The Gospel Truth
Hitler’s Conscience
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This post begs the question: Did Adolph Hitler really have a conscience?
Some would say the Hitler was the avatar of evil and ranks as the most pernicious human being of the 20th century and therefore he had no conscience.
I think many people think that he did not know right from wrong and therefore was more a sociopath than just an evil man.
In his Conversations with Hitler Hermann Rauschning, president of the senate of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk) in 1933 and 1934, reported the dictator saying the following to him:
I liberate man from the constraint of a spirit…(and) from the filthy and degrading torments inflicted on himself by a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the claims of a freedom and personal autonomy that only very few can ever be up to.
According to this statement, Hitler believed, not in freedom of conscience but the next logical step–freedom from conscience.
Herman Goring, who considered himself something akin to a Vice-Fuhrer told the same author: I have no conscience.
My conscience is called Adolf Hitler.
Herman Goring and his "conscience"
I submit that everyone has a conscience.
Goring’s contradictory comment proves my point.
For many conscience is that voice of reason, tempered by religious faith, self-interest and human passion.
Hitler’s “conscience” was formed by his early belief in God, his painful experiences in World War II, his early successes as a politician, the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, his short-term in prison, his rhetorical powers and messianic talent for exciting and attracting millions of disciples.
The Gospels of his early religion, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were summarily replaced by those written by Darwin, Nietzsche, Wagner and most of –Machiavelli.
Replaced Mark in Hitler's Gospels
According to historian Lawrence Birken, Hitler’s intellectual views that fuel his conscience are rational and well grounded in Western thought.
In particular, Birken stresses, Hitler’s thinking is firmly rooted in the rationalist and scientific outlook of the 18th-century European Enlightenment.
The most attractive feature of Hitler’s ideology was thus its optimism.
It was not merely his mood but his message that carried an infectious excitement.
He was a secular messiah proclaiming a Germanic version of the “good news.”
Germany's secular messiah
The possibility of class reconciliation, the plans for a national revival, the identification of a universal enemy whose elimination would usher in the millennium, all stirred his audiences to their very depths.
Hitler spoke the language of the Enlightenment philosophes, a language that had almost passed out of existence in the rarefied strata of the grand intelligentsia.
Hitler’s economic worldview, writes Birken, was likewise rational, self-consistent, progressive, and entirely in keeping with Western tradition.
Hitler’s racial views were comparable to those of Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill.
Some historians say their views on race were similar
This is a painful truth that the world does not want to admit.
Had he been born in America, he most likely would have been a liberal.
It is the left in this country that has calumniated the right by comparing their thinking to Nazism and Adolph Hitler–conservatives from the far right.
That intellectual legerdemain.
The word Nazi is an acronym that derives from National Socialism Party and if it is a right-wing organization it is the right-wing of a socialist bird.
The only real difference between Hitler and his 1939 partner, Josef Stalin in territorial aggrandizement was the Soviet Comintern, which had international and imperial designs, rather than Hitler’s nationalistic attempt to return Germany to its prior glory.
As a human being Hitler sought only what he perceived as the “good.”
This is right in line with the philosophy of Plato who said that men seek the true, the good and the beautiful.
What was Hitler’s “good?”
It was the resurrection of Germany as a respected world power.
Is this end evil in itself?
Do not all nations seek the good for their citizens?
No it is a good end and little different from those of Great Britain, the United States and Japan on its surface value.
The problem is not the ends but the means.
Bob Beckel, one of the left’s most argumentative agitators is up against four conservative-leaning commentators on “The Five” on Fox weekdays.
Pure Machiavelli
Recently he said that even though the Obama regime and the Democrats had failed to do much good these past three years, our hearts were in the rights place.
They meant well.
And Beckel was using this good feeling as why they deserved four more years to try to do good.
Now Beckel and his associates would never allow the same good feelings to the Republicans.
Beckel seems clueless or in a state of psychological denial when reminded that his ends have been damaged and perverted by his means.
This is pure Machiavellian.
It was the same with Adolph Hitler.
He viewed the infirmed, the handicapped, the elderly, the insane and all useless eaters as obstacles to German progress.
With his pure ends, it was not a quantum leap to use euthanasia, gas-filled trucks and fatal shots to rid Germany of those unworthy of life.
Liberalism's eventual consequence
Later he went after the entire Jewish population of Europe.
Hitler excused his means because he believed that Germany could return to the racial purity that had made it the most dominant nation in Europe for generations.
When it comes to conservative complaints about their behavior, the American left chides them for being too judgmental, since the whole tenor of the Enlightened sixties was that freedom to be whatever a person wanted to be was the rule. All others should keep their judgments to themselves.
Well they never granted this same freedom to Ronald Reagan, so it is likely that they would not have extended to Hitler…but they did sanitize the far worse destructive means of FDR’s ally and good friend, Uncle Joe Stalin, shed more blood than the Jewish death camps.
Just ask any Ukrainian how much blood Stalin shed in the 1930s.
The Holodomor (Ukrainian: literal translation Killing by hunger) was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933.
During the famine, which is also known as the “terror-famine in Ukraine” and “famine-genocide in Ukraine”, millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.
The Russians had their own version of genocide
It is this blatant hypocritical stance that fuels the liberalism of the 21st century.
In effect their conscience was formed from the same intellectual well as Adolph Hitler’s.
Hitler killed six million Jews.
American liberals have fostered the deaths of over 53 million unborn babies.
But then who is keeping score?
Tags: Comintern, gas-filled trucks, Herman Goring, The Five, the good, The Holomodor
The Big Amen
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It must be my age because I have been getting more confused lately.
For a long time, I have referred to the book and both movies,derived from the late Swedish author Stieg Larssons, as The Girl with the Butterfly Tattoo.
Of course everyone knows it is “dragon,” instead of “butterfly.”
A butterfly would have been more appealing
If I had butterflies on the brain six months ago, I think my whole body must be permeated with them after viewing Lad Allen’s DVD Metamorphosis: The Beauty &Design of Butterflies. (Illustra Media Series) You can get it at:
www.amazon.com or http://www.metamorphosisthefilm.com/
No, I haven’t developed a sudden interest in entomology.
I had to review it for an interview with the producer for Phyllis Schlafly‘s hour-long syndicated radio program.
It is always an honor for me to sit in for this prominent woman, conservative author and political activist when she is speaking before some large assembly around the country.
The video was marvelous but I had to admit it was a tough sell for a radio program.
From the very beginning I thought this would be a tough interview because the pure natural beauty of the Monarch has to be seen to be appreciated.
How can I show pictures on the radio?
Allen would have been better served on television.
But persevere we did!
They long like Tiffany lamps with wings
I was deeply impressed by the deep and varied complexity of the flittering creature.
But of course Allen did not appear on our program just to discuss the butterfly by itself but he wanted to talk about it in terms of its scientific and metaphysical relationship with an Intelligent Designer.
I asked him why the Monarch?
He said there were lots of different species to choose from but they had to choose one that they could videotape easily and could track through all of its habits and routines.
They would never have attempted this with the species that I think is an even better choice than the Monarch and that is the Bengal Tiger.
Allen said they did not want to be eaten by their subject before finishing the DVD.
When you compare the Bengal Tiger and the Monarch butterfly with the sketchy fossil record of Darwinian biologists I think one need conclude that what the left is selling in not scientific truth but a politicized agenda that defines another sector of the centuries-long culture war.
For such a tiny being to have that much detail, both inside and outside, is a visible proof of the invisible God that thousands of scientists have so much trouble in accepting.
The navigational system of the Monarch’s eyes allows them to traverse 2500 miles during their annual migration from the warm climates of the Unites States to the milkweed plants which they need for breeding in temperate Mexico.
God's autograph?
This alone is enough to make me wonder aloud how supposedly learned and highly educated scientists cannot not see the handiwork of God or at least some Intelligent Designer at work.
For anyone to say or argue that the Monarch butterfly just evolved randomly is so silly an idea one would be tempted to laugh in the collective faces of this highly educated scientific elite.
The whole notion of Darwinian evolutionary is an insult to our human intelligence.
Why students fail to question it in school or when they are free of the propaganda force of our schools and the power of the grade, they don’t renounce it, is way beyond my understanding.
I told Allen during the program that according to my historical understanding, until the Renaissance, the idea of God, as the creator of the world and the center of the universe, was the central feature in Western Civilization.
It was the humanistic ideas of the Renaissance that relegated God to the periphery of intellectual and cultural pursuits.
Man replaced God at the center of the universe
This picked up even greater steam during the French Revolution and its aftermath.
The Deism of that period preached a passive God who did not seem very interested in His creatures’ lives.
Like some sort of sadistic voyeur, He just watches.
As the intellectual elite grew more godlike in its own self estimation, they conspired to get rid of God on earth by killing His servants—His priests and nuns and destroying His houses of worship.
Still He persisted.
One divine faculty they never could explain away was His powers of creation.
His creation was the last stumbling block.
In what might be called supply side biology, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution provided the elite with a scientific lever with which they could remove the creation boulder.
Gave them supply side biology
He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species.
By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public accepted evolution as a fact.
Even though it was a mere theory, and violated the scientific method that includes observation and experimentation, it is accepted as the absolute gospel truth, and fast became the false idol of the new religion that thousands of skeptical scientists genuflect before.
God was finally, after many centuries eliminated.
He was proven as a non-Person, who need not apply on Christmas and Easter, feast days that are slowly slipping from the American cultural consciousness.
Does that mean there is no God?
Of course not.
All scientists know that nature abhors a vacuum.
As a result millions of their egos are lining up to collectively file as the new god of the universe.
The new gods of the universe
The boundless ego of man is ready and willing to be worshiped and deified.
Millions will bow before them in the public arena and will never question their heterodoxy.
I can hear their Big Amen resounding in college and university classrooms all over America, while God’s statues, relics and icons are being removed like those of a fallen dictator after a revolution.
To me it is nothing more than a discordant choir, clamoring the empty verses of a decaying philosophy that signifies nothing and has been filled with the wet dreams of god-deniers throughout history.
When they have all passed from the earth, God will still be sitting in His architectural seat and taking joy in those who still love Him.
Tags: Bengal Tiger, Darwin, Intelligent Design, milkweed, Monarch, Phyllis Schlafly, Stieg Larssons
In the Shadows of Roe
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Worse than Pearl Harbor, January 22, 1973 is a day that has lived in infamy for 39 years.
With the 39th anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision that effectively established the alleged unlimited right to an abortion through all nine months of a woman’s pregnancy, it is fitting to explore some of the basic components of that decision so that we may be able to explain, convince and change the hearts and minds of many who tend toward the choice side of the equation.
I Roe v. Wade— the Court decided that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman’s decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state’s two legitimate interests for regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting the woman’s health.
Saying that these state interests become stronger over the course of a pregnancy, the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the woman’s current trimester of pregnancy.
She just wants to live like everyone else
(This was never actually the case and the subsequent history of the decision exposed its faulty premise.)
II Penumbra—One of the most important aspects of the Roe decision was the way it stretched the Justices’ logic beyond all creditable belief. The opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, declares that abortion is a “fundamental right” under the U.S. Constitution and substantive due process under the 14th Amendment.
Writing for the 7-2 Court, Justice Blackmun found this is a fundamental right under the “penumbra” of the right to privacy.
Nowhere in the amendment does the word abortion or anything akin to it appear.
Blackmun said he “discovered” this inalienable right to terminate a pregnancy is in the penumbra of privacy rights protected by substantive due process.
50 million have died in the shadows of Roe
What or where is the penumbra that jeopardized the lives of virtually every unwanted unborn child in America?
It resides in the darkest shadows that Justice Blackmun saw emanating from the 14th amendment.
In other words, he created a “right” for all women that has served as a death sentence for over 50 million unborn babies since 1973.
As a result the unborn have as many rights as Nazi German’s Untermenschen and the ante-bellum South’s black chattel had.
III Norma McCorvey— In June 1969, Norma L. McCorvey discovered she was pregnant with her third child.
She returned to Dallas, where friends advised her to assert falsely that she had been raped, as she could then obtain a legal abortion (with the understanding that Texas‘ anti-abortion laws allowed abortion in the cases of rape and incest).
However, this scheme failed, as there was no police report documenting the false rape.
She told Congress in 1998 after she had joined the prolife movement that it was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the “right” to abortion out of legal thin air.
Another woman duped by the radical feminists
But her lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told McCorvey that what she had signed would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions.
Weddington never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control either.
McCorvey’s daughter was born well before the decision was ever decided.
IV Doe v. Bolton— Doe was decided on the same day as Roe.
In a very real sense it is more important that the much-more well-known Roe decision.
The Georgia law in question permitted abortion only in cases of rape, severe fetal deformity, or the possibility of severe or fatal injury to the mother.
Other restrictions included the requirement that the procedure be approved in writing by three physicians and by a special committee of the staff of the hospital where the abortion was to be performed.
In addition, only Georgia residents could receive abortions under this statutory scheme: non-residents could not have an abortion in Georgia under any circumstances.
The plaintiff, a pregnant woman who was given the pseudonym “Mary Doe” in court papers to protect her identity, sued Arthur K. Bolton, then the Attorney General of Georgia, as the official responsible for enforcing the law.
The anonymous plaintiff has since been identified as Sandra Cano, a 22-year-old mother of three who was nine weeks pregnant at the time the lawsuit was filed. Cano, like McCorvey joined the prolife side of the aisle.
More important than Roe
She loudly complained that her attorney, Margie Pitts Hames, lied to her in order to have a plaintiff. Doe v. Bolton stated that a woman could obtain an abortion after viability, if necessary to protect her health.
The Court defined health as follows:
Whether, in the words of the Georgia statute, ‘an abortion is necessary’ is a professional judgment that the Georgia physician will be called upon to make routinely. This is effect, over-rode Roe’s trimester limitations right up until the exact moment of the child’s birth.
Practically this meant for whatever reason the woman determined.
V Right to Choose— The person who created this slogan should be in the Abortion Hall of Fame.
Abortion-rights advocates have persuasively argued that whether or not to continue with a pregnancy is an inviolable personal choice, as it involves a woman’s body, personal health, and future.
They believe that both parents’ and children’s lives are better when abortions are legal, thus preventing women from going to desperate lengths to obtain illegal abortions.
More broadly, abortion-rights advocates frame their beliefs in terms of individual liberty, reproductive freedom, and reproductive rights.
Abortion-rights individuals rarely consider themselves “pro-abortion,” because they consider abortion an issue of bodily autonomy, and find forced abortion to be as legally and morally indefensible as the outlawing of abortion.
But the truth of the matter that none of them ever encourage a woman to keep her baby because it would hurt their cause.
Abortion is a terrible choice for both victims
Radical feminists hold up coat-hangers and back-alley abortion, as the symbols of their movement.
Years later this lie of 10,000 female deaths from the so-called back alley abortion, which really is a misnomer. Most illegal abortions took place inside an office, clinic or a hospital.which was another falsehood.
Since the discovery of penicillin in 1928, the death rate from illegal abortion was less than 50 a year.
VI Partial Birth Abortion–– the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 is a United States law prohibiting a form of late-term abortion that the Act calls “partial-birth abortion.”
The procedure described in the statute is usually used in the second trimester, from 15 to 36 weeks.
It is often referred to in medical literature as intact dilation and extraction. In reality the baby is nearly delivered.
A tame illustration of a barbaric act
With his/her head still partly in the birth canal, scissors are used to penetrate the back of the neck and skull.
A vacuum tube is inserted and the baby’s brain is extracted from its head, collapsing the skull. The dead newborn than is delivered.
This horrific practice was performed on an average of 2500 times a year in the United States and has served as ghastly proof of the evils inherent in this choice.
On a similar note, I was taken back by an article on Republican candidate, Rick Santorum, who over the course of his Congressional career was a untiring voice for the unborn.
With reason and logic on his side he made his pro-abortion colleagues quivers before his very words.
He once asked ow fellow Senators, Democrats Frank Lautenberg and former Senator Russ Feingold who opposed his proposed ban on Partial Birth Abortion if the baby slipped out of the birth canal before the doctor could stick his scissors in her neck, could the born baby still be killed because that was the mother’s choice?
Neither would say no.
All home births
In 1999 during a debate with Senator Barbara Boxer of California, Santorum asked her: Would you agree that once the child is born, separated from the mother, that the child is protected by the Constitution and cannot be killed?
Boxer responded: I think when you bring the baby home…
So I guess according to this senator life really begins at home.
Tags: back alley, Barbara Boxer, Norma McCorvey, partial birth abortion, penumbra, Rick Santorum, right to choose, Sandra Cano
One Pilgrim’s Progress
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During our bi-weekly Men’s Bible Study at my Church last week, old Charlie, one of my two liberal nemeses, mentioned that he had picked up a copy of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, published in February, 1678 and read it that afternoon.
Christian, an everyman character, is the protagonist of the allegory, which centers itself in his journey from his hometown, the “City of Destruction” (“this world”), to the “Celestial City” atop Mt. Zion.
Christian is weighed down by a great burden, the knowledge of his sin, which he believed came from his reading the book in his hand.
Life is a difficult journey
Charlie’s religious’ curiosity got me to thinking about my own journey as a cradle Catholic.
I was born into a faith that had existed for nearly 2000 years.
It had survived devastating attacks from without and from within.
It has endured a history or bloody persecution in which thousands of its faithful were ripped apart by wild beasts, crucified, burned alive and thrown off high cliffs, drawn and quartered–all because they believed in the Divinity of the Christ.
It has launched crusades and burned a few thousand heretics at the stake in defense of the faith.
It is a religion that is filled with mystery, ceremony, pomp and high circumstance.
It has smells that excite and calm, music that raises the spirit and comforts the will.
Sacraments and mystery
Theologically it soars like the eagle as it tries to touch the hand of God.
It can cure disease, ease suffering and prepare for the final moments of life.
It is a church of over one billion people.
It has as many different strains of thinking as a library does.
But being a faith of deep and high-minded ideas, sometimes it confuses.
Sometimes it frightens.
For all its attendant holiness, its leaders sometimes seem caught in a whirling vortex of charity and unadulterated power that idly dismisses reason and moral logic in favor of pragmatic results.
Some of its popes have done the work of the enemy.
Alexander VI, one of the notorious Borgias
Others have been saintly.
Most have been ambitious while others mediocre.
The Church is a very human institution— a veritable living contradiction.
I once asked a priest during a Christmas Mission at our parish if he had any advice for someone who had been born into the pre-Vatican Church but came to his full religious maturity during the initial reforms of the Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII.
I don’t really remember if he answered my question or if any of the 60 other people in attendance could identify with my dilemma but my mere stating the question was enough for me to come to an understanding of my feelings and thought about my relationship to the Catholic Church.
I am alas caught twixt the old and new Catholic Church.
There are many things about my birth church, which is vastly different from my adult church, that I relish.
As a child, rules, the actual law and order of the faith were deeply instilled in me, by habited nuns and serious priests.
Along with the Baltimore Catechism they laid the foundation for my faith.
We all learned the dogma of the faith by rote memory with a diligence and certitude that armed us to face the three major enemies, who competed for our immortal souls–the world, the flesh and the devil.
As Dragnet’s Sergeant Joe Friday might have said, we knew the facts.
Like Joe we knew the facts
I doubt if the same could be said today.
The Church’s teaching on sexual morality was complicated.
Most of our parents excused themselves from telling about the facts of life.
It was just too embarassing for them to broach.
Modesty forced most of them to shroud their bodies from our view and as an only child I had no siblings who could have explained my contradictory feelings about my own anotomy.
We were taught our bodies were the temples of the Holy Ghost, yet they were also the snares of the devil.
We were warmed about improper touches to ourselves and to others.
Girls were taught to dress modestly—no long pants, though I do remember a few occasions when they wore Bermuda shorts.
Most dirty magazines of the day were, not what anyone would call pornographic but more of the naturalist pulp magazines of nude sunbathers.
In the stash by the high school
I remember a friend, discovering a stash of such magazines in some weeds down by the local public high school.
His widowed mother had assured him he could could look at pictures of naked women as long as he did not get aroused.
To me this was my very first instruction in what I now understand as John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
It was this friend who actually instructed me and a few others in the facts of life.
The God I was taught in those days was also more a God of Justice than a God of Love.
My first lesson was in the weeds of a high school
I have to admit He was scary, freightening and seemingly elusive.
I remember being yelled at in the Confessional by a priest, who warned me of the powers of Almighty God.
He literally put the fear of eternal damnation within my soul at that moment.
In retrospect, I think that is really unfair to God.
But in a way it did work.
I have kept the faith all these years.
I have avoided most of the near occasions of sins.
After studying under the Jesuits for 11 year, I was able to rationalize those I couldn’t avoid.
I have been faithfully married to the same woman for over 45 years and still look at women in the same appreciative way that I adopted in the bushes at Forest Hills high school.
However the abject legalism did take a toll on my understanding of God’s divine mercy and the Agape side of His unlimited personality.
The early Christians knew the meaning of Agape
For most of my life I have been a habitual worrier who is relieved when things are over, instead of enjoying the joyful moments of my life.
But the new church is different.
The church of love and forgiveness has replaced the church of law and order.
In the Church of divine rules, I had tried to micromanage everything and had left nothing up to God
The new church is the worst nightmare of Doestesky’s Grand Inquistor, who cursed God for making men with a free will and granting them the freedom to practice it.
He cursed God for freedom.
During Holy Hour I have learned to open my soul and and heart in an honest and true way so that my life is more open to His grace.
The priest called my last confession–beautiful.
This would never have been possible in the old church.
I have learned to accept my body as it is and realize that it was made in the image and likeness of God and was not something dirty and offensive
However people still need honest and realistic rules—like the 10 Commandments and Jesus’ perfection of them with the emphasis on loving all other human beings.
The modern ideas of relativism and secularism have infected the culture and with it, in may places the church and its members.
Scandal, indifference and moral confusion abound.
I see many others who do not have that the double-grounding in the faith that I have.
Maybe even old Charlie would agree that this pilgrim has made some progress in his journey to that celestial city.
Tags: Agape, Grand Inquisitor, Naturalist Magazines, the flesh and the devil, Theology of the Body, world
Unrest in the Men’s Room
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It is difficult to read the newspapers, listen to the news on TV or the radio and not come away with a very bad feeling about the state of our society and the relationship it has with its most vulnerable people.
No, I am not writing about the unborn. I’ll save that for another day.
But it is not that far removed from this most pernicious evil.
I am thinking about the war on little boys.
It seems that the clerical scandal that rocked the Catholic Church, as it has not been rocked since the days of Martin Luther, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Predators now seem to have been also lurking on several the college campuses and any where young boys can be found.
They lurk everywhere
The stories at Penn State, and Syracuse University are probably just the first to make the headlines.
I can only imagine that there will be others.
These sexual deviates are as ubiquitous as the drunken uncle or lascivious brother-in-law. Every family has at least one.
As someone who has been exposed to a modicum of Thomistic philosophy, I have always sought causes for historic events.
Fairly or unfairly, I look first to the women’s movement that sent shock waves through American social and sexual relationships in the late sixties.
Since then women have challenged and confronted men in every aspect of their existence.
Where lines of gender separation or specialization had been historically and socially
established, women have broken through with a fiery anger that has incinerated anyone or anything that had the temerity to get in their way.
As a result adult men, especially the leadership of many of our Catholic colleges have failed to stand up to many of their outlandish demands.
I am not saying that women should have stayed barefoot, uneducated and pregnant–only that they shed their traditional sexual and family roles with such an alacrity that it was, not only blood curdling, but also destructive to, not only family life, but the civilization as well.
And this was done with a selfish disregard for the unintended consequences of their angered approach.
It is only Christian charity that prevents me from saying that much of the destruction of traditional society was not intended.
I think the women’s movement of the 1960s has also done terrible things to the relationship with mothers to their offspring, especially their sons.
Many sociologists have started calling our culture a feminized culture.
A war on males
The hands that once rocked the cradle with tenderness, selflessness and maternal love, now seem to have another agenda that is for want of a better word–misandrist.
Many brave psychologists say this has caused many young to suffer from a perpetual adolescent or what professionals may arrested development.
Many women have coddled and desensitized their sons to their own masculinity that millions have become wimpy, non-competitive and emotionally emasculated.
I would argue that this is partly the reason so many young men are either attracted to other men and or boys and have become easy pickings for all the chicken hawks stalking their natural habitats.
Some mothers have made their sons so cognizant of the existence of predators that to many of them, every man they meet is a potential rapist.
This is an outgrowth of the feminists who think that every man is a rapist and that Christian marriage is nothing more than legalized rape.
As a result many men have become innocent victims of their undue vigilance on the mothers’ part and have had their lives ruined and even spent time in prison where child molesters live as long as a turkey in late November.
One need only remember the case of defrocked priest, John Geoghan, who had over 300 notches in his molesters belt before being imprisoned.
While his was a heinous crime that cried to the Heavens for punishment, it was not a capital crime.
Not a capital crime
The acclaim or indifference surrounding his brutal murder in a Massachusetts prison in 2003 at the hands of a glory-seeking convict, Joseph Druce, is curious because most of our enlightened society abhors capital punishment by due process.
It is the same incongruity that also approves of over a million executions in the abortion clinics each year.
To modern couples, and their children of choice–what the Chinese call, imperial children boys have a much higher status.
Their abuse must be avenged, even including an unceremonious death at the hands of an assassin.
One need only remember the Amiraults at Fells Acres Day School in Malden, Massachusetts, the McMartin Preschool case in California, and the Glendale Montessori School in Stuart, Florida where the owners and directors of these day care center were wrongly accused and subsequently convicted by an overzealous prosecutor who sensed the political potential of this issue.
I have been aware of this over-reaction to the growing epidemic of sexual predators that has befallen our once virile nation.
It is has something that frightened me in my own personal life.
It has gotten to the point that I never like to be alone in a restroom with a young boy.
For the record, I have never had any sexual attraction for any boys or men my entire life.
I fear more their over-protective mothers.
Are mothers over-protective of their sons?
One personal incident will suffice as illustration.
I was in a Best Buy about 10 years ago. The call to nature came and so I headed back to the restroom.
As I got near the entry, I passed a young mother with her recalcitrant five or six-year-old son.
I just had a premonition that really frightened me.
It was akin to Claudia, Pilate’s wife, warning him not to have anything to do with Jesus.
Warned her husband
I remember praying to myself–please God make her take him to the ladies’ room.
God wasn’t listening or He knew I needed what was about to happen.
I rushed it and did what I had to do in record time and was washing my hands when this little boys walks in and starts to belly up to the bar.
Before getting there and fortunately before unzipping, he looks at me and with all undue seriousness says:
Don’t you touch my penis.
I hope the dreaded shock of my worst fear that had just come to life did not show on my face.
A similar image of my face
I nervously said: The thought had never occurred to me.
I immediately had this vision of being led away with my hands cuffed behind my back, mumbling something like, but officer I never touched the kid!
I quickly made for the door just as another man came in.
I must have broken all fleeing alleged child molester records for a return to my get-away-car.
All of this is not to discount real predators–only to say that both men and women should be reasonable about this dreaded subject and start thinking out of the box about the war on boys, which is nothing more than a miniaturized war on men.
Tags: Amirault, imperial children, John Geoghan;, Pilate's wife, sexual predators, war on boys
The Loud Silence of Christmas
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At this time of the year every Tom, Dick and Nancy that has access to anything from a laptop to a crayon is writing the definitive essay on the true meaning of Christmas.
I know this is true because I did it for the Mindszenty Report last December.
I thought I would try to approach this revered but common subject from a different angle.
It is obvious that Christmas has had its meaning changed by the deliberate vagaries of time and culture.
Christmas has always been my favorite time of the year.
My earliest memory of this revolutionary feast was, not the anticipation of Christ’s birth, but the anticipation of Santa, who was to bring me all the toys I could imagine.
A transcendent sense of anticipation
Christmas is the time of joyous and nervous waiting, followed by a brief period of enjoyment that ended way too quickly.
That childlike sense of what was to come is akin to what Christians and Catholics call the Advent Season.
It is not unlike the desire for a happier and a better life than the one we experience on earth.
The transcendence from the mind of a child with his self-centered desires is not that hard to translate into something more elevated and even supernatural.
The Christmas season, which now seems to start sometime in July, is a composite of many different feelings and memories.
I was talking to a Jehovah’s Witness the other day and he said that he only celebrates the spiritual renewal of Christ’s birth.
While I admire his singular focus I thrive on both sides of the Christmas coin.
The spiritual sign of the coin
Christmas’ secular activities, all in moderation, are a part of the human condition and no one should denigrate them.
I enjoy the gift giving and the smiles it brings to children of all ages because I still remember what a shiny and glitzy package could do for my struggling spirits as a child.
Then there is the holy side with Midnight Mass, the hymns of Christmas and the festive meals with friends and family that underscore the true meaning of the season.
I feel no guilt in enjoying the secular side of the Christmas holidays.
My wife and I have been going to New York City at Christmas for years, just to see the colorful lights and the tree that dominates Rockefeller Center, right across from our special place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
It all comes together in this part of Manhattan
The two seem like a perfect complement to all the promise of the year-end season.
I think it is possible to turn that part of our celebration into a pervasive sense of joy that melds both the material and spiritual sides of our complex nature.
The joy of being with friends and family also has a deep transcendent value that can uplift our feelings and momentarily appease the yearnings for the life to come.
The Christmas spirit, both secular and religion, can be easily ingrained in our hearts and minds and spread to everyone who crosses the path of our journey of life as long as we do not lose sight of our final destination.
Even the Nativity scene at St. Pat’s seems to meld both the secular with the religious.
The rector thought a "sheep dog" was appropriate
I especially like the Christmas music–both the spiritual and the secular.
From the 12 Days of Christmas, Silver Bells and Deck the Hall with…to O Come, O Come..and O Little Town of Bethlehem, nothing lifts my spirit and prompts me to ponder the joyous wonders of Christmas time at home.
I think my favorite hymn has to be Silent Night, written by Franz Gruber.
Together with Josef Mohr, a Catholic priest who wrote the original German lyrics, Gruber composed the music for Silent Night in 1818.
I think this Christmas classic is pregnant with meaning and wisdom for our troubled times.
It is basically an oxymoron, that is a parable of Christmas promise to the world Jesus came to save.
There is also a loud warning inherent in His promise.
A constant reminder
Christ was the only leader of a world religion whose birth was announced several centuries before it happened.
His birth and salvific death caused a universal reverberation that has has echoed through over 2000 years of history to every corner of the world.
He promised that the world would hate and persecute those who followed him.
Since His birth there have been few if any silent nights because for the first time in history, people had to choose a side.
One had to be for Jesus or against Him.
There is and never will be any middle ground.
Lukewarm became as vomit in His mouth.
Since His birth two millennia ago, there has been a noticeable divide that has cleaved mankind into two identifiable factions.
Of course there were wars and violence–one need only skim through the Old Testament to understand that the lot of most men was plagues, pestilence and violent death.
But Jesus’ promise of a better world, not of this world with its eternal peace and love, was too much for many people to fathom.
The Church He left behind has launched crusades, endured religious wars and seen legions of its followers murdered for their belief in Him.
Part of Jesus' promise
The Prince of Peace had brought a spiritual claymore that has cleaved the human race into two warring sections.
Today this cleavage has erupted into a wholesale culture war between a culture of life and a culture of death.
It has become a civil war that has split countries, states and families.
a claymore cleavage worthy of Braveheart
While Jesus did not will that this happen, He predicted it would because He knew the limitations and powerful drives of His creatures.
While His direct intercessions have been limited, He has always been there to help those who sought His assistance.
Some saw it as a threat to their power and august position in life, while others just did not want to stop doing what they had been doing.
In current times, it has created such a reaction in His enemies that many have literally declared a war on the Christmas season.
A calculated and determined clique has attacked every vestige of religious and even secular celebration of His joyous season that to even mention His name in an innocuous phrase of Merry Christmas is to invite the wrath of the PC police.
This virtual war on Christmas had changed the landscape so much that many public schools have started referring to the season of Jesus’ birth as the Winter Solstice.
This has the celebratory potential of a hockey game in downtown Honolulu.
With a president in a White House, who seems to have an antipathy toward all religious fervor, especially Christianity, it makes one more aware of the very threats, not only to Christmas but to our entire perception of religious freedom.
This is all a sobering reality that hangs amid the celebration and exuberance that characterizes the Christmas season.
But it should not be any surprise to any who are aware of God’s Silent Night.
***************************************
Here are photos of the accident from my recent post. You can view the after and the here after.
THE ACCIDENTAL KAMIKAZEby bbprof |
Unsafe at another's home
This photos was taken just five days later.
Amazing restorative powers
Tags: Advent, Franz Gruber, Jehovah Witness, Mindszenty Report, PC police, Silent Night
THE ACCIDENTAL KAMIKAZE
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I know I have been writing a lot about Heaven lately but I have been in no immediate hurry to go there, that is until last week.
I had a serious accident the other night.
One that quite possibly could have killed me.
It was an auto accident without the car.
I can only describe it as a possible suicide attempt.
I gave new meaning to the term, hit the ground running.
I assume its author meant with one’s feet and not head and face.
We were a meeting for the Foundation for Special Education for Children at the palatial home of one of our members.
As we were walking to the car I realized that I had forgotten my mailing list.
So I literally raced to their front door to retrieve the list.
Felt like this without the helmet.
I never made it.
The approach to their home is on an incline with one small step leading to a plateau that fronts a small staircase.
I was running toward the latter and never saw the former.
I either became airborne or merely skidded on my face.
I thought I had hit the stairs and had broken my neck.
While my wife impatiently waited in the car, she started to wonder what had taken me so long.
She did notice a small group of people gathering by a mass or a lump on the ground.
Little did she realize that bloody mess was her husband.
The first person to reach me was the widow of a former hockey player.
She had seen a lot of cuts and bad scraps and stated that she did not think I needed the ER, which relieved me immediately.
I tried to fly like the Rock.*
Our Director, a prominent priest in the diocese was the one who thought 911 might be necessary.
He also wanted to know if there was another priest around who could offer me the Last Rites since he had his new golf pants on, which my wife had given him.
The next day I saw my doctor and he prescribed several x-rays of my neck and damaged knee.
The results came back the next day.
The x-rays were all negative and I should heal quickly but I would still be ugly.
At my favorite restaurant the next morning the owner told me to leave since I was scaring her customers.
The next evening at my Christmas confession after sitting down to face the priest, he politely told me I should get behind the screen and put a bag over my head.
The family says I can’t be in the annual Christmas picture.
My daughter plans to buy me a mask from the Phantom of the Opera.
For the family Christmas photo
This would have all been risible except for the fact that this was not new for me.
I had been there and done similar things several times before.
It was as if I had an innate death wish that I keep failing to fulfill.
I am like one of those Japanese pilots that devastated our navy during the waning years of World War II in the Pacific…the infamous Kamikaze.
Having studied Japanese history, I think I have a bit of the Kamikaze in me, except I don’t want to die–it just looks that way
The Kamikaze is commonly translated as Divine Wind.
This Divine Wind is credited with saving Japan from a Mongolian naval invasion in the 12th century.
The Imperial navy resurrected it to save the home islands from the expected American invasion.
I have a lot in common with them
My first attempt at a crash landing occurred in 1955 in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, where I spent most of my summers with my maiden Aunt Mal.
My father had brought up my old bike–I would get my first “racer” after my September birthday.
I had heard of the play, Three Men on a Horse, so I decided, along with friends who were also brothers to try three boys on a bike.
We started at the top of one of the steep hills in the area and were going at a great speed with one brother on the handlebars and the other on the cross-bar with me at the wheel.
At the foot of the hill was a pick-up truck.
I immediately jammed on the brakes and we all flew head over heels into a pile of rocks.
Landed in a pile of rocks
My head was bruised–the bike had landed on me–and I had but a few scratches from the thistles that were adjacent to the rocks.
The next spring I was riding on my new bike up to the local high school to play stickball with Max.
The night before there had been a terrible storm and an elderly couple had been electrocuted by walking through a puddle with a live wire in it.
My protective mother urged me to be careful and watch out for ‘falling’ wires.
At least that’s what I thought she said.
So I am riding and looking up at all the wires above, thinking one is going to fall on me and fry my 12-year old body.
Some poor new father, who had just experienced the birth of his first child, turned the corner in his car as I peddled across the street.
He hit my front tire and I went flying.
My bike was mangled, not unlike my glasses at the recent accident.
Years later glasses got even worse
I had a small abrasion on my upper leg but that was it.
The recent incident is more reminiscent of my next incident, as it was the same eye.
The year was 1962 and we had our homecoming game with Syracuse University.
They were stomping us 24-6 at half time.
The Crusaders rallied and only lost 30-20.
I was so elated by our manly come-back that back in our dorm I challenged Mike Schoering to run past me.
He lowered his head and came at me and I swung around to drop him and crashed into the corner of a wall. We were at the intersection of wings in the building’s figure H.
I am looking up at the ceiling while people inquired who is it?
At the emergency room, my most memorable moment was meeting a really beautiful blonde, who was like a vision from a dream…maybe a delirious dream.
Ignoring my pain, I asked her for her symptoms. Oh I have an eyelash in my eye was her melodious reply.
Wow! I was in love but a male nurse–how I hate male nurses–quickly closed the curtain between us and she vanished from my life forever.
I think there is a best-selling triology about a Swedish girl with an eyelash or something in her eye?
Thanks to my roomie I made it to the dance that night but my head was approximately the size of a beach ball.
By Tuesday both eyes were blackened like a racoon’s.
Looked like twins
In 1971 I was finishing my course work for my Ph. D.
During the summer I organized with others a pair of teams from my townhouse neighborhood and the History Dept. at St. Louis University.
We had lost the first game when I played for the History Dept.
In the second match I was on the neighborhood team when in the last inning, with a lead I decided to get us another insurance run.
I whacked the ball off the shortstop’s glove and as it rolled into short left field I legged it for second.
The second base person was a wide-hipped professor of mine, Gordon Kirk.
I tried to dive between his legs because I couldn’t see the base and knocking him over was out of the question.
Never having done that before I did not extend my hands and arms and literally crashed into God’s earth.
My humerus departed from the rest of my shoulder and I felt like Bonnie and Clyde in their dramatic death scene that was frozen in cinematic time for what seemed like an eternity.
I should have practiced first
I was declared out and while my brother-in-law took me to the ER we lost the game.
Some years later I was playing tennis with the same brother-in-law when an errant bounce with unbelievable backspin came right at my face–I had not won a point from him since we had started playing.
In my effort to save the point I managed to hit myself right in the head.
Blood gushed from my other eye–not the one from the wall in our dorm.
He took me home to show his sister and she just shook her head as we drove to the same ER where my shoulder had been examined.
A pretty young nurse took all my paperwork and then abruptly turned to leave and I loudly asked her: Will I see you again?
She curtly turned and replied emphatically: No!!!
In my shaken but not stirred state all I could think to say was No, I don’t mean socially!
Not socially
As I write this, I am forced to think that if I am really a part of the Kamikaze mindset, I am not very good at it.
This reminds me of the joke about the Kamikaze who flew 44 unsuccessful missions.
At the rate I am going, I might win a Darwin Award.
Probably not, because you have to successfully kill yourself to get one.
* The last three years of my radio program on WGNU I used the Rocky Theme—Gonna Fly Now! And I did!
Nude Beaches in Heaven? PART II
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In Europe where people seem to have a much less sensitive attitude toward nudity, even public nudity, lust does not seem to be as rampant as it is here.
Perhaps it is just the idea of the forbidden fruit that inspires lust.
I am not implying that everyone should be nude all the time only that it is time we reassess our attitudes on it.
The promptings of the devil must be avoided but in itself the human body is a beautiful creation and must be respected, not a mere object of lust.
Pope John Paul II was a European and he had a much healthier view–morally and otherwise about his own body.
But it wasn’t always that way–even in Europe.
Nudity in art became a bone of contention in 16th century Rome when Pope Paul III asked the famed artist, Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel.
When executing his Last Judgement Michelangelo used his artistic licence to paint scenes, depicting numerous nude figures, including a female and a male saint.
Many accused him of immorality and obscenity.
A controversy for centuries
The Pope’s own Master of Ceremonies Biagio da Cesena said felt it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully, and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather for the public baths and taverns.
While the pope, who paid an enormous fee to the artists loved his creation, his papal censors scurried for paint-on fig leafs, girdles and other modesty garments.
A campaign, known as the Fig-Leaf Campaign was organized by Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini to remove the frescoes.
Daniele da Volterra, was commissioned to cover the figures nakedness with loincloths and veils.
His intervention earned him the nickname of the maker of breeches.
He covered barely enough to assure the painting’s survival.
Pope Clement VIII, 1592-1605, wanted to whitewash the whole wall.
Fortunately he never did but the cover-up work and helter-skelter touch-ups continued deep into the 18th Century.
One pope wanted to whitewash the whole fresco
For years Pope John Paul tried to have all the modesty shields removed from the fresco because he felt they demeaned the human body and demeaned Michelangelo’s art.
With the restoration of the chapel in the 1980′s and 1990′s his restorers said they had removed the 17 most recent breeches, leaving Volterra’s and a few others–23 in all–that would have damaged the painting if removed.
John Paul gave his imprimatur to the finished work, but it came with a stern warning that the splendor and dignity of the human body must be viewed in the light of its creation by God
But it can be appreciated in its entirety for what it represents, the visible sign of the invisible unity of the Triune God.
The pope also said the human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendor and its beauty.
We should not equate nudity with moral shame.
Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person…
The human body is not in itself shameful.
Some of the draping had to remain
Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of a person.
Since I started with massage therapy and researching the pope’s Theology of the Body I have taken John Paull’s words to heart.
I think I now have a more proper respect and understaning my body and its relation to the Triune God.
If I have been created in the image and likeness of God, my body must be essential good, even my naked body and not something dirty.
In massage therapy there should be no conflict between modesty and nudity
The doctor’s office, a shower room at the Y, the privacy of one’s home and the massage table are all places where modesty has to come to grips with a person’s nude body.
What about a nude beach?
I doubt if St. Augustine would ever have been found on a nude beach.
I know a couple people who have been to nude beaches.
The first is a middle age woman whom I have known for about 11 years.
She and her husband came to America from Eastern Europe 20 years ago.
Their attitudes about nudity are different from ours and more relaxed.
On their trips to the Caribbean on at least on two occasions they went to a nude beach on St. Martens.
There were mostly other Europeans there and with everyone in the same state of undress there was a natural aura to the beach.
Bathers in a natural state in Europe
Of course there are nude beaches and there are nudes beaches!
The only discomfort she felt was the voyueristic eyes of some people at the restaurant some 70 yards away, who were fully dressed.
The second time they went she felt more relaxed and they spent the time talking with others as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
For the first time in her life since she was a child, she said she felt truly alive as the sun and the cool ocean water refreshed her entire body in a way that was virtually indescribable.
According to the pope, in their context any shame or discomfort had to come, not the nude bathers, but from the lustful intent of those who did not know how to morally view other human beings in their natural state.
Lust is often in the eye of the beholder
I might add there is probably more lust committed from viewing the skimpy clothing and provocative outfits that characterize our sex-saturated culture than on any nude beach.
The pope has said that pornography does not show too much but too little.
But admittedly this is probably not for everyone, especially not all Americans.
A case in point is my other friend who went more to a nude beach out of curiosity but kept his swimming trunks on.
Part of the problem is our tendency toward concupiscence–that inner drive in us that spoils the good and natural things of life.
This is the real enemy in life–the force of human degradation that seeks to drown our human integrity in a slough of mud and filth.
The pope was trying to counter this tendency in people to turn the appreciation of natural beauty, especially that of the human body into unadulterated lust.
Maybe St. Augustine and the other anti-body heretics are somewhat responsible for this regrettable situation.
I am thinking of the Gnostics, the Cathars and the Irish Jansenists who all had a hateful disgust for God’s creation of the human body.
To his dying day, Pope John strove to counter this insult to God ‘s view of our basic humanity.
That brings me to the title of my post–finally!!
So are there nude beaches in Heaven?
Well my idea of eternity is to walk on the beach and look out at the ocean.
Ever since I made a retreat in Senior year at Holy Cross, I have thought of the rolling ocean, seemingly the eternal ocean as a sign of eternity.
My vision of eternity
It looks like it went on forever.
I also love the water and the sun.
Presumably in Heaven there is no need for any clothing once we get our glorified bodies.
I mean we wear clothing for warmth and modesty.
Heaven must be even better than Hawaii every day of the week, so the cold is no problem.
Without sin, lust or jealousy why would we wear clothing?
What a beautiful way to commune with our fellow saints–no pretenses or hiding anything?
St. Francis of Assisi thought nothing of going au natural to protest the materialism of his age.
Renounced all his worldly goods
There would nothing but true heavenly bodies and I don’t mean the kind in Las Vegas or New Orleans–we would all be awash in the infinite warmth of God’s love.
I may be wrong but my attitude is far healthier and more in line with God’s plan of creation than it was eight months ago.
The heavenly possibilities are endless!
Nude Beaches in Heaven? PART I
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Now that I have gotten your attention.
I will get to the beaches later on.
What I really want to write about is different concepts of Heaven–real and only imagined.
I am at the age that every waiting room I sit in makes me think that this could be God’s Waiting Room.
I believe that throughout history most people have believed in a God.
And with that necessarily follows certain questions of eschatology…that is the meaning of life and the advent of an afterlife.
Socrates did and he believed in an afterlife as well.
History is riven with acts of the utmost cruelty and brutality.
It is also replete with countless acts of acts of nobility and charity that underscore the duality of man.
This by necessity raises the question of reward and punishment and our understanding of Heaven and Hell.
I think most people have similar ideas on the latter but it is Heaven and what must go on there that fascinates, intrigues and maybe just fills us with a great sense of anticipation and maybe even fear.
The major drawback is that you have to die to get there.
Since no one, except Jesus has ever experienced Heaven, and then come to earth, what we really know about it is at best sketchy.
There is something Christians call the Beatific Vision — a face to face encounter with God that promises to be so overpowering the human imagination just can’t image it.
This encounter is supposed to fill us with an over-powering sense of joy that St. Paul said in Corinthians 2:9, is so spectacular that no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has the heart of man conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him.
This is really saying something special since there are so many natural wonders and beauties in this life that anything much greater would literally blow our human minds.
As a man I find all the natural wonders–from the curvaceous shape of a beautiful woman on the beach to the rolling hills of Virginia and the sandy beaches of Maui so uplifting that I have trouble imagining anything much more emotionally satisfying.
In the Book of Revelation, the most incomprehensible and most misunderstood book in the Bible, St. John writes of celestial choirs and a great deal of heavenly pomp and circumstance that doesn’t really seem all that appealing to the average person.
A God of Love more than a God of Majesty?
The God that we have been taught to love is all-knowing, and more importantly all-loving.
Loving is giving of Himself and I would think as the Divine host he would focus a little more on His guests.
He could give us the grand tour as a proud and generous Host would do in earthly life.
And lets face it we would be His eternal guests since we did literally nothing to earn or warrant His beneficence.
I think He would take us around and introduce us to some of the most famous guests that have shared His love.
Then there would be reunions with friends and families and the meeting new people.
I would love to sit around the campfire or at a sidewalk Bistro and talk history with some of our former presidents and generals.
I would love to meet Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and pick is enormous brain.
I would also love to know who really killed the Kennedys, maybe Marilyn and Princess Di and if FDR knew about the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl.
The book is not closed on this killing.
I will be truly saddened if my father were not there.
He never joined the Catholic Church and quite frankly though he respected my mother’s faith, he never made any outward allegiance to any religion.
But I have to think and hope that my mother’s 15 years as an Alzheimer’s victim was applied to whatever debt he may have owed.
If Heaven is supposed to be a perfect happiness and fulfillment of our earthly lives, if some of my closest relatives and friends are not there, what will that do to my happiness?
I think that and God’s infinite mercy are the two best arguments for a quasi universal salvation.
Another writer on Heaven recently said that we would get to meet the saints.
That is a scary proposition because so many led what seemed like impeccable lives that I would have tremendous feelings of inferiority around them.
I mean what do you say to people who loved God so much that they were devoured by wild animals.
A tough act to follow
St. Thomas Aquinas would be someone to spend a day with but my knowledge of Thomistic philosophy is limited but he did have a clear way of explaining things.
I would like to meet someone after my own heart–St. Thomas More, who loved God as much as anyone but was reluctant to stick out his neck–until King Henry backed him into his fatal encounter with his executioner.
His way was the only way I could have done what our martyrs have done.
I never volunteer for anything but when push comes to shove…
I would have shot my mouth off to the king and then it would have been too late.
St. Augustine is another story.
His Manichean background and the sexual sins of his early years soured him on anything to do with the human body and its sexuality.
And while he renounced this heresy, its views had already permeated his approach to sex, sin and the human body.
Sex was dirty and our bodies unclean.
He was plagued by this wretched sin of lust most of his life.
It affected the Church’s teaching on marriage and stained its sacramental importance.
Lust plagued his life and attitudes
I know John Paul II tried to do a lot to erase that stain with his Theology of the Body but there is still a long way to go.
The confusion attendant to the Biblical account of creation just complicates our understanding of sex, nudity and marriage.
Our first parents, whether it was an allegory or an actual fact, were created in their natural state.
Since they had complementary sexual organs, it is not much of a stretch to say that they did engage in lots of love-making, just as God had intended.
But I wonder if this was just reproductive sex since child-bearing became one of the negative results of the fall of man.
I dare not say punishment lest I sound like our esteemed president.
Boston College theologian Peter Kreft believes there will be sex in Heaven for all for whom it was an integral part of their saintly lives on earth.
His ideas on spiritual sex are provocative and engaging.
Kreft and spiritual sex--see below
How that would work is another of the many mysteries of the afterlife.
There were no clothes necessary because they were in a state of pristine beauty, just as God had intended.
But the serpent on the vine changed things for all eternity.
After they partook of the fruit of good and evil, they realized they were naked and sin entered the world and with it lust.
Paradise Lost
Lust can be defined as the innate desire to use another human being merely for the pleasure of the act or thought.
Most often the subject matter is sex.
As a result because of their shame they covered their loins.
Some theologians say theirs was a sexual sin but I have found nothing to confirm that.
But they must have been naked sometime after that because they had at least two children–Cain and Abel.
And there had to be some daughters too.
That raises the question of incest out of necessity.
Millions of married couples today are comfortable in their spouses’ company and even sometimes, the extended family without the benefits of any clothing.
Have they lost their shame?
Or are they treating their bodies more like God intended?
www.peterkreeft.com/topics/sex-in-heaven.htm
MAKE CERTAIN TO LOOK FOR NUDE BEACHES II NEXT WEEK
Tags: Book of Revelation, God's Waiting Room, Paradise Lost, Peter Kreft, spiritual sex, St. Augustine, Thomas More
The New Bishops of Blame
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I have been wrestling for a few weeks with the Joe Paterno controversy that has, not only destroyed a coaching legend, but quite possibly a leading Eastern university.
The conventional wisdom has already lynched his former assistant Jerry Sandusky for his alleged role in one of the most scandalous acts of child abuse ever conceived at a major university.
Does the name Mary Surratt mean anything to you?
I am not wired to jump on the pile and shout his guilt from the highest vantage point in America, like so many of our sanctimonious sportswriters and columnists throughout America.
In an era that disavows the professional and dedicated religious clergy who had always considered moral behavior their area of competency, who appointed this class of mainly sportswriters, who have appointed themselves the moral judges and executioners of sports legends, coaches, players and ball boys?
What do they really know about morality or anything outside the lines of sport?
What are their credentials?
These bishops of blame act as if they had some special knowledge of morality that the rest of us lack.
They are America’s Neo-Gnostics!
They have no churches, seminaries, degrees, credentials, or certificates.
Think George Vecsey of the New York Times.
Why should his opinion matter?
Why should their opinions matter?
Most are not fit to carry Paterno’s ball bag to practice.
I have never met Joe Paterno, nor have I ever been a fan of Penn State’s football program.
But I will say that they did provide me with one of my biggest thrills in my four years at Holy Cross.
At my 40th reunion I ran into classmate Jim Gravel, who had provided that thrill on a sunny fall day in 1962.
It was late in the 4th quarter and State had just scored to make it 48-13–they had the 48.
In all of their greedy wisdom, they elected to go for the two-point conversion, adding insult to the 48-point injury.
The Crusaders stiffened on defense and denied them the magic 50-point plateau.
It was on the ensuing kickoff with a mere 13 seconds left in the game that the slender Gravel thrilled, not just me but the 6000 in attendance.
HOFer Jon Morris played in that Nov. 17th game
He fielded the ball on the HC 13 and cut through their line of tacklers and took it to the end zone for our 20-48 moral victory.
We had a lot of those kinds of victories in those days.
I believe one of the coaches on the other side had to be Joe Paterno, who 49 years later is suffering through a dark night of the soul that has virtually wiped out the best efforts of a long career both on and off the football field. (Now he has lung cancer to boot.)
He had just recorded his record 409th win as a Division I head coach, the most in history to date.
I wonder if the press will clamor for all those victories from 1998 to be rescinded.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Just what is the proper–the Christian way to judge this pernicious situation?
First of all, his former assistant, Jerry Sandusky is innocent…until proven guilty.
One of the great drawbacks to our suffocating democracy is that mob rule eventually replaces sound and logical reasoning.
We are quickly approaching that state of mindlessness.
The logical consequence of democracy
Should Paterno have rushed out and reported the accusations of a graduate student to the police?
Hadn’t this been the case in 1998 and the state failed to prosecute because of a lack of evidence?
Didn’t the University do everything in its limited powers, given Sandusky’s individual rights, that common sense dictated?
Is Sandusky a paedophile or maybe there’s another word for his behavior which seems to be exclusively with young boys?
A paedophile or something else?
Has Penn State been too quick with its rush to judgement now?
Can anyone say, Duke Lacrosse team?
Since Paterno supposedly had never had any first-hand knowledge of these alleged crimes, what would have happened if he had tattled and been wrong?
A rush to judge another Catholic?
Is there anyone out there, who knows of our climate for litigation what Sandusky would have done?
What is the usual fate of Good Samaritans or Whistle-blowers in this country?
Are they heroes or chumps?
Do we not regard them like squealers and vermin?
Now it is our sanctimonious sportswriters and columnists, who are demanding that Paterno take the heroic way, instead of the prudent way!
What would they have done in JoePa’s place?
I’ll bet they would have done nothing more than he did.
The absolute right thing is always easier from a distance.
He did what America’s secular culture taught him to do…go through the chain of command.
This is the very culture these writers have helped to contribute.
Welcome to their brave new world of MC—moral correctness.
Can we demand that an old man who sees a baby floating down the river dive in and save that baby..at great personal risk…and without a decent chance of success?
Is it not curious that given all of these moral suppositions in a culture that has sanctified a woman’s right to choose the death of her unborn baby that our society has this knee-jerk reaction to even the allegations of child sexual abuse?
Is it that we treasure sexual behavior, even among the consenting young so highly that we do not want our children twisted by thew same predators that our sexually charged society encourages?
Speaking of Alfred Kinsey, did he not believed that sex with children was good for…the children? Did he not fosters studies where he and others sexually manipulated babies, all in the name of SCIENCE?
Sex was good for infants too.
Now there was a self-serving gourmet of adolescent pleasures.
Doesn’t our society base its sexual mores on his writing and later those of his kinsman, Hugh Hefner?
Or is it something deeper?
Has anyone read the story of Lady Macbeth lately?
Soap anyone?
Speaking of Freud and I was at least thinking of Freud, didn’t he believe that we must give into all of our sexual desires because repression caused neuroses?
Speaking of Catholics…
Is there anyone out there who doesn’t…at least subliminally connect the Italian Paterno with his Catholic faith?
And by that link him to its damaged priests and bureaucratic bishops who tried to protect their institution for the good of the whole?
Is Paterno just another Look Away Catholic?
The real reason?
Is this just another example of the secular persecution of the Catholic Church by proxy?
I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Send your comments to my comments page.
