What is Love?

http://www.cleveland.com/brett/blog/index.ssf/2014/05/catholic_school_teachers_fear.html

Short answer to the billboard: Yes.

This opinion piece is about the morality contract for teachers of Catholic elementary schools in the Diocese of Cleveland.  Teachers, whether they like it or not, are roll models for children.  They teach not just reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic, but they also teach how one should live their life.  Part and parcel of a Catholic school teachers job is therefore to model the morality children are supposed to be learning in Catholic schools.

This morality is not arbitrary, but is founded on love.  Let’s look at the case the author brought up, that of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

To begin, my 7th grade science class taught me that pregnancy, “results when a mature egg is fertilized by a mature sperm” (Thanks Stanford University!).  That newly formed zygote is already either male or female; and has eye color, hair color and so forth already determined because this human zygote (soon to be embryo) has it’s own unique DNA, just like you and me.

For IVF, many eggs are harvested and fertilized, creating many embryos.  These embryos each have their own unique DNA, and if allowed the womb to grow, could become fully functioning adults.  However, many of these embryos are cryogenicly frozen in case the first attempt to implant embryos in the womb fails.  While one might be, “blessed with twin boys through in vitro fertilization”, there are many other sons and daughters that remain on ice.  

(N.B. – I use the terms “son” and “daughter” because the embryo is already either male or female through DNA, even if the respective male and female parts haven’t yet grown).

How cruel is it to make over a dozen daughters and sons when one will only raise one or two?

“What kind of church wouldn’t see that?”

Apparently the church desired by the author of this opinion piece.

In our understanding of what makes an action loving is the fulcrum of the matter.  The Catholic Church has received the teachings of love from Jesus Christ and passed them onto us. Some things didn’t exist when Jesus was around, so the Church looks at the handed down teachings and looks for whatever doesn’t contradict them to guide us in our new settings and with our new technology.  Who would doubt that it contradicts love to conceive but not raise a child?   Those people are called deadbeat dads or moms, and are justly scorned for such behavior.  Orphans are given a protected status in the Scriptures, and children created but abandoned by parents are orphans.

The protestations of some Catholics to redefine the teachings of love handed down to us from Christ are because we are ignorant of the richness of our theology.  Therefore our Catholic teachings become ungrounded and so gain the patina of arbitrarity instead of having the love which is their foundation shine forth like the dawn.

Now then, in the unlikely event the author will read this piece, I challenge her to become a more loving person so that she can make a reality of the Church becoming more loving.  I challenge her to love the 400,000 frozen up like Stallone and Snipes in Deomolition Man as much as she loves those she can see and touch.  If she and I and every Catholic manage this great love, then the Church will indeed become more loving.

What do we sacrifice for?

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/513194/20131011/india-father-axes-infant-son-please-goddessdurga.htm

Kali, goddess of destruction.

This article is about a man who sacrificed his infant son to the goddess Kali.  One of the wonderful things about Christianity is that it helps to put an end to these sorts of brutal actions.  In the Catholic faith we recognize the need for blood to be spilled, but thanks be to God it is his and not ours.

When we cut ourselves off from the divine life through sin, the natural consequence is death (i.e., we experience the absence of life because we cut ourselves off from the source of life).  This man recognized that absence of divine life in childless couples and sought to rectify that.  He therefore committed some of the most ancient sins.  He sought to be like God without God’s help, just as Adam and Eve.  He sought to reconcile God with Mankind by his own actions, just like the Tower of Babel.  The battle of the Christian has already been won, she just needs to accept it.  This is one of the hardest parts of confession: accepting absolution.  The blood for us has already been spilled.

Carthage child sacrifices, the brutality of the Roman games, the violent barbarians, all were tempered by the Christian understanding that the sacrifice has already been finished.  It was never a complete conversion of Europe, and it took a long time, but great progress was made until our current era, where again we practice child sacrifices to our gods.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100240779/gendercide-catholic-doctor-could-be-struck-off-for-refusing-to-abort-healthy-girl/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10360386/Law-does-not-prohibit-sex-selection-abortions-DPP-warns.html

Our modern gods are our own whims.  Healthy females die merely for being female, and not only in Asia.  Our backwards and regressive modern society rejects the value of the feminine, and so sacrifices healthy infants on the altar of personal desire.

As horrid as it is to kill your son with an axe, at least this guy did it in a misguided attempt to help others.  The parents of the children sacrificed over gender preference are not so noble.

As with older gods, our modern gods also have state support, with the EU considering treating abortion as a human right.  I defy you, dear reader, to find anything either “human” or “right” about terminating a life because it is female instead of male.

Again, it is an issue of people putting themselves in the place of God.  The phrase, “I want a boy, so we’ll abort any girls”, treats children and commodities instead of as people.  Children become chattel to accessorize our lives with rather than a divine gift of life to nurture and love.

This doesn’t relate to a particular heresy, but underlies many.  Anglicanism was created because Henry VIII wanted to divorce and re-marry (thus putting himself ahead of Christ’s teaching), Liberation Theology can sometimes think we might build our way to heaven through structural reforms on earth, and so forth.  All of these try to supplant the gifts God has given us and place our whims before love of God and neighbour.

The Freedom to not look at Porn.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Society/article1317209.ece

This article discusses one of the recurring findings of modern science, that pornography’s impact upon the brain is similar to the impact of substances (drugs & alcohol) upon the substance abuser.  What that means is that the freedom of the user can become a slavery over time.  Merely to approach the baseline of normal one might need to continue using.  This consequence of regular pornography use is one out of many the reasons the Catholic Church finds pornography sinful.  One way to understand the morals of the Church is to understand that the breaking of those morals (a.k.a. sinning) are actions that limit our freedom.

We can see how important the moral law is to our freedom when we understand the context it was given in.  The Isrealites just left Egypt, and had crossed the Red Sea, and then God gave the law to them.  It would be foolish for God to make a people free only to enslave them to a law, but it makes perfect sense to prescribe a law which might help ensure their continued freedom.

If what I’m saying is confusing, I might suggest watching “The Prince of Egypt”, put out by Dreamworks in 1998.

One aspect of that law given around 1400 BC (an approximate time for the life of Moses, which is closer in years to Jesus than we are!) is that we should have right sexual relationships (cf. the 9th commandment), and pornography corrupts that sexual communion by changing brain chemistry.  The result is can be an addictive need for pornography, which progressively narrows the freedom to make choices in regards to sex down to only a screen.  When we don’t cherish our sexual freedom make the appropriate choice of monogamy, we can loose our sexual freedom.  Pornography, which is so easily available, accelerates this loss of freedom, but any misuse of our sexuality starts us down that path to sexual enslavement (and I’m not referring to the kinky kind of enslavement).

By understanding that the Church desires we be free people, we can understand why she says we shouldn’t use pornography.  It’s not out of a desire to be conservative or old fashioned, but because she loves us so much that she desires our freedom.

In this we re-imagine our freedom to understand it not as a freedom to do as one pleases, but the freedom to keep ourselves from enslavement.  My understanding is that during the Enlightenment the modern idea of freedom took hold, a freedom to do as one wishes as opposed to doing what is necessary to keep our freedom of will.  The Enlightenment changed the implicit meaning of freedom from having a freedom of will into having a freedom of body.  I can’t seem to dig up where I found this factoid, so I could be wrong here.

Sam Harris is right (but I wish he wasn’t)

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-moral-landscape-challenge1

I read The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris a while back.  While I would enjoy the cash from refuting his argument, I would despise what I would become in that refutation: a heretic.

The core of his argument is that a reasoned understanding of experiences can help us determine what is good and what is bad.  This, regrettably for my wallet, is the Catholic position on reason and science.  While acknowledging the difficulties in practice, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining … the natural [moral] law written in our hearts”.  Further, “religious and moral truths .. are not beyond the grasp of human reason”.  In addition, it is the heresy of Ontologism (popular in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds) that teaches we attain knowledge of God separate from the created world rather than mediated by the world.  This means rather than just reason alone, we need reason interacting with the world, which is nearly the perfect definition of science and precisely what Sam Harris is arguing for.

Used Without Permission From: http://media.salon.com/2010/10/the_moral_landscape_why_science_should_shape_morality.jpg

Why such a well known atheist would hold such a Catholic view might be because Christianity in America is strongly shaped by the heretical view held by Luther that “Reason is directly opposed to faith, and one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed and buried.”

Used Without Permission From: http://www.usgwarchives.net/mi/livingston/photos/tombstones/gilkes/reason122091nph.jpg

Poor Ms. Reason, looks like Luther got to her.

This comes out of Luther’s idea that God is nearly entirely transcendent when it comes to morals.  God’s law, for Luther, was arbitrary and external to humanity rather than an expression of the fullness of humanity.  For Luther, this was largely because of his nominalist tendencies.

However, Luther was hardly the first to espouse the idea that God is so transcendent that his law is beyond reason.  Perhaps the most well known body of believers who espouse this idea are some denominations of Islam.  Their understanding is that God is so transcendent that he doesn’t need reasons for his law (the Akhbari and Ash’arite schools).  While this may be the perceived common view, it isn’t the only view that could be held by Muslims.  The Mu’tazila and Usuli schools of thought teach more of what Catholic teaching is: that we can learn about God’s law through reason.

Amidst all this complexity then, Sam Harris hold quite orthodox religious views upon reason and science helping one understand how to apply God’s law to their lives.  Rather than encourageing atheism, his book could be seen as a call to return to a Catholic life for Christians and a call for Muslims to return to the Mu’tazila and Usuli schools of thought.

Montanism and the rejection of moral leaders

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/18/children-of-god-will-die-msnbc-host-says-only-phony-christians-oppose-obamacare/

The heresy Ed Schultz espouses is part of Montanism.  Starting near 170, Montanus started teaching that we don’t need a Church to teach us right and wrong (it was only to be the Holy Spirit).  Near the same time, this wall was built to protect Britannia (modern day England) from Caledonia (modern day Scotland):

Used Without Permission From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antonine_wall.JPG

As you can tell from the busted up wall, Catholics have faced the issue of people rejecting the Bishops for quite a long time.

Mr. Schultz, much like Montanus, had this special “born-again” experience of God, and therfore like Montanus before him, he feels qualified to distinguish between real and phony Christians.  Also like Montanus, he bases this upon his own personal morality.  For Montanus, it was sex he rejected as immoral. Marriage was denied to all and all were expected to be celebrate because the physical world is bad.  These were the “real” Christians of 170 AD.  For Mr. Schultz, the “real” Christians are those who embrace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) because it will save the lives of children.  These are the “real” Christians of 2013.  In both cases individuals think they know better than the Church — they feel that their morality is superior and that others have lost their way.

(A closing note: the American Bishops did campaign for a revision to health care prior to the implementation of the PPACA, but when it was revealed the revision would pay for more abortions, they rejected the legislation as unjust.)