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Early Church Father Athanaseus described the spiritually diseased condition of all too many today. Their souls he said, are materialized. By this he meant that their souls are closed to God the Father. Their downward-looking focus is on gratifying their appetites: pride, covetousness, gluttony, lusts, etc.

Nowadays, the idea of a "spiritually diseased condition" is virtually unheard of. But major thinkers of the ancient world were very much preoccupied with this problem — pneumopathy (in contradistinction to psychopathy). Plato — perhaps the greatest analyst of the soul qua soul who ever lived — called it nosos; Aristotle, nosemos; Cicero, aspernatio rationalis, which translates as the "the contempt for reason."

Well before Christianity, going back millennia, it was generally recognized that human beings have souls, and that they could become disordered. And when they do, then everything else in a man's life becomes disordered; for the soul is the foundation of the human person (so to speak), the very seat of human will, of choosing and acting, on whose order — good or bad — reason itself ultimately either stands or falls.

Nowadays, of course, atheists among our intellectual elites have taken the position that, since there is (allegedly) no God, then likewise, there is no such thing as a soul. Both are undetectable (i.e., by the scientific method); therefore they do not exist. So there is no basis for "spiritual regeneration" — according to them, there's nothing to regenerate.

Which if course is a most breathtaking redefinition of the human person. That which makes man unique in the animal kingdom is wiped out, and man is leveled to the status of any ordinary beast, and then encouraged to act like one. He is told he is most "free" when he indulges himself in every kind of base behavior.

But even beasts have more dignity than a "free" man indulging himself in every kind of base behavior. For instance, homosexuality is rare in the animal kingdom, and where it appears it is usually a sign that something is terribly awry in the environment. This insight is based on rat studies. Where a rat population becomes exceeding concentrated in a small space, very atypical rat behaviors have been observed to emerge — male "gang-banger" behavior and, most interesting, homosexual acts and cannibalism.

But human beings are not rats, even if many times they act like them.

Just a quick observation before moving on, about human freedom. Today we are told that a man is most "free" when he can do anything he wants without limit. The reigning intelligentsia — like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor — tells them it is perfectly okay to sin. But the Grand Inquisitor knows that, not only is this not true, but is tantamount to the abolition of human freedom.

Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game, with children's songs and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us as children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviors who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not have children — according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient — and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully.... And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. [Right. /sarc] .... Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in [Christ's] name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. — The Brothers Karamazov, emphasis added.

The Grand Inquisitor's definition of "freedom" is a classic example of how atheists appropriate Christian symbols in order to destroy their meaning and to con people who know these symbols into a false sense of security that whatever the intellectual elite's proposal might be, if it has Christian "bona-fides," then it can be trusted. (Obama himself waxes Christian every now and then; but he is utterly false, a bond-servant of the father of lies who does not wish Christians well, especially Catholics.)

This is a terrible trap from another standpoint; for rather than becoming "free," men become slaves to their own disordered appetites. For self-indulgence requires objects of gratification delivering "doses of satisfaction"; and as with, say drugs, the dose and frequency ineluctably needs to increase in order to achieve the desired level of satisfaction (which gets harder and harder to do over time). He becomes the slave (and victim) of the next "fix" — slave to his own disordered desires.

A man enslaved by his own disorder is the most miserable and wretched thing in the world. He has no future, in this world or the next. JMHO FWIW.

The great paradox is that man's freedom can find its true scope, its own perfection, only if he submits himself to God's Word, His Logos. Such a man is the freest man in the world, and no one can take his freedom from him — not even Satan himself.

Back to our main topic, spiritual regeneration. If there is to be such a thing, then it can only come from people who recognize that they are ensouled beings. That is, creatures of God made in His image.

And such people need to realize who the enemy is — which Linda Kimball's masterful article describes so well. Boiling it all down, they are the self-appointed intellectual elite who have "annointed visions" of a "better world" (if only we'd all just do as they say). In order to get to that "better world," the present one must be annihilated. They start with God; but as ever, it is man who "takes the bullet."

Sometimes I wonder whether the atheist elite has given up on trying to kill God (which I suspect even they know deep-down is impossible); so they go after man himself, particularly those men who believe in God. (Which is the most sensible thing to do, it seems to me.) This explains their concerted attack on Christianity and Christians.

With the result, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, in his Harvard Commencement address in 1978:

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, the misuse of liberty for moral violence against the young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. Life organized legalistically has shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil. — Harvard Magazine, July–August 1978.

Oddly enough, I am not too terribly depressed about the foregoing. It seems to me that more than half the battle consists in understanding the enemy. When you know how he thinks and acts, then you can fight him on more level ground, and with increased probability of defeating him....

And defeat him we Christians must. First of all, we are his first intended victims. And with us gone, with the moral order in which we stand obliterated along with us, the rest of society doesn't have a chance....

Onward Christian soldiers! Speak truth; raise prayers for our beloved country and its constitutional order.

May God bless America!

Thank you ever so much, dear spirited irish, for your excellent essay/post!