors discussed earlier, it can be observed that the downplaying of religion or to put it another way, when the state got out of prayer it got into law enforcement like never before with the possible exception of Prohibition. Where religion emphasized responsibility, self-control and abstinence from sex outside marriage rather successfully for years, the state stepped in with modern sex education stressing Dr. Weisman brand of “responsible” sex complete with condom instructions. Result? Disaster. We’ve seen the stats. As anyone should have predicted, the condom mania gave the green light to rampant promiscuity. Twelve years after Engle came Roe in 1973. Coincidence or part cause and part effect, you decide. Since Roe over fifty million have been aborted, about half a million have died of AIDS, and STDs are a spreading plague. There is another danger to the diminishing influence of religion that even now is partially upon us. If we point to the fact that we are a caring society there is some truth in and many exceptions to that claim, but when one looks to the source of those caring attitudes there is cause for concern, especially for the weak, non-productive and inconvenient members of society. Historically, to a great extent the caring for widows, abandoned children, orphans, the sick and unwanted, the call for the humane treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill, feeding the hungry and helping the poor were all explicitly adamantly and in many ways exclusively Christian ideas as historian Eric Metaxas explains in his book “Amazing Grace…” a biography of William Wilberforce,” the great 19th Century anti-slavery advocate. This caring and concern were and are foreign to many societies outside the Christian influence. As mentioned before, there was no Red Crescent without the prior example of the Red Cross. Atheists, Pantheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus and merely nominal Christians were comparatively uninvolved in such pursuits including, as the Wilberforce biography makes clear, the abolition of slavery. The idea of a social conscience with outrage at injustices done to others especially the helpless and a stubborn willingness to do something about it, sometimes at great personal inconvenience and even risk, was found in no non-Christian culture at that time. It was largely a Christian thing like the emphasis on forgiveness or the equality of the sexes under the marriage commitment. Our present secular culture sometimes carries on selected and usually less sacrifice involving parts of this Christian heritage and inheritance but is often ignorant of the original source of the concern and determination to help. The source was this: “Lord when did we find you naked and clothe you, hungry and feed you, a stranger and welcome you, sick and care for you, broken hearted and comfort you etc.…I tell you as long as you did it for these the least of my brethren you did it for me.” The Gospel is and was the bedrock of the caring that was found almost exclusively in the formerly Christian West and is not found even now in many parts of the world. Even the Stoics of the Classical era did not approach the Christians in indifference to a person’s social status when it came to helping. No one did. The new secularists when they support more government social welfare programs are basically parasitic on the Christian moral roots of caring though many are unaware. We already saw the historian Arthur Schlesinger and philosopher Jurgen Habermas allude to that vital Christian spirit of help, renew and reform earlier. The Christian ideal of self-giving love reflected in the recent studies on charitable giving already mentioned is bound to dwindle as secularism spreads and faith fades. Government may have to expand and move in even more as social problems continue to spread, though more government and government trying to do what the Church has done for two millennia is not exactly what the Founders envisioned. And it is bound to do a much poorer and more tax draining job for study after study, as was seen, show that when secularism displaces religion it fails as a strong philosophical motivator for the generous giving of funds and self to the aid of others. More often, as we have seen, it can be counted on as a platform for the morality of my rights, my self-realization, my way, myself, and my money. XXXVIII I”D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA, 1925 When that paragon of good humor, W.C. Fields playing Sheriff Cuthbert Twilly in the 1940 film “My Little Chickadee” was asked if he had a last request before they strung him up him for malfeasance, incompetence, collusion, you name it, he replied that he’d “like to see Paris before he died.” When the lynch crowd sneered at the request Field’s quickly added “Philadelphia will do.” Poor Philly! It was the great W.C.’s hometown and the butt of many a joke but he learned the wonderful trade of making people laugh there at his inimitable mother’s knee. Actually, back then Philadelphia had much to crow about and still does but there is a tarnishing now growing as secularism comes to increasingly dominate the scene and the old religious tradition of caring begins to change into something quite different, a sinister form of compassion that sees killing as a solution to some of life’s old problems and difficulties and even advocates the destruction of new life on the possibility that it may not always be “wanted” or on the prospect of poverty and hardship. But, as scientists and observers have noted, many a child grew to be loved and wanted before the horror of Roe even when unexpected and unplanned. And, as one of Darwin’s contemporaries noted, it is the struggle of the butterfly as it emerges from the cocoon that gives its wings color and the strength to fly. In some respects Philadelphia isn’t doing as well now as it was in W.C. Field’s time in several vital areas nor is the nation as a whole nor does the future appear overly rosy. As is true in many urban areas drugs ravish large numbers of people and neighborhoods, abortion on demand takes thousands, family breakup and cohabitation is rampant and as of 2010 more than 22% of the children live in poverty up from 20.5 % the year previous. Pro abortionists had promised the child poverty and abuse problems would all but disappear after the legalization of abortion. Wrong again! And to the disgrace on the nation, child poverty is almost 10% higher than the rate for adults. So much for making love not war. War is still with us only a major target now is our own people. This is bound to happen when the value and dignity of each individual life is trashed and their Judeo-Christian foundations discarded. Eastern religions and New Age beliefs just can’t do the job for the equal dignity and value of each individual human life are concepts that do not flow from their principles. As Walter Lippmann wrote long ago, “What is left of our civilization will not be maintained…what is wrecked will not be restored…There is no use looking for some new revelation of what man needs in order to live. The revelation has been made…sacrifice and duty…the grace of love and charity are the things which have made men free. Only in this profound and tested wisdom shall we find once more the light and courage we need.” There is an obvious decline of love, honor and dignity in the new priorities of the new age resulting in a new phenomenon, a society that destroys and neglects its young. Now we witness the common occurrence of great numbers of adults living better than the children. The children are being destroyed by the millions while awaiting birth and after birth millions are in poverty. This is America? It wasn’t the America of W.C.’s day. That America was in many material respects a poorer country but not in love. The sad fact is more hell on Earth should not be unexpected. These evil trends are likely to worsen as the revelation Lippmann wrote about is increasingly ignored and national and state economies come under increased strain due mostly to debt created by governments and politicians saying “yes” too often to programs and expenses best deferred until more affordable or able to be corrected in less costly ways. Trouble is, as the decline in personal morality and responsibility evidenced by so many studies and statistics quickens, these remedial programs become more necessary even as the ability to pay for them fails to keep up. Meanwhile politicians fearful for their offices, dreading to tell the people “no” and equally dreading to tell them of the higher taxes these programs require take the less immediately painful borrowing route thereby plunging the nation deeper into debt and thereby passing the obligation and whole inevitable day of reckoning on to the next generation. It’s called living beyond ones means or willingness to pay or more crudely, “dumping on the future.” The trend usually leads to budget devouring debt payments and economic crisis’, indeed the proverbial panics brought on by the danger of default. Frequently the end result if default is avoided by painful economic belt tightening is a very unhappy populace used only to hearing yes to their demands for new and bigger programs and now hearing no or, if the high tax route to pay off the debts is taken, the specter of many nations sagging under the weight of big government and big taxes and stunted economic growth and prosperity. The middle routes, the usually better course, are in themselves painful. The painful truth is sometimes pain is inescapable. It is simply a matter of when and who will face it. Difficult times are evidently upon us and will be, it appears, for a long time. That is, unless the people and politicians begin to say that all-important word “no” in both their private and public lives. Not wanting to do that, they must be willing to foot the immense bills, face the huge debts and eventually shoulder default escaping tax increases that are inevitably brought on by a populace creating too many problems and consequently demanding too many services to contain them to which vote seeking politicians have invariably said “yes.” The rare courageous politician who truly fears for the future real well being of the nation rather his own immediate personal situation and who dares to say “no” to those demands often faces the defeat the “yes” men usually escape. Fulton Sheen once wrote that “there are basically two ways of living; first the feast and then the headache or first the fast and then the feast.” Saving the best for last is always the better bargain because as he added, “ deferred joys purchased by sacrifice are always the sweetest.” But that takes wisdom and a people up to the challenge of self-discipline. Both qualities of character are often in short supply in a grab all the gusto society in which self-sacrifice is meaningless. After all, more than ever before Americans are destroying their own offspring because they are inconvenient or they walk away from them letting them languish in or near poverty. As always, personal irresponsibility becomes government responsibility fueling the growth of government, expense, taxes and debt. New to America since the 1960s, drug laced lives and rampant sexual promiscuity provide much raw material for the bonfire. The 1950s America, in many material ways a poorer society than today’s with fewer things except in many cases the free time that the computer age promised and failed to deliver, may have had a lower standard of living as economists measure it but was higher on the happiness scale as sociologists and psychologists gage it. Everyone must realize that no time or period on Earth is idyllic, all face problems and challenges, but some are clearly closer to that ideal than others. The period after WWII and before the assassinations, Viet Nam, Watergate and the general moral debacle of the 1960s, measured up rather well even as it confronted the racial segregation problem. Brown vs. the Board of Education was 1954.. Indeed the period between 1945 and 1963, even with the Cold War, nuclear threat, Korea, worry over juvenile delinquency, an economic down turn in 1957 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 62’ generally heard music in the air and saw optimism in the driver’s seat. Even the cars they drove often sported three bright colors rather than the dominant grays and blacks of the present soul troubled time. For one reason, it was pretty much devoid of many of the post 60s problems, mostly of a moral nature, that effect America today including massive abortion and divorce on demand, family breakup, drugs, promiscuity, illegitimacy, child poverty, single parenthood and the AIDS epidemic which it should be pointed out, actually has killed more Americans than WWII and is with us yet. Add to that an education system not capable of absorbing and educating all the troubled kids it gets, a record of falling academic achievement, a drop out rate at about 40%, and an economy staggering under the massive debts partly incurred to handle these self-created problems and black seems the appropriate color for the styles of the times. Even the end of the Cold War in 1989 didn’t snap the gloom or appreciably boost moral for the age of terrorism quickly took its place, America entered the new millennium rather worn even before 9/11.. It seemed to have less of its old bounce, its optimism, its self-confidence. It seems to have produced a bumper crop of the very people that, according to the Founders, would be destructive of its founding ideals. Before the 1960s, with the exception of an emergency like the Great Depression and an unemployment rate above 25% with about as many people working only part time, government had to devise ways like the New Deal to try to alleviate the joblessness and suffering. But in more normal times government was usually less involved in caring for its citizens because the citizens for the most part didn’t need much looking after or caring for. Their lives were not plagued with promiscuity, a nearly 50% divorce rate, family disintegration with many non -supporting fathers allowing their children to live in poverty, an AIDS epidemic, a STD epidemic, a drug epidemic, nor were they surrounded by a media bombarding them with ideals far different from the ones the republic was built on. Many expensive government programs came into being precisely to try to contain the damage that resulted from the change in moral climate. It became very easy to say the “yes” word to the new demands but hard to say a word about needed behavioral change and few said it for they were often labeled as intolerant or lacking in understanding. The break down in Judeo-Christian moral standards forced many a politician to say basically, “what else can we do?” But moral decrepitude is not cheap and it is a sure fire invitation to big government. On some level though, either on the personal and private level or the public and governmental, “no” has to be said. Far better the personal and private. No to sexual promiscuity, to divorce, to abandonment, no to abortion, no to drugs, no to the things that bring people, societies and governments down. With fewer manmade social problems, the pre-1960s nation expected less and demanded less from government. When caring was called for it was usually done on a local level, in house, meaning family, friends, church and local community with what major government programs out there, the Social Security System for example, serving largely as emergency back up. There were few large government remedial, educational and poverty programs for, as mentioned, before the 1960s the taxpayers were not faced with the deluge of single mothers, fatherless children, children in poverty, rampant sexual promiscuity with new diseases and epidemics, and a drug culture that clogged the courts and filled the jails all at tremendous expense. At this point, should we throw in a little thank-you to the popular rock groups who came along in the 60s and helped popularize and promote this new drug culture as the “in” thing among the young and impressionable? “Cool” became the accepted jargon. The resulting damage was immense especially on the young and impressionable, Besides its great contribution to crime and violence, drug use was second only to homosexual promiscuity in spreading AIDS. The lifetime cost of HIV/AIDS treatment in present day United States is estimated to range from $470,600 to $665,500 per person in 2004 dollars with much of it covered by the taxpayers. Again what you do in the privacy of the bedroom doesn’t always stay there. If the economic crash of the 1930s was costly, the moral crash of the 60s was even more so for it has lasted much longer and isn’t over yet. Consequently, before the moral crash, government was less costly and debt ridden, discounting special emergencies like the Depression and WWII, and would likely have returned to that pattern but for the coming of the 1960s and its aftermath. As noted, in many ways the society before then was far healthier and it must be added, richer in caring and less reliant on government. That’s where Philadelphia comes in. Philadelphia, despite the jolly black eye from W.C. was typical of the people and municipalities back then. It managed to care for its weak and unwanted in a multitude of ways and without heavy dependence on federal budgets. Philadelphia was typical of how problems were handled for the activities there were duplicated in municipalities and communities all over the country. In 1925 Philadelphia, faith based activities were paramount along with the municipality’s efforts in alleviating hardship and suffering. The city records show for that year that the Catholic church alone and not to include the activities of other religious groups who were also very active, supported eight hospitals, thirteen orphan asylums (these were the days when death was not the preferred treatment for the “unwanted,”) eleven day nurseries, one settlement house, seven homes for the aged, three homes for the handicapped, eight boarding homes for working women, five homes for “unfortunate’ young women and three visiting nurse associations. Men and women, often nuns and religious brothers whose motivation was primarily love of God and neighbor and whose compensation was little more than room and board with a small allowance, along with lay people staffed many of these institutions. That’s how the inconvenient and unwanted, both the young and aged often with no family able to help, plus those brought low by the hard vicissitudes of life and assaulted by poverty and mental illness, the very ones increasingly up for destruction today, were cared for back then when the country was much poorer but more generous and loving. Many of these institutions are gone now especially the orphanages, replaced in many of the old neighborhoods with abortuaries. It is not hard to imagine some of them also occupied by the proliferating pet caring establishments. As one observer put it, “Never have America’s fire hydrants and telephone poles been wetter or its cradles and cribs emptier.” Priorities have changed. Orphanages may be mostly gone but billions are spent yearly of pets and pet products. Today we hear, in a nation that can spend over 43 billion dollars in that area annually, that American children are aborted at a rate of over a million a year often because of the hard life of deprivation they may have to face. That’s about a quarter of all those conceived. They would have been better off as cats and dogs. Who would have thought that life in the biggest rich country in the world would be so hard on the children? Who would have believed that life was so terrible in the rich U.S.? But, of course, it’s a typical pedantic smokescreen meant to placate the comfortably living. The kids were cared for before and would be still. It’s not a failure of means, it’s the failure to love like before. And so much for the false accusation that the Church or the pro-life movement “has no concern for life after it is born.” The statistics of 1925 show how it was done and are reflective of pro-life efforts even today especially in the proliferation of centers supported for the help of expectant single mothers and the care and adoption of the children. Those who for whatever reason can’t personally adopt often support the agencies and institutions that work in area. Also part of the beneficent and mollifying smokescreen thrown up by the defenders of abortion is the often-heard remark of how tough the decision to abort is. But in fact about 30% or more abortions are repeats. In N.Y.C. sometimes called the “Big Apple,” the figure is an atrocious 56%. How difficult can it be? Evidently for many abortion is looked at as just another form of artificial birth control. It is hoped that Whoopee Goldberg’s six are the record but it might not be. The numbers show that there have been more than 50 million abortions since the 1973 Roe decision. Law is a great teacher. In this case a very deadly one but it blesses the choice and thereby makes it ever easier to choose. The cheapening of the value and dignity of all human life, a key inheritance from our Christian roots and reflected in the Declaration, is an inevitable consequence of this home grown holocaust. The justifications for the tragedy are painful to hear. To spare the new life the pain of living in the richest, biggest, freest country in the world just doesn’t cut it. Sparing the pre-born life’s hardships is a smokescreen for sparing ourselves any hardship or inconvenience. How hollow a justification it is, compassion unguided by revelation and turned deadly! Death the preferred solution relieves the living of the burden of caring love. This is the new lethal modern “caring” arising as the insights of Christian love are lost. This mass destruction of innocent human life in the womb without the benefit of due process or any other such civilized protections thanks to the Roe decision is considered a good thing because the children would have been unwanted! Their lives would have been harsh and difficult, bereft of love. What is really being said is that it is no longer 1925 and although the country is richer in stuff it is by no means richer in love and sacrificial caring. There are no longer enough people especially parents who care enough to give the very best love and to inconvenience themselves in order to give their own children a chance at life. Often pets get the priority! To repeat, never in America have the fire hydrants been wetter and the cradles emptier. Safe to say, probably half the kids in 1925 Philly were unexpected, unwanted, unplanned but loved anyway. For those who weren’t loved or couldn’t be cared for, the afore mentioned institutions including the eight orphanages and five homes for “unfortunate” young women all supported by the love and giving of the Catholic people there were ready to step in. Such was the value and dignity of life then and the power of love. How things have changed! Now we have government, often by court decision, that legalizes and endorses abortion in spite of Jefferson’s admonition that “ the care of human life and not its destruction is the just and only legitimate object of good government.” Not only that but it subsidizes it. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion business with 309,000 abortions in 2009 alone and charging on average back in 2003, $375 per abortion gets in addition $350 million from taxes, an amount still there in spite of the deficit crisis. Saying “no” is still too difficult for many! We need politicians like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius who told the Danubian Legions “no” when they demanded more pay. The demand might be justified but the cost too burdensome on the people. As the uniquely Christian insight into who we are and its profession of the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person fades, subjective impressions laced with merely utilitarian notions of individual value, dignity, freedom will not last long as gap fillers. Men and women will become walking, thinking meat with personhood eventually fading into glinthood. As that happens, expect more death with dignity squads to search for new subjects in need of “help.” Already we are witnessing a spin off of humanity’s essential lack of value, the serious rebirth of slavery even in the West mostly for illicit sexual purposes. It should be remembered that Christians as a group were the first to be completely opposed to slavery; the first for raising women to equality in marriage and elsewhere; the first for faithfulness in monogamous marriage and the first for the egalitarian brotherhood of all men. These values are eroding and the pagan past is seeping back in. Disposal of the sick and elderly infirm in the quise of mercy killing at a time when so much palliative care is available is already coming on strong. This is compassion without expense and inconvenience and without the vital “suffer with” component. With the concerted secular effort to ban God from public education, the Public Square and public influence in general, censor him out of historical documents and exile him to the closet, we remove the ultimate imperative upon which we build anything beyond self-interest. Watch for the disappearance of those who cannot care for themselves without inconveniencing others. With the eclipse of traditional religion specifically Christianity, there will be fewer others. The disappearance of Down syndrome children is only the beginning. The disappearance of females in non-Christian societies is upon us. Aided by modern science, there is already a scarcity of them in China and India where Christian influence is small and the value of the male is traditionally prized over the female. Gender based abortion in China has left at least 24 million men single and in India males outnumber females by millions with potential problems that can be imagined, sex slavery just one. But where every child is a child of God, that fact makes an immense difference, but a difference to be found only where revelation has been received and accepted. XXXIX THE NEW CHURCH AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS In addition to an avalanche of newly concocted space age spiritualities ranging from Scientology with benign space visitors coming Hale-Bopp-like to free us from our despised and disposable bodies to the pantheistic god indistinguishable from nature and its forces proclaimed by folks like Shirley MacLaine, who sometimes runs about exclaiming “I am god. I am god,” we now have coming our way a new church. It is a self-designer scientific secular church boasting a new priesthood and new sacraments. However, these sacraments are frequently not life giving like the old ones but often rather deadly. Under these new priests human life is nothing special or sacred and certainly not endowed with inalienable rights. Indeed, with them pre-born human life especially, though not exclusively, is vulnerable to some deadly ministrations. Rather analogous to a tooth that someday may develop a cavity and turn bad, they would pull or shall we say root out new life on similar pretexts, the possibility of future hardship, poverty, abuse or disease, for example. They might be looked upon as dentists ready to do what has to be done to clean up not simply a mouth but the whole Earth and move it closer to a painless, ultimately purposeless utopia. One of the new priests is a well known scientist, Peter Singer of Princeton, who has for a long time been calling for not only abortion but also infanticide for those who are notably less than perfect or potentially troublesome. Dismissed out of hand as he may be by the inheritors of revelation and believers in the principles of the Declaration and in general by people of balanced and healthy mind, he has apparently attracted attentive listeners of the secular utilitarian bent from the usual places, academia and media being two. He has written that, “The fact that a human being is alive, does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that beings life.” Well, if it doesn’t, there are many who had best watch out especially if a Supreme Court of the Roe mentality should ever get to hear his case. Of course, if infanticide is on the table and learned journals are now discussing it without dismissing it out of hand, imagine what’s beneath it! Can pubecide be far behind? It’s already the stuff of novels. The pressure is off. No need to rush to judgment? Now, in this new scenario parents or the state can take all the way to puberty to decide whether to keep the individual around or not. How better to be rid, after careful cost evaluation, of those turning disappointingly troublesome and sour, violent and incorrigible? The secular utilitarians of the Singer ilk who dream of reforming society into a much better place, indeed into a utopia, can easily foresee the families freed from anguish, the multitude of improved schools, the emptied jails, the safer streets with the implementation of pubecide as similarly they saw abortion reducing child abuse and child poverty. Pubecide could be looked at as a form of permanent irreversible extreme detention. And just think of the bumper crop of healthy organs to be harvested to help those deemed worthy of them! We will have a new clergy empowered to sift and ration life. This is the new Church’s form of compassion. Jonathan Swift where are you? We need a new “Modest Proposal.” And while we are at it, let’s use the new prenatal testing techniques to eliminate all those clearly incapable of attaining 100 IQs. Improvement, improvement, improvement, forever and ever attainable, amen. This is the new church’s most popular prayer. With a little imagination of the Peter Singer variety there might be no end to progress. And what’s to be lost? Just the trash! What atrocities can’t be justified or if you will, human improvements achieved, once we are rid of that troublesome Judeo-Christian revelation and the inalienable rights that rest solidly upon it? Already, as mentioned, over 90% of those diagnosed with Down syndrome have disappeared from the Earth. We are looking at the new church’s sacraments of early and deadly dispatch, sort of new non-baptism of the young. It’s rather easy because without the Creator, our self-evident truths and inalienable rights are not self-evident or inalienable anymore. No one has ever found anything more dependable and reliable on which to rest them than the God of revelation. The new priests are highly rational men of the scientific variety. They demand hard evidence of these rights and truths but, to paraphrase an analogous situation 2000 years ago, “no sign will be given them except the sign of Jonah.” We saw in “pearl” XXII what that sign was. A self-evident truth is so basic as to be beyond arguable of demonstrable proof. English essayist, Coventry Patmore, put it this way, “ There are truths which to many are incapable of proof, yet their denial is not to be tolerated as the most tolerant society finds out when it is compelled to face the practical results of such denial…There are no two sides to every question…(especially) the question of the sacredness of human life. There are no two sides to murder, you are dead or you are alive.” A self-evident truth is one you accept or you don’t for whatever reason and the soundest reason for acceptance, as many of the Founding Fathers would agree, is revelation. The great Judeo-Christian proclamation of the equality of all as children of the loving creator is not self-evident without that revelation. That we are all children of the same truly loving God who created us and respects the gifts of intellect and freedom he gave us only comrs from Judeo-Christian tradition. The concept of “all men and women created equal” was found in no culture outside its influence. If an outside culture has advanced to it, it like the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century that built on it, they did so by borrowing from the fruits of that revelation. Our laws especially of equality and inalienable rights accept those fruits and were built on them or once were. From them and the natural moral law within us come some of our most basic concepts, that justice is good for example and that the killing of innocent people is murder no matter how much good it does. This great inheritance, enhanced by experience, brought us to our basic political concepts: that the power of government derives from the consent of the governed; that the people have the right to change that government by force if justified; that the power of government is limited for the protection of the people from tyranny. Today especially the threat is in the form of an attempt to remove inalienable rights most especially, life and liberty from certain inconvenient segments of the human family. The Founders accepted these principles, the Peter Singers, the priests of the new church, don’t. The Founders are dead, the Peter Singers aren’t and they are very vocal and sometimes, as we know, the courts listen to them. The late Bernard Nathanson pointed that out. Others listen too as we saw. To help, academics have been known to excise God from the Gettysburg Address and even a President attempted a like removal from the Declaration of Independence. And as long as the self-evident nature of these truths weakens with the weakening of faith and the happy populace continues to be more concerned with Black Friday shopping sprees or the latest Lady Ga Ga antics, we can expect more exceptions to the old rules. Already the compassion cops are pressing poisonous cocktails on the useless, expensive and sometimes terminal elderly. And, as faith in revelation and the morality contained in it weakens, former self-evident truths will be submerged in a secular mindset that declares mankind rather than God the ultimate arbiter with calamitous consequences for the usual victims. Helping in all this, as was mentioned, is a vocal part of the academic and scientific establishment and the new priests like Peter Singer who ironically is the descendant of Holocaust victims, and Richard Dawkins, Britain’s leading atheist preacher. After the 1960s these new icons began to replace the priests of the old discarded “establishment” including the Church with its terribly dated and unpragmatic rules and moral strictures so easily discarded as “impractical> by the many Dr. Weismans. The Church had been preaching the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all mankind, a mankind created with dignity and in the Creator’s image, for two millennia. The message of the new church is quite different. The new establishment church and its pop. media pulpit see mankind differently and it forebodes great ill for the future of the weak and dependant parts of the human family. Here’s a small sample of the new priestly pronouncements describing the new man: He is no more than “nerve cells and their associated molecules,” –Marvin Minsky. “A soul made up of many tiny robots,”-neuroscientist Giulio Giorelli. “In essence, we are nothing but a big fly,” biologist Charles Zuker. “A pack of neurons,” -Francis Crick. “Over-anthropomorphized humans who are after all mere machines,”- MIT Researcher Rodney Brooks. “A mere accident,” biologist Jacques Monod,” or as someone else put it “”walking meat…meaningless brutish bits of matter.” This is as bad as dust in the wind and even worse than glint on the snow! And as for those bits of matter, the mere machines, the pack of neurons, the walking meat that can’t tote their load because of illness, handicaps or age, watch out! There is no equality for you; no inalienable rights. After all, the foundation of that equality and those rights, God the Father and creator of all is, according to one of the new high priests, Richard Dawkins, no more than “The Flying Spaghetti Monster.” Historically, verbal dehumanization of persons has frequently been a prelude to destruction. Slavs and Jews first became “swine,” and the handicapped “unnecessary” or “life unworthy of life” in Nazi Germany before their mass elimination and of course the pre-born were labeled “blobs of cells,” according to Planned Parenthood on the eve of Roe’s open season declaration. And more swine are on the way if the new priests have their way. Peter singer thinks it is not a defensible moral position to take the interest of animals less seriously than we take human interests simply because they are members of our species. Between a year old pig and a day old baby, the pig has rights superior to the baby because of its greater self-consciousness! It comes down to this, the new (self-evident) truth is, there is no self-evident truth beyond the scientifically provable. Therefore, of course, the most important truths are gone. If to be true a thing must be laboratory verified, if there is nothing beyond scientific proof and based rather on a rational faith in revelation, then our national guide posts, “We hold these truths” and inalienable rights “to be self evident” and “endowed by the Creator,” as the Founding Fathers wrote, are, to dip into the old jargon bucket, in deep dew dew especially given the views of the new priests on the disposability of certain categories of humanity. According to their laboratories we are essentially big flies, mere accidents, a pack of neurons, walking meat. So much for human dignity and equality before God! If everything must pass laboratory proof for approval and not much of vital importance to us as human beings, especially our inalienable rights can, then the apparently useless and decrepit among us or as the Nazis used to say “those not worthy of life,” are already far out on the plank. This was Patmore’s point. If nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all. If the inalienable rights of equality, life and liberty were not self -evident they could never be proved because they are beyond proof without the revelation of the Fatherhood of God. The laboratory evidence is lacking because the whole stack of cards rests on God. In fact, since the failure to persuade of Kant’s categorical imperative which stated as a rational non-revealed ground for all rights and morality that any action or right to be legitimate must be extendable or expandable into a universal law of action and behavior without doing damage, no modern school of philosophy has argued that reason uninformed by revelation can produce an ethics or a basis for these building block rights and immoral ideas. As the late Richard Neuhaus wrote, “From Nietzsche and Heidegger to Rorty, modern philosophy insists that reason offers little guidance in matters of morality. The people who supported the Declaration of Independence understood this. Here’s Washington: “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds… reason and experience both forbid us to expect that morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” He meant principle far beyond what is discoverable in the laboratory and far beyond the “spiritual but not religious” new age mode. Once morality becomes untethered from revelation and its philosophical sidekick natural law, it becomes as dust in the wind. Toleration and compassion, the virtue of virtues in the secularist’s increasingly skimpy arsenal but certainly vital values that must be preserved can become, with the best of intentions but without divine underpinnings, a road to hellish tyranny. Often the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Goethe wrote about Napoleon, that he “went forth to seek virtue, but since she was not to be found, he got power.” How hard did he look? Did he overlook revelation and the millions who take it to heart in their daily lives? Dostoyevsky illustrates the danger of a discarded revelation and the moral law it contains in the story we related of the murder of a devout old women, in order to steal her money for a good cause: “A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped on that old women’s money which will be buried in a monastery,” said the murderer. And the murderer did much good, “dozens of families saved from destitution” and thousands got a new chance. If murder of the old lady did that much good, why not murder incorporated, call it Robin Hood Inc., to spread the wealth to those really in need by offing the rich? Why not sex selection abortion to make families desirous of only males happy? Or, as it was claimed, falsely as it turned out, eliminate most poverty and abuse by bringing in abortion on demand! Create a world full of happy families by eliminating the pressure of unwanted children. And what promised benefits! More education will be available to fewer but more wanted children leading to great social improvement, more doctors, more nurses, more scientists. Lives will be saved in the long run by sacrificing some (not one’s own of course) now and so much good done! We now see the reality that Dostoyevsky saw behind the murderer’s good intentions. That good intentions unhinged from revelation was, in reality, the road to hell. It’s the road all moralities have historically taken when wrenched free from their roots in the Creator. Dostoyevsky could see through the good that could be done if only we cut loose from revelation and the great value Judeo-Christian morality puts on each and every life including the most “worthless,” and he saw horror. He was dead before their time but he saw the Lenins, the Stalins, the Maos, the Hitlers, the Pot Pols even the terrorists who use religion devoid of its moral strictures. And he saw the Manhattan women who aborted one of her twins because she didn’t want to be forced by economic depravation to shop at Casco or move to Staten Island? What havoc is wrought when compassion, good intentions and not so good intentions are released from the strictures and demands of our Judeo-Christian roots! Like sex, good intentions unchanneled, uncoralled and unguided by a clear morality of life can become destructive. Without infusing toleration and compassion with the genuine love that has been examined in detail in some of the previous pearls, things go easily awry. Today, in the name of toleration many a college campus has seen freedom of speech severely corralled by what amounts to thought police enforcing so-called hate speech mandates which often ban such things as anti-abortion rallies and vocal opposition to same sex marriage. Catholic Charities is being forced from its traditional task of placing orphans and abandoned children up for adoption because the new morality finds its policy not to place with same sex couples intolerable. On the other side of the spectrum, just how confused things can get with the right to choose was demonstrated at San Jose State College when a student opposed the school’s anti-plagiarism and anti-cheating program. She told a student rally “it totally hurts a person’s right to choose whether or not they want cheat or plagiarize.” And so it does in a society that thinks choice means the right to destroy new life. This is Sir.Wall’s individualism gone mad. It is choice unhinged from revelation and even from basic biology. For those supporting the stealing of someone else’s life under the banner of choice but opposed to the exercise of that kind of choice when it comes to stealing someone else’s life work, homework or research there is a need for the consistency that logic and revelation can provide. But logic without revelation will lead many into the thickets of utopia. Secular materialistic logic might well see here a perfect opportunity for pubecide. Terminate before full maturity all those who begin to show definite and incorrigible signs of a predisposition to cheating or for that matter, drug addiction, violence, rape, murder, theft excessive religiosity, whatever in the years ahead may eventually get added to the hit list started by Roe vs, Wade. In that ruling, according to a culpably bamboozled Supreme Court, to be an inconvenience was enough grounds for a “mother” to destroy her unborn child. So, why not now when? Since it’s already open season on newly conceived life to logically add the life of the young and very dangerous or the old and absolutely useless? But wait! The old do vote and can sound off! Political power may not be the best moral grounding for the right to life but with the best one, Judeo-Christian revelation, being shelved, perhaps it will hold back the hammer from them…for a while. The pre-born, of course, don’t even have that edge. If life doesn’t begin at conception, all other points are completely arbitrary, wrote Walker Percy. It can begin anywhere, implantation, birth, self-awareness, puberty, personhood, at the 100 IQ point, at full body growth, at full brain development (usually at age 25) you name it. All other starting points after conception, are arbitrary, adjustable and usually agenda driven. It was pointed out that placing the start at implantation, as a growing number like to do, is like saying a long trip begins when the family checks into the hotel room on the first night. Even working toward equal economic opportunity another value with roots in Christianity’s concept that all are equally children of God, when unhinged from accountability to anything above us, historically has turned into Gulags and new self-evident truths. “Truth is what advances the revolution” pronounced Lenin from his own Mt. Sinai to the adoring revolutionaries like the American John Reed, subject of the movie, “Reds.” It is dangerously unhinged values like that often surrounded by the best of compassionate intentions that bring hell on Earth. The irony is Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries declared traditional religion the opium of the people only to become the arsenic of the people. They killed tens of millions to make their revolution come true. Exclusive of religious principle and with the underpinnings of religion removed, we can expect even more hell on Earth especially from the priests of the new revolution as their “walking meat” school of thought replaces the faith that raised mankind to the status of children of “Our Father”. The hundred million dead from the Marxist and Hitlerian revolutions, the fifty million abortions in the U.S. alone since Roe are no accident. Thomas Paine wrote, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” The forty years since Roe have done their job. Paine might have had Pope’s “Essay on Man” in mind: Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs only to be seen Yet seen too often, familiar with her face We first endure, then pity, then embrace. Many who would have been horrified by abortion in 1973 have grown accustom to her ugly face since. Today those who continually prattle about making abortion safe and rare obviously do not understand the human being as well as Christianity, Tom Paine and Alexander Pope did. Legalization of the destruction of life in the womb is the first blessing bestowed on America by the new church, and as we know blessings are encouragements. 50,000,000 abortions would have surprised neither Pope, nor Paine, nor the Church. We, after all, are the poor, damaged, children of Eve and Adam. We are a mixed bag and the bad in the bag needs little encouragement to break forth in new and gloriously horrible ways. Roe was just such encouragement. The good God gave us freedom, even the freedom to be our own worst enemy. Law and religion can help put the bad back in the bag. They cannot make us moral but they can help or hinder what does. The Supreme Court’s Roe Decision has been a great hindrance. It is a deadly teacher that has taught many to embrace a terrible evil, the killing of innocent and defenseless life. It gave a terrible wrong the superficial appearance of being right by draping it in the mantle of law and replacing the “Thou shall not kill” of natural law, conscience and the revelation on Mt. Sinai with vague and vacillating ideas about choice and privacy that have no foundation either in the Constitution or revelation. Law like media helps shape culture for better or worse and culture shapes conduct…for better or worse. The culture spawned by the new law and the media’s delirium about its benefits for women fits in well with the tame undemanding new gods of new age religion, life forces and energy fields along with their promise of cosmic nothingness waiting all after death. Do not expect from such religion a thirst for justice that will impel great inconvenience and self-sacrifice in defense of the defenseless. Rather expect the unconcern for justice that started with the pre-born to spread to other inconvenient vulnerables, the diseased with problems other than Down syndrome, those blighted by dependency, discrepancy, illness, loneliness and age especially the severely handicapped, the mentally ill and dependant, all those burdensome invalids no longer enjoying life or sometimes convinced as much and so costly and inconvenient to those who are. As massive national debt forces tighter budgets, expect great pressure for medical rationing with the above categories viewed as expendable opportunities for saving…not life of course, but money. Facing these challenges without further disgracing ourselves as human beings requires the well-honed wisdom of a morality based on revelation and the dignity of man not utilitarian materialism. Rolling things back so that the pre-born and other potential targets are again under the one tent of humanity will be a consuming task. Don’t expect the institutions and people of 1925 to spring to the rescue but we can take a cue from their love and caring. But it all rests on faith. In lieu of that, expect instead Planned Parenthood type outfits and death with dignity squads. Even the smiling and apparently oblivious Buddha of so many photos and statues, contemplating, anticipating and welcoming the oblivion to come seems to exude a comparative unconcern for the plight we are in although he was a person of great compassion if not exactly love. It was noted that between eschew and renew love must always choose renew to be authentic. That’s hard to do if you believe, as the Buddha did, that in order to free ourselves, we much renounce all worldly attachments, including even our children. And how much help can be hoped for from his follower the Dalai Lama who believes in a similar detachment? A kind and gentle man, he nevertheless fails to see the basic difference between a religion that teaches a detachment ending in our ultimate melding with the impersonal, indefinable and oblivious universal spirit and one based on revelation that teaches us to become the salt of the Earth, the leaven in the lump, indeed the light of the world with the promise of a new, abundant, fully aware life to come for each individual who learned to love here. Love without action and sacrifice is mere words as compassion without “suffering with” is just sentiment. The cross is the symbol of the kind of love we need. Love without the essential willingness to sacrifice self for the beloved is no love at all. And, as authentic love spread under the aegis of Christianity, writes Joseph Sobran, “Quietly, gradually, without milestones, Christianized Europe abolished or discredited many everyday evils of pagan antiquity…” Included in the list was slavery, abortion, infanticide, divorce which usually meant easy male divorce, polygamy that rated many women to be worth one man, pederasty, sodomy,” add concubinage, and prostitution and we have a huge slow miracle in which women and children were among the main beneficiaries. This was not achieved through Buddhist-like detachment but Christian involvement. It is now being undone with the rise of a secular neo-paganism and popular soft new age spiritualities that have nothing to offer with which to resist the moral tsunami. Only Christ-like love will turn things around. There is hope. There has been peaceful turns-around in history before, perhaps not as all encompassing and sweeping as the original Christian revolution described above, but nevertheless brought off usually by reform movements with strong Christian motivation. Christ urged us to be the leaven in the lump of dough. It takes very little leaven to raise the whole lump, very little salt to flavor the whole hash. It is this spirit that has advanced the west out of the escapism, detachment and inertia that has plagued most of the rest of the world and that Alexander Smith and Arthur Schlesinger wrote about several “pearls” ago. Some of these turns-around have happened fairly recently. Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movements were discussed earlier and it has also happened in the distant past. Christianity preserved and regenerated a Roman culture sinking under a sea of pagan barbarism. Pitirim A. Sorokin, the founder of the Sociology Department at Harvard in his book “The American Sex Revolution,” stated concerning ancient Rome: “Salvation and regeneration came from Christianity with its anti-materialistic, anti-sensualistic, and anti-erotic system of values and moral commandments…Christianity was able to curb greatly the prevailing sexual anarchy and to restore the sanctity of marriage and the family, and the normal or lawful forms of sex activity.” It did indeed, but he does seem to overstate the “anti” part. Substitute “rationally directed,” for “anti” and the picture becomes more accurate. Given Sorokin’s assessment and others agree with him, the question can be raised whether “sexual anarchy” by which he would include rampant promiscuity and a spreading homosexuality along with their damaging effects on marriage and family life is always a precursor to the decline of a culture and civilization? It may be so, given those factors are definitely associated with demographic decline which if not reversed sounds a society’s death knell. The healthy condition of marriage and family is the direct remedy for such a decline but a culture plagued with “sexual anarchy” can hardly resort to them. Andrew Sullivan, a leading spokesman for the homosexual life style in the U.S., may have inadvertently put his finger on a situation that makes our present condition in the U.S. fraught with danger. Even while pushing for same-sex marriage he wrote, “gay men have a need for extramarital outlets.” Research by David McWhirter and Andrew Mattison and published in their book, “The Male Couple,” agree citing a sexual fidelity rate for male homosexual couples of 4.5% compared to 85% for married females and 75.5% for married males in the heterosexual category. If spreading heterosexual promiscuity including both widespread extra-marital sex among the young and the substitution of cohabitation for marriage among many others weaken marriage and family life, the homosexual will end up making a disproportionately large contribution to the decline especially in pressing for legalization of same sex marriage. There are other factors doing damage too. The popular media, besides its tilt in favor of the equalization of hetero and homosexuality especially in marriage rights, presents a world of sterile, fully contracepted, abortion backed extra marital sex as more the rule than the exception especially among the “cool” and that’s sure to do additional damage to marriage and family given the media’s influence especially on the coming generation not that the media moguls care. The result is that with the family already under pressure and in very shaky condition, the American birthrate has slumped below replacement levels and the trend seems to be gathering overall momentum in that direction. Were it not for immigration and a not negligible though proportionately shrinking number of religiously minded married couples having families we would be seeing and feeling the demographic decline and related economic problems much more than we are The massive avoidance of children is something new to America. Posterity loomed large in everything the Founders attempted and remained so in the pioneering generations after them. The dismissing of children and posterity as of no great concern or importance is often an indication of a loss of faith or interest in the future, neither of which bode well for a nation facing a new century. It also shows a loss of faith in ourselves and our ability to rationally solve such issues as environmental impact, an overpopulation already peaking and even the persistently exaggerated picture of the horrors and hardships of life used to justify removal of a quarter of our posterity each year. Often these issues are thin covers for the big reasons for avoiding children, inconvenience and financial commitment. They cost money, and require lots of self-sacrificing love. The decline of love leads to the decline of a lot of important things, one of them population. Demographic decline is usually not a good thing, as history often demonstrates, for any nation or civilization. It’s frequently another sign of decay as it was for Rome when its people could not even fill the ranks of the army defending them against the invading barbarians. The revitalizing effects of Christianity came too late to save the Empire. It did however help preserve the best of the culture for the coming age. In other words, based on authentic love, the Church as the leaven at work in the lump has in the past and can again lift and transform a morally decaying society and save a crumbling culture. It does this by convincing enough people to bring under control the disorderly, destructive and often sterile moral life that enslaves people to their own lowest drives and often breaks their spirit as well, thus turning people away from the authentic life goals indicated by their better grace aided natures. By bringing under the control of faith and reason those things that always tend to undermine the life’s blood of any culture and rob it of its physical and mental health, its morality and its creativity, civilization can be dragged away from the brink of a rising moral barbarism. The current descent into this barbarism is everywhere statistically evident but especially so in the popular media. There the slide has been long but it’s picking up momentum. As early as 1961 the symptoms were gathering. Read Newton Minow’s observations that year: “Sit before a television screen. I assure you, you will observe a vast wasteland…game shows, violence, audience participation shows (the progenitor of today’s reality programs), formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem and violence, sadism, murder…gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly (he should be around now!) commercials-many screaming, cajoling and offending.” Lucky Minow! He missed violent sweat drenched, half clad rockers, tattoo coated athletes and reality shows that create a yearning for Buddhist-like oblivion or at least the mute button if not the plug. Today much of the media is a petri dish of decay with almost total primetime involvement in everything from grungy to glitzy unreality featuring graphic life demeaning rather than life enhancing sex and a violence that regularly features mutilated, dissected, and blown up bodies in HD living color. Meanwhile, the language sinks increasingly under the weight of crudity and vulgarity with what passes for humor hardly rising above a depressingly sour cynicism. Historically and biologically, loss of soul leads to decay. Surveys increasingly show that many people don’t know they have one. Historian-philosopher Will Durant comments that the moral and physical backbone of Persia (its soul) was broken at Marathon, Salamis and Plataea. The nation descended into corruption and apathy with immorality and degeneration spreading among the people. In a few generations they went from Stoicism to Epicureanism. As someone described it, the rule to eat once a day became eat all day. One has to wonder what’s our excuse. Persia’s was a philosophic and moral downturn that a later Roman general, Manius Dentatus, (the bucktoothed,) observed in Rome’s Greek and Macedonian enemies during their invasion of Italy under Pyrrhus, (the Red King,) and he was glad to see it. He observed in their Epicureanism a life sapping philosophy not fit for Romans but very handy to Rome when sapping the vigor of her enemies. Later when the Romans, as stoical as a people could be at the time, finally defeated Hannibal after many defeats at his hands and destroyed Carthage, diggings centuries later at the site revealed heaps of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of their decayed and awful religion. Their god Baal had devoured her children. It was a culture severely gone astray and the Romans cut down the groves of Baal as, after a new version of the old decadence caught on in Rome and helped bring her to its knees centuries later, the Christians cut down the groves of Venus. From the Latin name for her orgiastic temples found in those groves, “fanum,” comes our word “fanatic.” Moral decay with the accompanying loss of soul has brought many a civilization down. Christianity arrived too late to save the Rome of the Empire and much too late for Egypt, Persia and Greece. Sorokin mentions the “sexual anarchy” that assumed extreme forms in Egypt and cites the “homosexual love that entered the mores of the population.” A similar development later enveloped Greece. J.D. Unwin’s classic “Sex and Culture,” describes Athens in the fifth century BC where the old customs “had disappeared, the sexual opportunity of both sexes being extended…Divorce became easy and common, pederasty (homosexual sex between men and boys) appeared; the men possessed mistresses as well as wives, women broke bounds, consoling themselves with both wine and clandestine love affairs. The energy of Athens declined…” It declined rapidly. Her pioneering philosophical advances stalled and it took the message of revelation brought to it by Christianity preached by disciples like St. Paul to get it going again with a renewed intellectual vigor though in altered form centuries later. Greece evolved into the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople its capital. Some civilizations may give out with a long sigh and sag but not the Byzantine Empire. Even with all its internal divisions and failings and its external defeats at the hands of an aggressively expansive Islam, it resisted vigorously and its holding out for centuries saved Eastern Europe from Moslem inundation while at the same time in the West the Christians of Spain were pushing back against the same aggressive force. Byzantium was a civilization that lasted a thousand years and withstood seven centuries of Islamic pressure and intermittent onslaught before being taken by storm in 1452 with its Emperor dying on the ramparts. It became Turkey with Constantinople transformed into Istanbul but most of Eastern Europe was saved. Long before the roots of Byzantium were set by the Emperor Constantine when he moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome east to his new city of Constantinople, the Greek decay and decline had led to Athens fading with a sigh and being absorbed by Rome. Yet it happened to Rome too. What Dentatus happily saw in the leaders of his Greek and Macedonian opponents, not necessarily the debauch associated sometimes unfairly with Epicureanism but a decayed version of aloof stoical detachment and self-absorption similar to the Buddhist and practiced by many followers of Epicurus, eventually, as he feared, got to Rome. By the 120s AD the Emperor Hadrian, though far from aloof or detached did become a full devotee of things Greek, so much so that he was nicknamed, “greekling” for his admiration and imitation of the Athenian penchant for pederasty, popularly known as “Greek love,” as well as secret cults and Eastern mystery religions. Later, under the stoical Marcus Aurelius, a faulty version of the old Roman admired by Dentatus reemerged but not for long. Commodus, his son reverted to the easy life and the Empire declined rapidly only to be temporarily saved by Diocletian and Constantine, the first Christian Emperor. But it could not hold out against the Germanic tribes pressing in upon it in the way that Byzantium later resisted the Islamic invasions. Christianity arrived too late to have sufficient impact to revive the Empire’s sick and dying soul but much of the good was salvaged. Perhaps there was no hope for Egypt, Persia, Classical Athens and Classical Rome because the hope filled message of Christianity was yet to be revealed. Still, it must be admitted, Christian revelation is by no means a panacea for political ills. It is first and foremost a message loaded with good news and aimed at the individual and the transformation of his and her mind and heart. It is not a political message at all nor a political remedy guaranteeing the survival of a society yet, by transforming individuals, it can have that effect. The Christian religion that transformed and built on Rome’s Greco-Roman cultural roots gave rise both directly through the achievements of the Middle Ages and indirectly through some of the advances of the Enlightenment, to the civilization of the West with all the benefits that we and many others influenced by it can now enjoy, specifically government based on individual dignity, rights, responsibilities and freedoms. That civilization is nourished from three main cultural taproots, the Greco-Roman, the Christianity and the Germanic influence brought in with the barbarian invasions. But, the hope held out by that civilization is now under siege because the message of revelation carried by the Church and from which the civilization arose and received vitality is now under siege. David Horowitz, a reformed 1960s radical, in his 2012 book, “A Point in Time,” sees our problems arising from a secular hope grounded entirely in “earthly institutions.” This type of hope is not enough. He calls hope not grounded in anything beyond such institutions bound to disappoint and frustrate. He remembers his father’s never fulfilled hope and devotion to communism as a prime example and sees the Judeo-Christian vision of reality as the best answer for coming to terms with our ubiquitous problems. Dimmed our hope may be by the new secular priests and the new secular church that they wish to prepare for us but the hope and life revelation offers is still ours and still the West’s great advantage. It is appropriate to begin the closing of the clasp on our pearl necklace with a quote from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who was reacting against modern atheism and the Marxist claim that religion was the opium of the people. He wrote “A true opium for the people is a belief in (ultimate) nothingness after death-the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.” That danger is growing but this nothingness has no place in Christianity. On the other hand, the elements of classical Eastern thought centering on karma and reincarnation ultimately end with the same nothingness. Even the agnostic Buddha in his reaction against the Hindu pantheon of gods sounds almost atheistic. He constructed an ethical religion but it, much like the central tenants of Epicureanism, was designed to avoid what Stoicism, Christianity and Judaism face up to and indeed embrace, namely life with its difficulties. No salt of the Earth for Buddha, no leaven in the lump for Epicurus, escape into tranquility though by different roads was the way that they preached. But, though, at about the same time in the West the philosophies of Epicurus and later Lucretius were sounding a variation of the same aloft and aloof approach to facing life’s disruptive challenges that the Buddha was preaching in the East, there was one vast difference. The approach found home in the East but never in the West where Christianity took root. In both an Epicurean West had it come to that and Buddhist East, there was that opium of nothingness awaiting all indiscriminately that Milosz feared and condemned. There was no ultimate reckoning, no ultimate justice except perhaps in the form of many punishing existences before escape and ultimate absorption into the life force of an impersonal and unknowing universe and thus in the words of the modern poem mentioned earlier, achieve at best glinthood. No help or hope there, and no drive to face the world and try to change it. Escape was their way but not the way of Christianity. But as Christianity is increasingly pushed away by the new powers and priests of the West’s new religion, what then? Similar to the Dalai Lama, the post-modern New Age take on all this, often Eastern in orientation, is that there is but one dogma. It is that there is no dogma except of course the dogma that all truths, and all approaches to truth are equally true or equally false, it hardly matters. This is how a false notion of equality turns destructive. What is rational for one person may not be for anyone else but who is to judge? Judgment is elitist so goodbye to rationality and farewell to objective discoverable truths based on evidence and self-evident truths based on revelation. Sounds a lot like the return of nothing! We’re being robbed of our soul! Agreement about important matters is becoming extremely difficult. In this atmosphere of a mistaken tolerance and ultimate nothingness, the intellectually indolent often seem immunized against evidence but are granted equality status with the studious and serious searcher after truth. For someone to try to convince others of a truth is often taken as a sign of elitism and a sin against equality, This new take on toleration seems to demand that everybody is right and nobody is wrong and if you disagree, do so silently or be labeled intolerant, elitist or worse. In this false equality, open and rigorous debate is stifled and truth is the casualty. The one and only dogma is the one that denies that some truths may be truer than others, some windows clearer than others. No sturdy soul enliving ethic, no salt of the Earth, certainly not one calling for self-sacrifice even to the point of suffering for the good of others, can stand on such sand. With both Eastern religion and New Age thought, suffering is caused by our stars or our Karma and has no value. That the fault may be in us and not our stars as Shakespeare attested or that suffering may be redemptive, transforming and productive of love as Christ’s cross teaches is denied. Justice, renewal, reckoning, suffering, redemption, dogma, such are the thoughts of the “organized” religion that the new priests loudly condemn. If they continue to win a following, our suffering society will lose a vital support with inalienable rights quickly put in jeopardy. The most “organized” religion of all, if you will, Catholicism, must try to shoulder some of the burden for this dangerous development due to her past errors of political, scientific and social judgment epitomized in some circles by the Galileo case. These errors are ammunition for her opponents though the fact is, much of the opprobrium is based as much on ignorance as historical realities and much of it comes with the label, “made in media land” where historical distortion is common. In all this it is helpful for a realistic appraisal of Church history to keep in mind the image of the great hospital ship striving to salvage humanity for a better life here and for the new life promised but by no means always piloted and manned in its two millennia journey by saints. Indeed it sometimes becomes rather sullied as will happen to the leaven in a lump. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, the Church was promised protection from formally teaching error in faith and morals, not sinlessness or for that matter political astuteness. It’s a simple appraisal but one missed by many, especially those who would like nothing more than the removal of Christian influence from all public life and those who live their lives in media’s suffocating box and are heavily influenced by it. But, to repeat, there is hope. That’s one of the great lessons of revelation along with faith and charity. John Noonan has written, “It is embarrassing to live in the most materially comfortable time in history and not be happy.” Yet many are not happy though there are many reasons to be. There is reason for hope and happiness far beyond what material comforts can provide. The Christian especially should never surrender to pessimism. And it is not only the Church’s revelation based faith and theology that is the basis for the optimism. Reason and science too, though they took some deadly turns in the hands of 20th Century totalitarians, speak out strongly for hope and against despair. The history of modern physics illustrates not just the nuclear with its promise and dangers but the more it probed into the structure of matter, the greater was the mathematical order it found. The order we see in nature does not arise from chaos or from nothing; it is distilled out of an even more fundamental order, an order of remarkable mathematical structure and of patterns more beautiful than those known before our time. Emily, in “Our Town” called it, with child’s imagination, the mind of God. “An order of remarkable mathematical structure,” and beautiful too, these are the thoughts of physicist Stephen M. Barr of the University of Delaware. Truth, with its bonus of beauty, exists in itself and not just in the eye of the beholder. Let those from either traditional East or secularized West replete with its new church and deadly clergy deny eternal reality but never the Christian! Classic Eastern religious thought and revealed religion, especially Christianity, go off in very different directions, the one toward the abolition of man, the other toward man’s full realization in eternal life in its prime with a loving Father. Though we turn them against ourselves at times in terrible ways, our Father never takes back the gifts that make us like him and indeed in his very image. They are the gifts that make us unique of all the creatures we know, our reasoning intellects and free wills. It is from them and our ability to use them for authentic love that come our irreplaceable innate dignity. It makes a big difference. One that should not and need not be papered over in the name of a distorted toleration that tends very easily to drift into intolerance and even tyranny in the hands of the new priesthood and a new and deadly secular church. THE 40TH PEARL One more pearl, perhaps a little tarnished at times but a pearl nevertheless. It’s the original Church, first called “Catholic,” about 100AD and forever new, forever salting, and still identified by its four ancient marks, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Holy does not of course mean perfect. Holy means the Church is always working at doing the good she was established to do though the work is never perfectly realized. We read and hear about her sins, from the Galileo affair to the recent sex scandal involving a small percentage of the crew, but she’s been around a long time and is comprised of humanity and all that means, hundreds of generations of it, all crowded on the great Bark of Peter. It’s a vast hospital ship, a great lifeboat for many of that immense tribe made up of the poor and sinful children of Eve. All are on their way home to the Father through what is for many of them a vale of tears but the Father has let them know he has plenty of room, “many mansions.” Naturally, there’s always room for more on aboard. The Church’s sins and human failings during the long centuries of leavening action are often highlighted by her critics who prefer to ignore the great good that she has accomplished. Some of those accomplishments and benefits to humanity have been laid out in a few of the preceding pearls with the aid of unbiased commentators. Nevertheless, hostility is sometimes the reaction of a world she is commanded to change and she knows full well the obstacles she faces. They are many faceted and over the years have been varied but typical at present is a media establishment often mentioned here that is very prone to accentuate the negative and almost eliminate the positive in human life. To listen to some of the extremists, we are a plague on the planet when in actuality we alone have the ability and intelligence to save it and it can be done without the destruction of human rights and dignity. As a typically sensationalistic example of its skewered approach, it give the Florida woman who killed her young daughter because she was in the way of her social life a year of intensive news coverage while the young mother of Rayne, Louisiana, who out of motherly love perished using her body to shield her infant during a hurricane got an hour’s treatment and was forgotten. Or take the many women who refuse to have abortions and who pass unknown while the Casco mother who destroyed one of her twins for economic reasons gets full treatment. Movies too are made of a million Al Capones and godfather thugs but a do gooder like “Dagger” John, an Archbishop of New York, is passed over and forgotten though his works are still with us. No Scorcese for him. We hear much about abortion as necessary in today’s harsh world but little about how the “unwanted” were cared for in places like Philadelphia before Roe declared open season on them. We are bombarded with bad priests entangled in sex scandal and cover up but nothing of the faithful 97%, the celibate and selfless priests who still work in the fields and cities of the nation unsung. Mother Theresa is gone but we would never know of the hundreds of her nuns still at work in the poorest parts of the world if we relied on the popular media. They, the Dagger, the mother and the millions like them are all the leaven that helps keep life and hope going in the vast lump of humanity, though they hardly make to the tube unless they drop the ball. Not all are in Peter’s bark in a formal way but they are there in many different ways. It’s good to remember those many mansions. So, on and on the ship goes, spreading the good news of the fullness of life for each of us that is Christ’s promise to every new generation and bringing all it can of us prodigals to that promised new life in Our Father’s house. The Church has its work cut out for it. It faces external obduracy and internal dissentions. The first is an ever-present but faulty mindset that thinks the answers of the present are always superior to those of the past. Indeed, many hold that we should let go of the old fashioned insights of long ago for those of the present but it is humbling to remember that the new insights for which the old are abandoned will soon be old too and scheduled for abandonment. In going for the truth, pride in the present, the idea that new thought is superior simply by being new, is an obstacle that must be realistically dethroned. There is also the related danger of simply going with the crowd. In this vein, though popular demonstrations and protests have their legitimate place in a free society, Kierkegaard was making a valid point when he wrote in his hyperbolic way,” A thousand people saying the same thing makes it false even if it happens to be true.” Mark Twain was saying something similar when he wrote, “If you find yourself in agreement with the crowd, think again.” The accumulated wisdom of the past, a good part embodied in the Catholic Church, the oldest institution we have, should be attended to, fairly examined, studied and scrutinized, then possessed when found valid and true rather than summarily cast aside. In the electronic clamor of our distracted age, that can be a daunting task. I wonder if Milton would be so optimistic today as he was almost four hundred years ago or would he alter his opinion that “Truth can be counted on to have her say and way…Let her and falsehood grapple…who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter.” It would seem he was not confronted with a media and academia that are really not all that free and open to encounter on the really important issues. For that reason, sometimes divisive but important life questions, hot button topics and traditional metaphysical concerns are avoided, even banned like the Danish cartoons critical of Mohammed were a couple of years ago. In some similar venues the pro-life position, questions critical of the Darwinian version of evolution, criticism of the homosexual life style and such are barely tolerated if not totally censored. The use of the word “encounter” itself would raise fears in some yet debate and mental confrontation are tried and true methods of attaining clarity and truth. To placate very vocal and hypersensitive segments of society, much of the media and many a campus avoid such openness. They like to claim that they entertain all diversity indiscriminately but the really sensitive issues that need to be explored and debated with all views given equal opportunity for airing such as the aggressive history of Islam that the Danish cartoons tried to raise are avoided rather than risk divisive debate and, sad to say, in some cases even violence. The Church has learned through the ups and downs of centuries of experience in a variety of social and political settings that it functions best overall at its main job of spreading the good news in societies that are free and open. Even societies that supported it in the past eventually weakened it, infringed on her freedom and became liabilities. Often she negotiated concordats to insure her freedom to operate. Societies closed against it and sometimes even persecuting it such as the Communist and Nazi regimes in the 20th century and currently radical Islamic countries in the Middle East and the heavily secularized Western states adept at trying to push her out of the public square and into the closet of merely private opinion are at this stage of history her biggest headache. By remembering the long past the Church attains a very realistic perspective for viewing the present. The second danger is a weakening of the Church by internal dissention. It is a danger that often arises when too much of the lump of human frailty rubs off on it. The Reformation might be considered a good example in that it was partially a reaction against the worldliness of the Church at the time but typically, as with most revolutions, zealots take the helm and much of the baby goes out the window with the bath water. The result was multiple divisions and the general worsening and weakening of Christianity especially regarding unity and authentic doctrine with benefits hardly commensurate. Holiness was not appreciably increased but the divisions remain. But nevertheless, the Catholic writer G.K.Chesterton pointed to a real danger when he wrote, “If the world grows too worldly it can be rebuked by the Church but if the Church grows too worldly it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world.” This is very true although now, rather ironically, some of that world justifiably rails against the small minority of priests and protectors who became sexually worldly but at the same time shorts its own criticism by refusing to condemn, abandon or even seriously criticize its own wantonness and ever increasing sexually destructive ways, Ways that frequently put children and family in great disarray. There have indeed been some bad times for the Church when the salt lost much savor and tang and the leaven much strength but it always came back, often improved.” We are reminded of author Flannery O’Connor’s description of the bark: It’s a Church of saints and sinners too. Christ never said that the Church would be operated in a sinless or intelligent way, but that it would not teach error. This does not mean that every priest will not teach error (or sin) but the whole Church speaking through the Pope will not teach error in matters of faith. It was founded on a man who three times denied Christ. Don’t expect his successors to walk on water. Such a realistic view of the Church would help avoid much confusion and disappointment in her human failings and clear the deck for an apt appreciation of essayist Stephen Tonsor’s assessment of some of the more unsung personal benefits of Christianity. To paraphrase: The true Christian is free of metaphysical anxiety and if not happy as a clam given the evil we experience, is a realist in a world that bears the unmistakable imprint of God’s ordering hand. He is free of bitter and radical alienation and is not taken in by, indeed has no hope in any secular utopian social order or social engineering scheme. Regardless of what many moderns have insisted, sin, evil, tragedy, are not the consequence of inadequate social planning and education and will never be eliminated by those means. They are the consequence of man’s sin prone and disordered nature. That’s where they have to be confronted and improvement achieved and the Church is uniquely equipped to do it, all the while knowing, “the poor (the evil and sinful) we will always have with us.” So why bother to fight? Precisely because in the battle we are improved! I close with Albert Camus who wrote, “The writer’s job is to speak up for the voiceless.” And not just the voiceless, but all who feel cowered or overwhelmed by the almost inescapable roaring of a secular saturated entertainment media as well as an academic establishment often of like mind. This I have tried to do. POSTSCRIPT, EPILOGUE, AFTERWORD, APOLOGY (YOU NAME IT) I believe it was Machiavelli who wrote to his children. “I send you the worthiest gift I have to offer, inasmuch as it comprises all that I have learned from long experience and continuous study.” This I have also tried to do. If things were written here that are commonplace, I tried to say them in my own way and certainly not to bore. If there are any useful insights, I am glad. They have been culled from the thought and hard work of many others and have come to me through years of reading, studying, sifting and evaluating. Eighteenth century English writer and wit, Sydney Smith, wrote something about writing that strikes me right, “If I don’t write I fear no one else will say what I think should be said in the way I think it should be said.” I only wish I could have said those things I did say and wanted to say, so much better. I like to write and I’ve been trying to learn how to do it well for years. Forgive me for practicing on you dear ones and dear readers. Needless to say, if there was any unfairness to or misrepresentation of any point of view in what I have written, it was not intended and I shall happily stand corrected. Logical lapses and non-sequiturs should be reported too. What is presented here is not a history but a personal reflection based on the factual record, If some of the “pearls” seemed to have a similar sheen or appear to overlap remember redundancy is a teacher’s occupational hazard. I’m afraid I am a master at it so please be forgiving and chalk it up to over thirty years in the classroom. That said, it is obvious that Christ had answered Pilate’s question before he asked it, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” As Joseph Bottum wrote: God gives all He has to give His Son to speak that one word, LIVE. Dedication: In memory of my Sister-in-Law Linda Niver Murphy who died in December of 2010 and to my mother who would have been 100 that same year. Also, to my California Cousin Carol Finn, who died in January 2011 and my father who would have been 100 in November of the same year. The work is also dedicated to Susy with all my heart and to the future, to my loving children and Grandchildren and those coming after. Dick Murphy Sr. Beacon. 7/31/2011 ................
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