Posted on 05/17/2018 10:07:41 AM PDT by ebb tide
Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the “transvaluation of all values”: the inversion of our conceptions of good and evil in this post-Christian era. What had been regarded as good—humility, self-denial, obedience, love of the poor and of poverty, looking towards a world to come—was, in his system, to be seen as evil, and what had been regarded as evil—imposing one’s will by domination, satisfying one’s lusts, crushing the weak, dismissing thoughts of an afterlife, living for the moment—would now be virtues. The Übermensch or Superman would be the exact contrary of the Christian saint.
As the atrocity of abortion demonstrates, Nietzsche’s view has prevailed in the secular society of the West. But has not a subtler form of this “transvaluation of all values” invaded Christianity as well—including the Catholic Church, which had seemed for so many centuries to be adamantly opposed to any compromise with modernity and its atheistic spirit? In the past thirty years of my life (that is, the years in which I have been really conscious of being a Catholic and trying to live a life consistent with my faith), I have increasingly noticed a trend that certainly deserves to be called Nietzschean.
If, for example, one objects that a certain idea or practice is “Protestant,” he is likely to be dismissed as “anti-ecumenical.” In this way, a vague ecumenism has supplanted several de fide dogmas as the measure of being a Christian. “I don’t believe in dogma, I believe in love,” as a plainclothes nun once said to a priest tour-guide.
If one objects that a liturgical habit or opinion is contrary to the teaching of the Council of Trent or any other magisterial determination, he is likely to be shut down as “stuck in the past” or “not in line with the Council”—meaning, of course, the Second Vatican Super-Council in whose name all earlier councils can be ignored or negated. A new form of conciliarism has supplanted obedience to the deposit of faith in its integrity and ecclesiastical tradition in its received richness. “That’s pre-Vatican,” as a difficult elderly nun used to bark at a certain priest whenever he stated the teaching of the Church.
In a recent article, I objected to modern lector praxis as Protestant and Pelagian. The reaction of today’s progressives (that is, the mainstream Church) would undoubtedly be: “So what? We’re chummy with the Protestants, and we don’t care about obscure ancient heresies in these enlightened times. All that matters is active participation.” With one badly-understood phrase, five, ten, fifteen centuries of Catholicism can be swept aside. Remarkably, even ecclesiastics who bring up the term Pelagianism seem incapable of seeing its most dynamic symbols and reinforcing practices right under their noses.
Our Lord taught that divorcing and marrying another person was committing adultery, which is a mortal sin; but say this today and you are nearly put to death with verbal stones: “rigid, judgmental, unmerciful, unwelcoming, Pharisaical.” Never mind that the Pharisees were the ones who approved divorce and bending big rules while imposing little ones; no one today cares about either history or logic. That, too, is essential to the “new paradigm”: the banishment of history and the emasculation of logic.
Such examples could be multiplied ad nauseam. They all point to one thing: what used to be orthodoxy is now viewed as heresy, and what used to be heresy is now viewed as orthodoxy. The transvaluation of all values.
We are standing at a juncture in the history of the Catholic Church. We might call it the nadir of Pascendi Dominici Gregis—the moment when an attempt is being made, in practice if not in theory, to substitute for the teaching of St. Pius X its diametrical opposite. St. Pius X had defined Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.” For many of today’s church leaders and people in the pews, however, it is orthodoxy that is “the synthesis of all heresies,” and Modernism that is the Catholic Faith pure and simple. Indeed, it has become fashionable today, even in so-called conservative circles, to brand as “fundamentalists” Catholics who hold and teach what John Paul II’s Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches.
The transvaluation, or perhaps at times merely the devaluation, of all values can be seen if we survey popular theologians of our time. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s downright bizarre Trinitarian theology is in no way reconcileable with the Church’s orthodox Trinitarian theology.[1] Taking his cue from another of Balthasar’s novelties, Bishop Robert Barron thinks that he can seriously claim that all men might be saved—a view that Our Lord in the Gospels, Our Lady of Fatima, and the entire tradition of Christianity prior to Vatican II would have taken exception to. The standard “Bud Lite” version of Christology bears little resemblance to the Christology articulated and defended at such great cost by so many Fathers of the Church, such as St. Athanasius and St. Cyril of Alexandria. Compared to that of St. Alphonsus or St. Louis de Montfort, our Mariology is either non-existent, sentimental, or reductive. Catholic Social Teaching has been co-opted by the socialist Left and the capitalist Right, each for its own purposes, while the fundamental themes as we find them in Leo XIII, e.g., the ontologically and institutionally necessary relationship of Church and State, are unknown or caricatured. As for our sacramental and liturgical theology, one may be pardoned for wondering if there is any orthodox theology left at the popular level, apart from a (simplistic) conception of validity and licitness.
How did we get here? The path is a long and winding one that leads back several centuries at least, with nominalism, voluntarism, Protestantism, rationalism, and liberalism each playing star roles. But in terms of how this Nietzscheanism came to find its home in almost every Catholic church and Catholic bosom, seeping into the nave, rising into the sanctuary, erasing or jackhammering the memories of our forefathers and the faces of saints and angels, I think the answer is more straightforward.
This transvaluation of all values follows necessarily from the transformation of all forms.
I refer to the way in which nothing of Catholic life was left untouched after Vatican II. Every bit of the Mass, every aspect of the Divine Office, every sacramental rite, every blessing, every piece of clerical and liturgical clothing, every page of Canon Law and the Catechism—all had to be revamped, reworked, revised, usually in the direction of diminution and softening: “the Word was made bland, and dwelt in the suburbs.” The beauty and power of our tradition was muted at best, silenced at worst. No form was safe, stable, or deemed worthy of preservation as it stood, as it had been received.
The open or subliminal message isn’t hard to infer: The Catholic Church went off the rails many centuries ago, and now has to play catch up with the modern world. Everything is up for grabs. What measure to apply, what ideal to aspire to, what goal to reach before the changing stops—even these are indeterminate, disputable, open-ended, like a badly written stream-of-consciousness story. Nothing is to be left intact in humble, grateful acknowledgement of its longevity and belovedness. We are done building on rock, for it is unchanging; shifting sand is what suits the evolution, flexibility, and pluralism of Modern Man.
It was simply not possible for such an iconoclastic, vandalistic, self-doubting and self-creative process to occur without profoundly calling into question all Catholic beliefs, all Catholic practices. Ostensibly, the Church’s liturgy was being reformed; in reality, Catholicism was being questioned from top to bottom, or shall we say, campanella to crypt. One crack in the dam is enough to lead to its entire collapse.
Hence, from the transformation of all forms came, as inevitably as exhaustion and dictatorship follow after revolution, the transvaluation of all values. One could almost approach it like a theorem in Euclid: “Assuming aggiornamento, demonstrate that orthodoxy will become the synthesis of all heresies.” And so it happened as one might have predicted. Q.E.D.
This is the larger context that explains and, in fact, impels the dizzying events we are witnessing under this pontificate, such as the dismantling of the Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Immaculate, the suppression of the Trappist monastery of Mariawald, the push for optionalizing clerical celibacy, the push to expand female ministries, the bitter hatred of Summorum Pontificum and every traditional liturgical practice (e.g., ad orientem celebration) that has resurfaced in its wake, the antics of the Amorites who are working sleeplessly (in imitation of their master) to gain acceptance in the Church for every sexual “expression,” and on and on.
It all falls into place the moment one sees that the new masters of the universe hold exactly the opposite of what you and I hold. We believe what Catholics have always believed; we want to live and pray as Catholics have always done[2]; and we are shocked to find ourselves the object of mockery, hostility, and persecution. But we should not be shocked. We are living by the old paradigm, in which Modernism was the synthesis of all heresies. Our enemies follow a new paradigm—the paradigm, in fact, of systematic newness or novelty. The newer something is, the better, the more authentic, the more real, in the ever-evolving process of human maturation. For them, the so-called “orthodox Faith” defended by the likes of St. Augustine, St. John Damascene, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Pius X, this is absolutely no longer “relevant” to Modern Man; it is a frozen relic of a dead past, an obstacle to the Progress that the Spirit of Newness wishes to bestow.[3]
The noveltymongers will stop short, perhaps, at canonizing the more illustrious members of their house—Ockham, Descartes, Luther, Hegel, or Nietzsche—but they will do their best to canonize lesser factotums such as Giovanni Battista Montini, Annibale Bugnini, and Teilhard de Chardin. We should prepare ourselves spiritually to endure a season of sacrileges, blasphemies, and apostasies that Catholics have never dreamed of in the worst periods of pagan persecution or internal confusion.
We may take comfort in the certainty, as John Paul II reminded us in his last book Memory and Identity, that the Lord always puts a limit to evil, as He did with National Socialism and Soviet Communism. He will not tempt any man beyond what he can bear. And, sobering as the thought is, we may also draw some comfort from the certainty that Our Lord puts a limit to the evils each of us must endure by setting a boundary to our lives. For the faithful disciple who clings to Christ and His life-giving Gospel, death accepted in self-abandonment is, in addition to being a curse of the Fall, a blessing that liberates us from a world that is not and was never intended to be our lasting home (cf. Heb 13:14). This inevitable fact is not an invitation to quietism—work we must, and work we shall—but rather a call to preserve our peace of soul in the midst of earthly trials, which will never be lacking and which are meant to wean us, bit by bit, from our attachments, as we prepare for the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb.
Meanwhile, during our pilgrimage in this life, it is ours to fight the good fight, to keep the true Faith, and to resist any and every deformity of it that raises its ugly head, as we strive to pass on what we have received and seek to enthrone Christ as King of our hearts, homes, parishes, countries, and all of creation.
NOTES:
[1] Fr. Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., published a short but scathing “Note on Balthasar’s Trinitarian Theology” in The Thomist 64 (2000): 127–30, in which he quotes various heretical texts from Balthasar’s work and comments: “We have here a paradox: some modern authors, evidently concerned with spirituality, have unwittingly fallen into a conception of the divine Being that is overly materialistic. … A kind of human psychologism risks drawing the readers of the Swiss theologian in the direction of tritheism. … Given the strong affirmations in the Gospels of the unity between the Father and the Son-affirmations reiterated by several ecumenical councils in underscoring their consubstantiality, we cannot accept the dialectical, obscure, and, above all, dangerous language of Balthasar, who appears to affirm and to deny it at the same time.”
[2] The favorite comeback of progressives is that “the liturgy kept developing over time, so you can’t say that Catholics ‘always’ worshiped this or that way.” But that is a superficial response. The deeper truth is that Catholics have always worshiped according to the liturgy they have received, and any development occurred within this fundamental assumption of the continuity of the rituals, chants, and texts. The work of the Consilium of the 1960s rejected this assumption in altering almost every aspect of the liturgy, adding and deleting material according to their own theories. Therefore what they produced is not and can never be an expression of Catholic tradition; it will always remain a foreign body.
[3] It is in keeping with this Darwinian-Hegelian evolutionism that we find today’s “conservatives” so ready to embrace the view that whatever the current reigning pope says automatically trumps all that his predecessors have said on the same subject. In reality, a pope’s teaching possesses authority precisely insofar as it contains and confirms the teaching of his predecessors, even if it expands on it in ways harmonious with what has already been taught. Moreover, elementary rules of magisterial interpretation tell us that a teaching given with a greater level of authority, no matter how many decades or centuries old it may be, carries more weight than a recent teaching given with a lower level of authority. Level of authority is gauged by the type of document in which, or the occasion on which, it is issued, the verbal formula employed, and other such signs.
Acts 8:23 ESV / 2 helpful votes
For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.”
John 8:44 ESV / 2 helpful votes
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
2 Corinthians 11:14-15 ESV / 2 helpful votes
And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.
Romans 1:28 ESV / 2 helpful votes
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done
Proverbs 3:7 ESV / 3 helpful votes
Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
2 Peter 2:2 ESV / 2 helpful votes
And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.
1 Peter 3:12 ESV / 2 helpful votes
For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”
James 4:7 ESV / 2 helpful votes
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
is 5-20
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
2timothy3
1 But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: 2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, 4 traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! 6 For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, 7 always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
John 3:19 ESV
And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.
Matthew 15:19 ESV / 6 helpful votes
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.
Romans 12:21 ESV / 5 helpful votes
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
3 John 1:11 ESV / 4 helpful votes
Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.
2 Peter 2:10 ESV / 4 helpful votes
And especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority. Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones,
Matthew 24:12 ESV / 4 helpful votes
And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.
1 Timothy 4:1-2 ESV / 3 helpful votes
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared,
1 Thessalonians 5:22 ESV / 3 helpful votes
Abstain from every form of evil.
Ephesians 6:13 ESV / 3 helpful votes
Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.
Luke 6:35 ESV / 3 helpful votes
But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.
Matthew 6:13 ESV / 3 helpful votes
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Revelation 12:9 ESV / 2 helpful votes
And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world
Jude 1:10 ESV / 2 helpful votes
But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively.
1 John 3:8 ESV / 2 helpful votes
Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
2 Peter 2:1 ESV / 2 helpful votes
But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.
1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 ESV / 2 helpful votes
But test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.
Man, you are on a roll today!
“Moreover, elementary rules of magisterial interpretation tell us that a teaching given with a greater level of authority, no matter how many decades or centuries old it may be, carries more weight than a recent teaching given with a lower level of authority. Level of authority is gauged by the type of document in which, or the occasion on which, it is issued, the verbal formula employed, and other such signs.”
____________________________________________________
A desperate but futile attempt to rescue the RCC from Popes and Magisteriums that have been slowly (yet inexorably) cutting the doctrinal ties to Orthodoxy for decades. We were told that the RCC was built upon Petrine authority and the orthodoxy that would flow from it. We were told that “the gates of Hell would not prevail against it.” And yet...the gates of Hell have prevailed against it for decades. So, what are we to think? Do these lines in Mathew really mean that the Christian Community must place so much of their trust in the hierarchy (past and present) of the RCC?
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him. ...Psalm 2:1-12
Yes he is on a roll. Too bad it’s downhill.
Yep, can be depressing if ya let it get to you. I’ll be supporting my wife at a year one Confirmation retreat this Sunday. The good news is our older teens have worked quite hard over the last month putting together the sessions and activities. Seeing young people so involved and joyful helps make up for the very disturbing things going on with the Magisterium right now. God bless!
This is what killed tonality in classical music: the conscious preference for ugliness over beauty.
Schoenberg was a spiritual soulless-mate of Nietzsche.
What a sick, sad joke Catholic "changelessness" is! The author, like every other so-called "conservative" Catholic, obviously still wants to ignore the elephant in the room that led to all of this: the rampant rationalism and naturalism that led to the reduction of whole books of the Bible to "primitive mythology," of which historical criticism and evolutionism are the two prime examples.
I have read about many of the so-called "conservative" Catholic heroes (such as Sheen, Benedict XVI, JPII, etc.) and while they may have fulminated loudly about Freud and Nietzsche and other such, they never quite make it to Wellhausen and Darwin. In fact, Catholics/Orthodox now consider these two philosophies as dogmatically mandatory to prove they aren't "Protestant." Even as both philosophies were started by liberal Protestants!
Bellarmine's insistence that the sun revolves around the earth to protect the literal teaching of the Bible has been assigned to an Orwellian memory hole. Now it's "that's those Fundies; we've never had a problem with such-and-such." And while they haven't had a problem with it for a very very long time now, the idea that they've never had a problem with it is a d@mnable lie.
Catholics/Orthodox/Myophosites/Nestorians now actually seem to be in a race as to which can claim the most ancient opening to evolution and higher criticism (or to the current mania that "there's nothing wrong with us"). Entire swaths of history have been eliminated to "prove" that they were always progressive and futuristic and open to naturalistic theories. Now even the so-called "conservatives," even the ones who want to restore the high middle ages, are Darwinists and higher critics. They want the middle ages with evolution.
This being the case, the claim of current "conservative" Catholics that their church has been the most "reactionary" and resistant to change of all other forces in the world is simply a sad, sick joke. They may have masses of simple peasants among their members, but all their spokesmen are intellectuals who hate and detest American-style Fundamentalist Protestantism over all other things . . . including abortion and homosexuality.
And as for being "anti-Protestant," I note that this "anti-Protestantism" never seems to apply to liberal Protestants. Only Fundamentalists are criticized for "rejecting the ancient oral interpretive tradition." As if liberal Protestants didn't do the same thing! In fact, liturgicals and liberal Protestants come together in ecumenism primarily to attack "Protestant Fundamentalism."
And it is Fundamentalist Protestants, btw, who are more opposed to "ecumenism" than any other movement in chrstendom (except maybe the J-- Witnesses). If the ancient churches are so "changeless" and conservative, why have they been involved in ecumania almost from the beginning? And why to they attack Fundamentalists for believing that there can only be one true religion? After all, the ancient churches certainly don't think membership in any of them is required, which is why they engage in absolutely no missionary activity whatsoever and depend on endogamous sexual reproduction to survive(not to mention their loud attacks on FP's precisely for being missionary).
The "indefectable church" has defected. That is obvious for anyone with eyes to see. The thing is, all the so-called "conservatives," who want to be highly intellectual reactionaries while regarding simple people as hateful and too stupid to even be proselytized, are all part of the problem. And it begins with the two philosophies neither of them wants to jettison. Because they can't bring themselves to have anything in common with "those stupid people."
All the other ancient churches will fall as well, just like dominoes. They've all been very liberal for a long time. And they all absolutely refuse to get rid of the two root causes of "modernism" in their religion.
What a sad, sick joke your endless rants are!
Just like your predictable, jack-in-the-box condemnations.
Before you decide to pester me again, answer me this question: if "we're not that messed up" and require a regimen of human effort, law, and morality, then why in the sam hill did anyone think they needed to create a new one two thousand years ago when there was already a perfectly valid one whose laws and rites come directly from the Mouth of G-d?
Historically, the only alternatives are Judaism/Noahism and ancient liturgical chrstianity. Logically the only alternatives are Judaism/Noahism and Lutheran/Calvinist style Protestant chrstianity. Two chrstianities: one perfectly logical but ahistorical, and one historical but whose theology doesn't even give it a valid reason to exist.
Get back to me on that. And that's not even touching on the current rampant prejudice of the ancient churches against rural America and its inhabitants.
Oh come on, you know the purposed conflation of the institution of Catholicism, and the body of believers, Ekklesia, is the ‘church / Church’ abuse common to such threads.
Well, I’m not sure what you mean, but if it’s that, in the post-modern era, Christianity has outlived its usefulness and even lost its former meaning, many people would not disagree. Is that a transition or a crisis?
Christianity is not a teaching - it is a relationship with the person Jesus through the Holy Spirit. Christianity is eternal because it is not a religion, it is faith in a living and eternal God.
As much as it may, the world will NEVER wipe out Christianity.
Now I say to you that you are Peter (which means 'rock'), and upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it....Matt 16:18
Consider that what you perceive may have a lot to do with where you live. The Catholic Church is an international institution, and I doubt Catholics in Italy or India or Indonesia or Angola are much agitated about Protestant Fundamentalists.
Consider also that it has a lot to do with you. Somebody who comes to people demanding that they take his point of view has a way of dominating the conversation, and even if he doesn't, such a person will assume that his ideas are the center of all discussion.
And consider also the history. Do you really expect an institution that's been accused for centuries of obstructing science and free intellectual inquiry should simply reject two centuries of research and scholarship out of hand? Do you really think that would make for a better world or a better understanding of religion? Do you really think that Judaism or Christianity have always been hostile to scientific inquiry and scholarly investigation?
I also get that you thought that you had found some kind of primeval, ur-alt, original religion in Catholicism and then you came upon something even older, something so old that you assumed it couldn't be refuted (ignoring the fact that it couldn't be proved, either). Okay, good for you, but one has to wonder why you are forever tossing bricks back at the Catholics. Is it disappointed love, or just a way of indulging age-old anti-Catholic prejudices?
It's also clear that you regard yourself as some kind of great defender of Fundamentalists, even though you've attacked and even mocked their most cherished belief on several occasions. You'll have to admit that's a little strange, and hard to take. You want to have it both ways. You want to be the defender of simple Bible-believers, and also be the modern skeptic who sees through Christianity.
I guess that's what you think you have to do to get through life, but you might consider that it may strike other people as patronizing in the extreme. Evangelicals or Fundamentalists or Bible believers aren't the poor cowed victims that you make them out to be (when you're not dismissing or insulting them in your own way). They're part of the discussion, just like everybody else. If you really respected them, you wouldn't be forever reducing them to a caricature of helplessness and victimization.
What does Catholicism say about the well-known scientific fact that dead people don't come back to life or that virgins don't have babies?
I suppose we need a couple more centuries of "research" and "scholarship" to get there, eh?
I also get that you thought that you had found some kind of primeval, ur-alt, original religion in Catholicism and then you came upon something even older, something so old that you assumed it couldn't be refuted (ignoring the fact that it couldn't be proved, either).
It has been proven. The fact that you choose to identify the world's only self-vindicating claim of religious revelation as just another exercise of "blind faith" is your problem.
In a way I hesitate to post this, because there is absolutely no way for me to prove what I am going to say (quite unlike the Revelation at Sinai). Personally, I don't know why in the world you don't simply ignore my posts since they so bother you. But be that as it may . . .
I did not enter the Catholic Church screaming for everyone to reject evolution and source criticism. Quite the opposite. I was quite prepared to accept the fact that there was something wrong with me and mine (unlike all those illiterate peasants the ancient churches are so proud of). It was the historical argument that cinched it for me (goodness knows, it's all they have going for them), and I asked only if, since in times past Catholics were much more literal in their Biblical interpretation, I could therefore retain these earlier beliefs (since I assumed what was once perfectly legitimate could not suddenly and magically become excommunicable heresy). Granted, the flagrant hypocrisy of accepting some alleged supernatural phenomena while rejecting others because "we know now stuff like this doesn't happen" is about as two-faced and hypocritical as you can get, and can only be driven by an absolute mania to distance oneself as far as possible from those awful people who live in trailer parks.
But when I went out of state to study Divinity and was facing all this stuff for the first time, "my" Church gave me absolutely no support. In fact, it agreed with the atheist professors. When I went to "my" denominational counselor I was told to "get out" because my beliefs "just weren't Catholic." But did I? No. I had come to believe that Catholicism was the one true religion, and the day being a holy day of obligation, I went straight to "my" church for mass where I refrained from communion because I was such a bad, rebellious Catholic (unlike all those homosexuals the Catholic Church wants so badly to court). I actually confessed my Biblical literalism as a sin in the confessional because my "infallible" church evidently labeledd it "bad" and "heretical." The priest was an older man with white hair, yet he spent some fifteen minutes (with a line forming outside the confessional) to try to convince me of all the errors the Bible contained. I actually went to an eastern Catholic church for I felt welcomed for a while, but quit at the end of Lent when one of the seminarians there said he had absolutely no evidence that a man named Noah ever existed (or that he didn't). I talked with him about being now stuck in a "one true religion" I simply in good conscience could not agree with, and he basically told me it was all right. After leaving there, I had both an Eastern Orthodox and a Myophysite church to investigate. The latter had a particularly beautiful liturgy, but it was a typical liberal ethnic church where apparently the only thing they believed in was their holy nation and their grudges.
Naturally, when I found out (thanks to an Eastern Orthodox booklet) that the true doctrine of human nature is found in the Talmud, I felt as if I had been cheated. Here are all these ancient religions boasting of their at once greater antiquity and oxymoronically their greater liberalism (did not compute). Why wouldn't I be bitter?
I saw a religion that claimed that the ancient Biblical religion had to be replaced even though there was nothing wrong with us, the so-called savior had not in fact "died for my sins," and that Judaism's teaching on human nature remained the correct one.
Then why in blazes the need to start an entirely new religion if the only thing wrong with the first one was that all the ritual and calendar dates needed to be changed? How can I not regard chrstianity as the greatest and cruelest joke ever perpetrated on the human race, with my own people with their sincere beliefs that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are true and that J*sus had indeed died in their place as the supreme suckers of the whole operation?
I've told this story often, but I know it will mean nothing to you. But here on FR I often read posts attacking snobby liberal elitists and defending the American "redneck." What makes a "conservative" Catholic elitist any better?
What about all the various blasphemous vermin who post here exclusively to celebrate their holy white European chromosomes? What about all the people who post about all the hundreds of thousands of years Blacks are "behind" whites on the evolutionary timescale? How are these b@st@rds and my people even on the same board? How could we ever be allies? Good gravy, is hearing the words "ax" or "exscape" that grating??? That is all this is about???
Since you will not even try to get inside my head or give my case even a hearing, I suggest you simply ignore me from here on.
As for me, I am delighted that the ancient fraudulent evolutionist churches are going down the drain, clinging to Darwin and Wellhausen with their cold dead fingers to the very last.
What does the third book of Kings 17:17-24 say about dead people coming back to life?
And what does Isaias 7:14-15 say about virgin births?
But when I went out of state to study Divinity and was facing all this stuff for the first time, "my" Church gave me absolutely no support. In fact, it agreed with the atheist professors. When I went to "my" denominational counselor I was told to "get out" because my beliefs "just weren't Catholic."
If so, that was unfortunate. But they may have been trying to say that interpretation is necessary in any religion. The literal sense is only one level of meaning. That is true of Judaism as well as Christianity. Interpretation has been at the heart of text-based religions for a very long time.
I was quite prepared to accept the fact that there was something wrong with me and mine (unlike all those illiterate peasants the ancient churches are so proud of). It was the historical argument that cinched it for me (goodness knows, it's all they have going for them), and I asked only if, since in times past Catholics were much more literal in their Biblical interpretation, I could therefore retain these earlier beliefs (since I assumed what was once perfectly legitimate could not suddenly and magically become excommunicable heresy).
It sounds like your colleagues were too literalistic in their rejection of literalism. That is not uncommon in the seminaries of all denominations. I suspect other Catholics outside academic centers wouldn't be so absolute in their rejection of miracles and supernatural phenomena.
But your combination of contempt for Catholic "illiterate peasants" with glorification of Fundamentalists you call "rednecks" -- and then combining that with contempt for some of the most cherished beliefs of those Protestant Fundamentalists -- is off-putting.
It's hard for me not to see your former teachers' and spiritual advisors' attitudes as something very American and very regional, something that doesn't affect Catholics in Africa or Asia or elsewhere in the world.
It's also hard for me to avoid seeing some complicated psychology at work. You appear to be one of those people who is always punching up or punching down. Always looking for somebody to be the elitist to attack or the elite to join, the victimized to uphold or the suckers to despise. And you have to expect that writing or speaking in that combative mode will provoke responses.
What about all the various blasphemous vermin who post here exclusively to celebrate their holy white European chromosomes?
I deplore those people as well. But do you not see some similarities between their way of thinking and your own? Have you considered that you are more likely to run into those people or to think you do, because of the similarity between your views and theirs?
Then why in blazes the need to start an entirely new religion if the only thing wrong with the first one was that all the ritual and calendar dates needed to be changed?
Christianity and Judaism are different religions. Like all religions they have their core assumptions. If you're outside the religion you won't accept those assumptions. Most people have come to realize that tearing down institutions that have lasted for millennia can have some very negative consequences and leave people prey to even worse thinking.
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