“Religion” is typically considered as a “belief system” or a “structure of beliefs and practices concerning the divine.” It’s a recent development in the meaning of the word, and it would have been foreign to, say, Aquinas, for whom religion was a virtue.

A virtue is the perfection of a power of the soul, or, in modern parlance, an excellence of the human person. We see a height of humanity in courageous actions, a greatness we are all capable of. We admire courage, not as something for just this or that person, but as something every human being can and ought to aspire to. Virtue, then, is not the addition of some pleasing quality, slapped on like a sticker on the surface of this or that person. Virtue is the perfection of those powers and capacities every person really does have, our indwelling capacities for courage, patience, justice — and religion.

If religion is a virtue, then we have “religion,” not because it is one option among many, nor a “belief system” one may or may not take on, but because the human being is that type of being who is capable of the divine as he is capable of courage — as a power intrinsic to his person. In this view, there can be no clear distinction between the religious and the non-religious. To be human is to be religious, and the only distinction is the degree to which we perfect or do not perfect this power. There are those who are excellent in religion and those who are not; those growing in this particular capacity and those atrophying; the flourishing and the wilting.

Atheism does not a non-religious make. The lack of belief does not exempt anyone from the capacity to suffer the divine — from the power of honoring and reverencing God. Indeed, there are atheists who have made an enlightened, rational dissent towards the proposition of God who nevertheless remain more religious than Catholics. Watch them silence themselves in the Cathedral while the camera-clicking Christians babble on. Watch them defer to the priest while the Catholic bristles. Watch them imitate the genuflections and signs of the cross out of “respect” during weddings, funerals and the like — the Catholic breezes through them. Watch them speak late into the night and deep into the beer about theological issues the Christian has forgotten are issues at all — the doctrine of Hell and the problem of suffering. To deny God as a theoretical concept proffered by the Christian is not to cauterize the capacity for God always already present as a real possibility of human existence.

Theism, for its part, does not a religious man make. One is no more religious by believing in God than one is excellent in justice by believing in an ordered human community. The order of intellectual assent is not equatable with the order of virtue. Satan is a committed believer, a theist deficient in the virtue of religion. Only the theist has a real capacity for satanism – to believe in the divine while refusing Him honor and reverence.

Of course, the theist who wilts in the virtue of religion lives a painful contradiction between the content of his rational beliefs and the state of his life, as does the atheist who awkwardly — and even ironically — flourishes in his reverence and interest in the non-existent deity. Both flirt with the moment in which they will either unify their beliefs and actions into a consistent life, or content themselves with being a contradiction.

This, I think, is why our age wants to make religion a matter of rational choice rather than a matter of excellence. If it is something we are all capable of by virtue of being human (rather than something believers are capable of by virtue of an intellectual assent to the proposition “there is a God”), then we are all responsible. The theist is is not saved by his belief, and the atheist is not exempted from the issue by his unbelief. The capacity for honor, reverence and right relation to the divine is written on every human heart, and expresses itself as a demand to be realized, whether we’d like it or not. If it is true, and if the modern intellectualizing of religion is bogus, then it is a lovely truth. For I am often confused, and I often doubt, and there are many moments when I stutter, stall, and find myself without the capacity of “proving” or even giving “strong evidence” for God’s existence in any intellectual fashion. But I am religious. I suffer the divine, whether or not I can defend its presence in the intellectual sphere. While the arguments fluctuate according to the conversation and my own place on the scale of Density to Wit, the capacity remains, the virtue sticks, the power of the soul is the same power that has gnawed at me from childhood, demanding to be allowed to flourish in the full light of day.
 
 
(Image credit: Lifehack Quotes)

“Christ prophesied the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs) objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem. He said, 'If these were silent, the very stones would cry out.' Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.”  - G.K. Chesterton

 
We lost something important when our Western culture ‘outgrew’ its infatuation with obscenely large cathedrals, ornate basilicas, dark stone chapels, stretching towers, and lonely crypts. We lost something important – a unique human experience – when religious people began their relationship with the plaster-church over the ‘old-school’ church.

We lost our awareness of the power of Place, specifically, its power to shut us up. Have you ever seen a group of tourists walk into a basilica? They respect the great artistic achievements of the Old Church without respect for the Old Church. They walk in through the creaking, wooden side-door; they are talking about their diet plans, and the relative evils of cholesterol. Through the door now, (they smell the incense), into the foyer, (they feel the cool of the stone ease away the heat of the day from their skin), and past the first arch. Wait for it, wait for it…now.

Their words die on their lips. Mouths open loosely, and necks crane instinctively upwards. Their group loosens, they begin to wander away from each other, one towards the candles, another towards Our Lady of Sorrows, and another towards the altar, each waltzing in small circles as they try to take everything in. How many times I’ve seen this, and how many more times I’ve performed this little unconscious ritual; this silent transformation; this unrequested dance.

The beauty of a basilica is that men do not visit it, it visits men. The beauty of it, yes, but also the rudeness of that dark, stone temple, for it is a hand clamped over the modern mouth, a sturdy grasp guiding one through side-chapels.

It demands that you center yourself. Here are the pews on either side, the symmetrical side-chapels, everything mirrored and proportional, even the interlacing tessellations of granite that spread out from a single star on the floor. Stand on the star. Then look straight ahead. There are two things that everything else seems to reflect from. Two things in this building that form and beauty and structure emanate from. One is you, in the center of the church, having wandered there almost by by necessity, by the strange force of the symmetry all around you. The other is the tabernacle. Of the two, choose now whom you will serve.

Every cathedral makes this bold, arrogant challenge to the visiting man. The sheer size, scope, and intricacy of these temples speaks of the total, radical commitment men gave to God; to build him a dwelling place, even if they were not to see it complete; to serve him. These living stones are their pronounced fiat; their yes; their choice. What is yours? For when Catholic or atheist leaves, the tabernacle remains. The Body of Christ will stay – the red candle still burn – and the basilica will circle and reflect around it, like ripples in a pool, emanating from the drop of some inexplicable and sublime stone.

What does a plaster-church say? “I will not be here long.”

What does a cathedral say? “You cannot deny me. For I’ve outlasted your forefathers, and I’ll outlast you.”

The cathedral speaks of the endurance of Catholicism. This is not to deny the beauty of a simple church, of the awesome fact that the universal quality of Catholicism means that Catholics can celebrate mass in their living rooms, shelters, canoes, and battle-fields. This is simply to lament that the age of the Cathedral is done, the age where one was silenced, for perhaps the briefest of moments in a life filled with noise, and brought to worship.

Perhaps the tourists would never acknowledge that they perform an act of worship, walking into a basilica. But what else are we to call it, when we all shut up, slow ourselves and walk small-stepped in awe, reduced to whispers and peace?

The Catholic Church holds that worship is not something we do. No, worship is a gift we receive. I hold that the cathedrals, basilicas, and lasting chapels of the Church are awesome conveyors of that gift, rudely thrusting worship into the hearts of all who enter them.

But perhaps there is one place left where one can experience this bit of humanity. I speak, of course, of the library, where my writings are written. It would not be unwise for the seeking, modern man, to stand in some old, dusky library, close his eyes amidst the books that surround him, and think of how such a little peace would be magnified, if he were surrounded by saints, angels, pilgrims, prayers, cool stone, and holy incense.

A man in a library - if he is a man at all – is humbled by the mass of human knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that surrounds him.

A man in a cathedral is humbled because he, as a member of the human race, has performed the incredible and audacious act of surrounding the unsurroundable God with stone.

The Internet hath done wondrous deeds, but raising the intellectual bar cannot counted among them. This became clear when I realized the question man alone has the dignity to ask—Am I a creature or an accident?—is being answered by taking screenshots of our oppositions’ Facebook statuses, rebutting them in Impact font, and posting them in a forum appropriated for the caress of our preconceived notions and the heavy petting of our unexamined faith. In this climate of awful, between the “God Hates Gays” meme and the “Atheism Causes War” rebuttal, I sympathize with the man who dismisses current atheistic/theistic dialogue as a joke.

But the problem with all this is that it’s not a joke. If there were jokes, there would be understanding, and an untwisting of sneers besides. The power of humor is not that it makes the serious frivolous, but that it unites opposites, and binds contraries in communion. By opening the lungs to laugh, humor opens the heart to hear, rendering a man absurdly vulnerable to anything his opposition wishes to say.

Take, for instance, the fact that it is acceptable to insult a man’s mother to his face if—and only if—you can make him laugh while doing it. ‘Yo Momma’ jokes bear testimony to this bizarre truth, that there are moments when we will enjoy precisely that which has been deemed utterly distasteful. In fact, it is entirely acceptable to call a man any manner of names, to insult his upbringing, his occupation, the faithfulness of his wife, his education, his love life—if and only if he laughs. Laughter negates insult.

By what witchcraft? I’m not sure. But its seems that all jokes are inside jokes in that they bring two men into the same sphere to dwell in communion with each other. It’s impossible not to like the man who makes you laugh, for in that moment of laughter you share with him the joke. You are his brother.

Now if a joke allows a man to bear an insult to his person, and bear it willingly, then surely a joke would allow a man to bear an insult to his worldview and his philosophy, and bear it willingly? Debate is, when all is said and done, the constructive insult of another man’s philosophy. This does not necessitate that it be bitter. In fact, it demands that it be good-natured. It demands that the insulting, divisive nature of debate be elevated by the communicative, brotherly nature of humor, if one desires to convince his opponent.

I look to the debates of G.K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw as my example, the former a Catholic and a distributist, the latter an atheist and a socialist. Their ability to joke—and to stay friends—in the midst of such heated debate is no accident. It is precisely because they could joke that the debates were so heated—there was a real danger of someone being converted. Shaw, in defending his desire to abolish private property, said:
 

"If I own a large part of Scotland I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea, or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it. They might frighten the deer.
 
But now compare that with the ownership of my umbrella. As a matter of fact the umbrella I have to-night belongs to my wife; but I think she will permit me to call it mine for the purpose of the debate. Now I have a very limited legal right to the use of that umbrella. I cannot do as I like with it. For instance, certain passages in Mr. Chesterton’s speech tempted me to get up and smite him over the head with my umbrella. I may presently feel inclined to smite Mr. Belloc. But should I abuse my right to do what I like with my property—with my umbrella—in this way I should soon be made aware—possibly by Mr. Belloc’s fist—that I cannot treat my umbrella as my own property in the way in which a landlord can treat his land. I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community. That, I think, is perfectly simple..."

 
To which G.K. Chesterton responds:
 

"Among the bewildering welter of fallacies which Mr. Shaw has just given us, I prefer to deal first with the simplest. When Mr. Shaw refrains from hitting me over the head with his umbrella, the real reason—apart from his real kindness of heart, which makes him tolerant of the humblest of the creatures of God—is not because he does not own his umbrella, but because he does not own my head. As I am still in possession of that imperfect organ, I will proceed to use it to the confutation of some of his other fallacies...
 
I fully agree with Mr. Shaw, and speak as strongly as he would speak, of the abomination and detestable foulness and sin of landlords who drove poor people from their land in Scotland and elsewhere. It is quite true that men in possession of land have committed these crimes; but I do not see why wicked officials under a socialistic state could not commit these crimes. That has nothing to do with the principle of ownership in land. In fact these very Highland crofters, these very people thus abominably outraged and oppressed, if you asked them what they want would probably say, 'I want to own my own croft; I want to own my own land.'"

 
Perhaps I’m the only one who enjoyed all that umbrella talk, but I hope I am not the only who recognizes that the exchange of these two men is miles beyond—in quality, clarity, and convictions—the binary, right/left, atheist/theist debates we witness today.

The current God Debate does not seek to make its opponent laugh, but to make an already sympathizing audience sneer. One wonders whether debates aim to convince at all—an object which demands the respect and love of the other—or whether they exist entirely to publicly dismiss others, a thrill unique to those—myself included—who forsake the pursuit of truth for that of popularity. Sarcasm, wit and humor—which all have their place—are wasted. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons human communication can wield, for it makes a friend out of an enemy, but we are too intent using it for the sake of our already-nodding audience to bother using it for the sake of conveying the truth.

Chesterton said “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it,” and this seems to me true, for to joke about your philosophy is to invite others into it—everyone can laugh at a joke. Let us not be so smug as to disdain joining in.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

True suffering — whether in death, disaster, or disease — is united by the fact that we hate it. Our beings reject it, our minds refuse to comprehend it, our bodies are sickened by it, and it’s all a simple matter of definition: To suffer is to experience that which we do not want to experience.

Now it’s impossible, from a purely secular standpoint, to answer the question of why we suffer. For if there were a good reason for our suffering, then that suffering would become tolerable to us — and then it wouldn’t be suffering at all.

I’ll try to be clear: If we could say with precision why we suffer, and to what end, then we wouldn’t be suffering. We would be athletes with sore muscles. The athlete knows why he is experiencing pain, and he knows to what end (becoming stronger, improving at his sport, etc.). He will not be swept up in fear and confusion after each workout, nor will his very being rebel against the pain in his triceps. He is not suffering in the strict sense, and we’d be fools to treat him as if he were.

Or take burning our hand on a stove. Again, this pain is something we want to experience. Pain, after all, is the message rammed into our brain to remove our hand, lest we burn ourselves through to our muscle and bone. Pain of this sort is useful and answerable — it is not suffering, and no one treats it as such.

It seems that for suffering to be suffering — for it to truly be that which do not want to experience — it cannot have a satisfactory answer. To put it another way: The existence of a clear, natural purpose to “suffering” indicates that the experience in question is not “suffering” at all. Thus there exist no support groups and therapy sessions for stove-pokers and athletes, and quite a few for cancer patients and the survivors of massacres. The difference is simple. The former can point to some greater purpose to their pain — an un-destroyed hand or bigger, stronger muscles. The latter cannot. All we can give those truly experiencing suffering are expressions of support or comfort. We can give no purpose.

This is no failure on our part — it's not our fault we're unable to give a rational, secular purpose to suffering. It simply speaks to the fact that if there existed for us a perfect, satisfactory answer to the problem of suffering, then we would not really be suffering. Suffering, to be suffering, seems to require its awful purposelessness.

This, of course, is a terrible paradox and an immediate problem. It is our natural response to the experience of suffering to ask “Why?!” and “Why me?!” Few would deny this. Yet it is inherent to the nature of suffering that there be no answer to these questions. This is a tension begging to be released, a conflict in desperate need of resolution.

I cannot blame the atheist then, for speaking in religious tones after a great tragedy. I cannot blame the agnostic for going to a Christian memorial service. I don't fault the materialist for finding comfort in the words “Rest in Peace,” even if he believes that the only peace after death is that of oblivion. Since we are necessarily denied a natural solution to suffering, we turn our minds to the supernatural.

This is no sign of weakness, but a sign of common sense. If I were to sit in a classroom and find that there were no answers I could give using the English language, it would be no weakness to conclude that my answers must be given on a different plane, in French or Mandarin, depending on the class. So too, if we find in this life a question that necessarily has no answer on the secular plane — in this case, “to what end do we suffer?” — then it is no weakness to begin operating on the religious frame. In fact, it’s entirely natural.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Red Letter Christians)

At some point in discussions between Catholics and atheists, the Catholic is obliged to defend the flair his Church has for covering everything in gold.

The criticism, veiled as a question, isn’t without foundation. There have been all manners of abuse regarding wealth within the Church, and — if I may prophesy — there will continue to be. No sane man would defend the personal hoarding of wealth, especially not among clergymen. But when the man outside of the Church bemoans the unsold wealth of the Church, he’s not thinking of crooked cardinals or Popes parading as Renaissance princes. He is thinking of the cathedrals and the basilicas, the thrones and tabernacles of gold, the chalices of sliver and the jewel-encrusted robes, the pomp and pageantry of the largest human institution in the world. Hence:
 

 
To summarize the modern axiom: The Catholic Church has gold and refuses to sell it, thus the Church lets the poor starve.

It’s a noble complaint, but the reality is this: The Church’s wealth comes from the poor. What people miss when they speak of “The Catholic Church” — and by it mean a few cardinals, bishops, and a Pope — is that the Catholic Church is made up of every Catholic, rich and poor alike. Thus the upkeep and general wealth of the Church comes from every member of the Church, rich and poor alike, giving to their respective dioceses. As a college student who has put his laughable dollar into the collection plate more than twice, I can attest to this fact.

But most importantly — and this really is my point here — the wealth of the Church exists for the edification and benefit of every Catholic. Cathedrals are not solely for bishops. A throne exists for more than the man sitting on it. It is a certain nasty pride that tells the man suffering from poverty that the Beauty surrounding him — be he a homeless man appreciating the cool of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, or a Haitian saying prayers in the Cathédrale St. Jacques et St. Philippe — that it should all be torn down, sold, and given to him in the form of money. It is an offense to say, “this golden tabernacle you kneel before — it should be melted for bread.” The poor man in this position would do well to tell his well-intentioned but misguided friend the truth that “man does not live on bread alone.”

Faulting the Cathedrals and Basilicas of the world for containing “too much” wealth is an awkward denial of the fact that the cathedrals and basilicas of the world are explicitly for the use of the poor, and to steal from them is to steal, not merely from the Church, but from the poor themselves — the poor who, despite the perceptions of Hollywood, do not merely need bread, cash, and contraception, but beauty, ritual, and God as well.

In sum: the visible wealth — the very stuff that sets people complaining — is for the poor.

But surely the cardinals and Popes are rolling in it. Right? I can’t speak for the entire world, but the average salary of an American bishop is $23,ooo per year, about half the average American’s. The average priest’s is $40,000 per year, only $20,000 of which is actually “take home cash”. And if you’re the Pope, not only does your salary suck, but you don’t get it until you’re dead. Popes get one gold, silver, and copper coin for each year of service placed on their coffin. Blessed John Paul II received about $141 dollars.

We should note that when many people criticize the Church's extravagant architecture and art,  they often invoke Jesus. Let's examine his response to a similar criticism:

“While Jesus was in Bethany, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”

Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

Here Jesus welcomes and praises the excessive love poured out for him  — what Judas calls "waste." But that's precisely what Catholics continue doing today. Atheists must remember that Catholics believe the words of Christ, that in the Mass he becomes bread for us, transforming mere wheat and wine into his Body and Blood. Thus when we build for him a tabernacle of gold, and chalices of silver, pillars of marble, and windows of fiery glass, we do it not to placate men but to honor God. God does not disdain these treasures any more than he disdained the Wise Men’s gold or the Bethany woman's perfume, for our praise is his gift to us, the spiritually poor, who by it are granted the desire for communion with him.

 
 
Originally posted at BadCatholic. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: ###)

I’m curious as to why man is in the habit of wearing clothes, when no other animal has been spotted with even the smallest, most insignificant of socks.

We could say it’s the fault of the cold, but humans wear clothes at the Equator.

We could take a Darwinian tactic and argue that clothes are hygienic—and thus the people who wore clothes outlived and out-reproduced those who ran young, wild and free—but this assumes too much. A soiled rag around the crotch seems far less healthy than a lifetime in a birthday suit. Even if dressing was significantly life-saving back in our lol-what-is-a-hygiene days, an appeal to hygiene still doesn’t answer why clothe-wearing began. It can only describe how it succeeded after its genesis. (And we’re after a genesis, not an exodus. (Somebody, please, laugh.))

We could argue that going around naked makes a man vulnerable and ashamed, which is experientially true, but veers from science and into religion, claiming man as animal-embarrassed-of-his-genitals, he-who-covers-what-every-chimp-and-dolphin-flaunts, putting dead animal skin between him and his primary drive to reproduce, and bringing to center stage one of the most terrifying existential question we can ask: What is wrong with human nature, that we feel an obligation to cover it?

We could make an argument from necessity, something like “thanks to natural disasters, human beings had to move to new climates, and the wearing of clothes allowed them to do so”, but this will only ever be a decent guess, in that it could be equally true that humans first wore clothes, and wearing them allowed for movement to new climates.

All any explanation after the few we’ve mentioned can hope for is mystery and guesswork, for we find ourselves wearing clothes, ashamed to take them off, having done so as far as we can look back. We can’t even point to where the absurdity began. As G.K. Chesterton noted:
 

"The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words ‘They wore no clothes!” Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting rock. But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments, or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of them than these people have left."

 
You see the conundrum. So in the face of the question of why we’re so embarrassed to be naked—regularly dreaming of the situation occurring to us at our old high-school—two answers diverge in the woods.

The first goes a little like this: Science tells us that the human being is merely an animal. Presented with the fact that he acts strikingly unlike other animals, we must explain this difference as merely quantitative. So what is the difference between man and the other beasts? Man is simply more intelligent.

In his intelligence, he chose—well not chose, that implies free will, a thing no animal exhibits, and thus a silly opening to an argument that holds man as no more than a smart animal—man happened to wear clothes out of necessity, driven by his own survival instinct, in response to migration, climate, disaster, or some other, unknown agent. First he lay under a dead animal for warmth, then he tried to take the animal with him, then he cut its skin, and thus forth. Perhaps, over time, this “happening” became a taboo. The idea that “it is good to wear clothes, it is bad not to” was enforced by a herd mentality, which sought the survival of the species, and “knew”—in that fur-wearers survived longer to pass on their genes—that fur-wearing aided the species survival. The shame we experience in nakedness today was born, a product of evolution, and has remained with us ever since.

It’s not bad, and I’m certain my pitiful attempt could be polished by some one versed in the language of anthropology and speculative darwinism. The problem is that it will always be a guess.

Another guess, one that has the value of being experienced every day, is that man is not just quantitatively different from the beasts, but qualitatively. Because clothes are a uniquely human phenomenon, man can be described as an animal who wears clothes. It’s not that he happens to wear clothes, which, as discussed, is only ever a guess. He is a creature who wears clothes, as a pelican is a creature that flies. If this is the case, it tells us something rather remarkable: Innate to the experience of human existence is the experience of shame, expressed by the fact that man is ashamed to be exactly as he is born—naked.

Now shame is something no human being desires to experience. At the very heart of human existence then, there is a thorn: Something-that-should-not-be-but-is. This is all rather odd, for a something-that-should-not-be implies desire for a something-that-should-be, namely, a world without shame. And if we contain within ourselves a desire for a world without shame, while living in a world of shame, then the simple fact of pulling on a pair of pants in the morning expresses a truth illustrated in the creation myths of every religion the world has ever put up with: The Fall, that bold and obvious proclamation that things are not as they should be, and that there is a better world to be attained.
 

"When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
 
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
 
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
 
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

 
At times, the religious impulse seems frightfully natural.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Black Sheep)

In the delightfully crunchy world of debate, it seems apparent to me that the closer you are to the tactics of the Westboro Baptist Church, the closer you are to being entirely wrong. This is a concept towards which I have no doubt that my atheist friends will nod in earnest. After all, the level of intellectual destruction it takes to reduce one’s entire theology to the slogan “God Hates Fags” is embarrassing, to the point that the entire universe seems sadder for WBC’s very existence.

So it is odd—and I pretend with a passion that it is not simultaneously and sickeningly fascinating—that we sometimes see others joining forces with the WBC. What dark power could possibly exist on earth strong enough to bring about such a cosmic convergence? Why, The One Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church!

You see the Church—may She blossom, build more cathedrals, and continue being the world’s largest charity—has the remarkable habit of unifying friends and enemies alike. Thus we see record numbers of Anglicans and Lutherans becoming Catholic, incredibly improved relations with the Eastern Orthodox Church, and, in general, great strides towards Christian unity, while Evangelicals, Agnostics and New Agers all sit together on the sidelines with identically incensed “you-don’t-allow-birth-control?” expressions on their faces. The Wiccan and the Darwinist can set aside their mutual contempt for each other and smoke a few bowls over the Church’s position on abortion. It happens.

But my point is that these days, any argument with a Catholic can be neatly avoided—and often is by the Church's most vigilant opponents—by devolving to the Westboro Baptist Church’s self-proclaimed “air-tight, three word case against the Catholic Church”: priests rape boys.
 

Reason to be Catholic #1334542: We have all the right enemies.

The problem is, as others have noted here before, this is a bad argument against the Church. Actually, it is not an argument at all. It is specifically the avoidance of any argument. But nevertheless:

If a man commits a crime as heinous and hideous as child molestation, he deserves all the mistrust and disgust thrown at him. If that man is in a position of care, as a priest is, that same man deserves all the more mistrust, excommunication, and punishment prescribed. But if a stereotype is to be applied to an entire group of men, it follows that that group of men must commit the act more than any one else.

To use a more benign example, if the stereotype that “women are great multitaskers!” is to be a sensible stereotype, women must be greater multitaskers than men. If men are equally good at multitasking, or better than women at multitasking, the stereotype is empty. All well and good, but apply that same logic to priests and watch the world flip out.

The truth is that child-molestation is not a Catholic problem. It is a problem of Western culture in general. As Newsweek pointed out in their 2011 article "Mean Men", “experts say there’s simply no data to support the claim [that the Church is “a refuge for pederasts”] at all...based on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. ‘We don’t see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else,’ said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”

Dr. Thomas Plante, a Professor of Psychology and an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, says “available research suggests that approximately two to five percent of priests have had a sexual experience with a minor” a percentage which “is lower than the general adult male population that is best estimated to be closer to eight percent.”

A child is more likely to be molested by his parents, his neighbors, or family friends than a priest, yet there exists no stereotype about these groups. According to the US Department of Education’s report on the issue, entitled Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature, “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by [Catholic] priests.” Why, one wonders, in the ever-present debates over the pay of teachers, public school programs and the like, is there no brilliant, hip man who stands up and says, “Yes, but everything you’re saying is suspect because teachers rape children." Why is there no stereotype against public-school teachers?

First of all, because, unlike American public schools and the culture in general, the Catholic Church has made an unprecedented effort to destroy the evil culture of child molestation. If you’ve ever worked for the Catholic Church, you know of what I speak. It can be hell, going through the various training programs in place to completely rid the Church of child molestation. Ninety-four percent of the abuse incidents reported to the Catholic Church from 1950 through 2009 took place before 1990, and there’s a reason for it. Already having less of a problem than the general culture, the Catholic Church has done more than any other institution to get rid of the problem entirely. All of this meant staying in the media spotlight. We did not avoid evil, we fought it, and we let the world see, because we are held to a higher standard than the world. So the Church bore the brunt of the blame, and has ‘cleaned house’ tremendously, while the public-schools are rarely discussed, and are still a major problem. And this is good, because one abuse-case is one too many, and I don’t give a damn how embarrassed it makes Catholics, all this attention the Church has paid to the issue—if it’s what it takes to keep children safe, it’s worth it.

But I fear that the real reason there exists a completely baseless stereotype against priests is the same reason the WBC has a stereotype against priests: It’s easier to make up a stereotype and name-call than deal with the claims of the Catholic Church. If people who make this claim really do wish to do The WBC, let ‘em. It’s so obviously ridiculous that it can only ever mean a Catholic has won the argument.

So how to win an argument with a Catholic? Not through empty stereotypes. You win by arguing.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Lifehack)

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that “just as important as the truth, and of the two the even more important one, is the mode in which the truth is accepted, and it is of slight help if one gets millions to accept the truth if by the very mode of their acceptance they are transposed into untruth.”

God hides himself so we will come to him in the right mode. He is not an object. He is not an old man in the sky, available to our observation, nor a slight grease on the surface of all things, available to our scientific probing. God is love. What merit is it to know of God’s existence as a man knows the existence of his right foot? God doesn’t want our observation, nor our pitiful attempts to “prove” his existence — he wants our love. He wants to be known in truth, as he is, as love, which is only known in the act of loving.

If we’re going to speak of “knowing” God at all, we must mean to know him in such a way that we infinitely strive for him, in which our knowledge and our panting after him are one in the same, for love is not known disinterestedly, rather, love is interest. We cannot know God cooly, as an object is known.

The knowledge of this tree or that apple sets myself and the object apart. I and the tree are divided into the categories of observer and object, because all knowledge is knowledge of something – some thing we refer to — apart from ourselves. But God is not a thing. God is love, and love will tolerate no separation.

Observation brings certainty. We see the tree and are certain of it. Our relationship is simple, call it I-thing. But with God, what’s needed is precisely uncertainty.

Uncertainties are known — not by knowledge, for knowledge attains certainty and thus eradicates uncertainty — but by belief, and belief always has the quality of hurling us upon another person.

For instance, my father calls, and before he hangs up, he says “I love you.” I do not know this to be an objective fact. I do not observe it with the certainty I observe the tree, because the words “I love you,” are an outward expression of my father’s subjective, interior life — a life I cannot know. From my perspective, his kindness to me may have been born out of no more than duty, the pressures of his surrounding moral society, or the desire to raise a child in such a manner that he does not become an embarrassment.

In short, the words “I love you” may not be true, and no objective knowledge can eradicate their uncertainty. Even if I were to add up all the constituent parts – his expression, his tone, our history, etc. — I could not arrive — with objective certainty — at the conclusion, “Yes, it all adds up to love,” and this is apparent in the fact that no one bothers to engage in such arithmetic. I cannot know love as an objective fact, existing outside of myself and available to my objective verification. I can only believe in it.

But this is the point. My believing in the love of my father and my entering into that love are one in the same, for in believing — which embraces the uncertainty precisely as an uncertainty — I fling myself entirely on him. I trust in his word. I trust him as I would myself. This blurring of he and the I in the moment of love’s expression; this taking on of the other’s hidden, subjective, interior life as if it were my own; this taking for myself as true what only he can know is true — this is love. In believing I participate in the life of the one I trust to believe. What a pitiful, boring world which elevates objective knowledge over belief! By belief I attain a greater certainty of what cannot be known than the certainty I have of those things that can.

Now we approach, with trembling hearts, the infinite uncertainty of God himself. God is invisible, and this terrible absence, this awful gap in our ability to attain certainty, and this necessary possibility of atheism is also the way in which we come to know God as he is, in truth and in right relation to him. By being objectively uncertain, yet communicating himself to us in beauty, in truth, in the goodness that inexplicably guides our lives, and ultimately in the fullness of revelation, through his only begotten Son, he offers us a qualitatively different type of certainty that would not be possible were he visible in the way a tree is visible. He gives us he opportunity to believe, to know him in such a manner that our knowledge of him is simultaneously a total reliance on him, indeed that our “knowledge” — which we should refer to as faith, for it maintains the objective uncertainty by never rendering Eternity objectively visible — is a participation in the life of God himself.

“If God had taken the form, for example, of a rare, enormously large green bird, with a red beak, that perched in a tree on the embankment and perhaps even whistled in an unprecedented manner–then [the modern man] surely would have had his eyes opened,” says Kierkegaard, but then we would not have related to him in truth, but in untruth. But since God is hidden, we must believe, and in belief we approach God in truth, as we approach love.

That this is truly the proper mode for “knowing God” seem evident in that difference between belief and simply knowing a visible something is that the former requires eternity while the latter requires a moment. Once the green bird is seen, it is known. No further effort is required. We may walk away from the embankment, close our eyes, and still know that the green bird exists. All that was required was the singular moment of perception. But when it is precisely an objective uncertainty that is being offered, an invisible reality expressed to us, the effort to know this uncertainty must be an eternal effort. At no point do we master God. At no point can we walk away. At no point do we attain a certainty by which we are “finished” with the project of belief. Belief is knowledge that comes from a participation in the life of another, and thus our belief in God only remains insofar as we, in every moment of our life, actively participate in the life of God. “I must continually see to it that I hold fast to the objective uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am “out on 70,000 fathoms of water” and still have faith.”

This is precisely why the Christian says he is saved through faith. To be saved means to become the self who you are, the self you are for all eternity, and only by faith do eternal selves act eternally. Only by faith do we participate in the self-offering of God, do we freely and eternally participate in the life of Love himself, do we attain that reality which, in religious tradition, is referred to as Salvation, or Heaven.

But this is hardly a distant mystery: As goes life so goes love, for there are few distinctions between the two. The words “I love you” — spoken in truth and by their very nature — tend towards relationships that last forever. Man and woman marry to express with a lifetime what cannot be expressed in a moment. The one requirement of erotic love is faithfulness, not simply in reaction to the evil of its opposite, which we call adultery, but because the very essence of love is belief in the other, a participation that renders adultery unthinkable. Theirs the eternal, theirs the ritual, theirs the belief in the other’s love that is simultaneously a participation in that love. And what lovers would prefer objective knowledge over the infinite strive of faith? What lovers would demand the singular moment that forever establishes certainty over a lifetime of active love, over the ecstatic comedy of forever proving the unprovable and rendering visible the ever-invisible?

God wants us to relate to him in love, for only by relating to God in love do we relate to him as he is — love himself — and only in this relation are our finite frames expanded and exploded with the infinite. God does not want our validation of his existence any more than the lover wants the beloved to simply say “You exist.” He wants us all swept up in love, forever and ever, amen.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with author's permission.

If some natural, secular purpose could be granted to the man suffering, then his pain would cease to be suffering and begin to be useful pain. The athlete can point to the material purpose of fitness and strength to answer the problem of his sore muscles. The old man who wakes up ever day with inexplicably sore muscles can point to no such thing. Though the pain experienced is the same — down to the last, aching twinge — the old man suffers, and the athlete does not. Suffering, to be suffering, requires the lack of a natural, secular answer.

The secular cannot answer the problem of suffering (as I’ve spoken in depth elsewhere), but suffering is still a problem we naturally want resolved. (If you don’t believe it is, develop leukemia, have a close family member die, and then try being content with not having any answers, meaning, or purpose.) We are obliged to ditch the secular and take up the religious, as a man cutting wood ditches the fork and picks up the saw. Which religion? I cannot speak for all of them, though the very existence of religion as a fundamental human institution does lend support to what I’ve just argued, that we must leave the purely secular if we want answers in this life. I can only speak for Christianity. Think of Christianity as some obscure, New Age cult — so as to judge her fairly — and I will give you her claims:

CLAIM 1: Suffering is the result of sin. If you are an atheist, freaketh not, for we know this on a purely experiential level. When we sin against others — when we steal from them, malign their names, or harm their bodies — we cause them suffering. When we sin against our nature — when we isolate ourselves, or demean our bodies — we cause our selves suffering. Suffering is the result of sin.

CLAIM 2: This verified reality is in fact the reality of the entire cosmos. The very state of human beings and the universe they inhabit is a sinful one.

Again, this is not a religious claim. The word sin is translated from the Hebrew ‘chattah’, which means ‘to miss the mark’. To say that the world is in a sinful state is to say that our world is not all it should be, that it misses the mark, that it is — in a word — imperfect. This is verifiable. We do not wish children to suffer and die, and yet we live in a world in which they do. It is entirely possible that we will have to at some point push spiky balls of calcium through our urethras. The experiences of these natural things as imperfect — to say the least — is a universal experience. We live in a world that “misses the mark” of perfection.

(OBJECTION 1: I suppose it could be argued to the contrary that the world is perfect, but we apply our human standard of perfection upon the world, and are disappointed when she doesn’t meet that standard. Both claims are statements of faith. One says, “I experience the universe as imperfect. I believe this experience corresponds to reality.” The other says, “I experience the universe as imperfect. I believe this experience does not correspond to reality.” Both are statements of belief based on a common experience — the experience of imperfection, found in kidney stones, dying children, 9/11, Katrina, etc.

The latter statement of faith — that the universe isn’t imperfect, we just believe it to be so — means human beings are far too strange to exercise rational thought. To say that what I experience as reality does not necessarily coincide with what reality actually is is to be unable to say anything at all. If what I experience as true does not necessarily coincide with what really is true, then I can hardly say “It is true that the universe is perfect.”
But this is obvious, and I digress going after the few who would argue that children dying is a matter of ultimate indifference, and that it is only our projections that make it seem otherwise.)

So the universe is imperfect. To be imperfect is to “miss the mark” of perfection. To be in a state of missing the mark is to be in a sinful state. The universe is therefore in a sinful state. As we’ve established, suffering is the natural result of sin. Thus suffering is inherent to our sinful universe.

CLAIM 3: As the universe is imperfect, God is perfect, the fullness of Perfection itself. This is first of all a simple matter of definition. If you have in your mind an imperfect God, then he is not God. But there is proof to this claim. As the philosopher Thomas Aquinas says:

“Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being.”

If God created all things, and all things are good in varying degrees, than God must be the standard of Perfection from which all things derive their relative goodness.

(Minor objection: Of course, this assumes the existence of God, which I do not aim to prove. Rather I aim to say, if there is a God, he is perfect. (I come dangerously close to bringing up St. Anselm.))

(OBJECTION 2: If the Christian sheeple (I’m joking) believe that God is the fullness of perfection, and that to say that our universe is sinful — or imperfect — is to say that our universe is lacking total union with God, why then, would Perfection allow our imperfection? If God is all-powerful, surely he could forever stop us from sinning, and thus from ever suffering? Is he so cruel as to allow us to suffer, children to die, etc.?

We are allowed to sin — and thus to suffer — because God loves us. If we could not refuse him, the fullness of perfection, we would be puppets attached to his celestial fingers. We could not not love God. But love, to be love, must be freely given. Perfection is meaningless if we have not the choice of imperfection. We are granted, in love, the opportunity to sin.)

CLAIM 4: Christianity answers the problem of suffering with the bizarre claim that a man who was God, the fullness of Perfection, known commonly as Jesus, “became sin”. We must listen attentively to her claim, and suspend at least a minutia of our disbelief, for we’ve already established the impossibility of an answer to the problem of suffering springing from a secular source.

(OBJECTION 3: I understand of course, that I’m not proving that God became Man. This would of course provide proving that there is a God, which is not my goal here. Rather, I beg the atheist to read this and understand that, if there is a Christ, then suffering is granted meaning, and then decide from there whether there in fact is a God, a Christ, etc.)

Jesus “became sin”. Sin is the act of missing the mark, of missing perfection. It follows that Jesus, in totally becoming sin, became totally absent from perfection, a claim verified by the words of Jesus on the cross: ”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” By becoming imperfection, he is forsaken by Perfection.
We arrive at a paradox. If Jesus is God, and God is Perfection, how could Jesus “become sin” — the absence of Perfection — and thus become the absence of God? How could God become the absence of God?
He could not: He would die. If I were to become the total absence of myself, I would cease to exist. I would negate myself, as a negative number and the same positive number join to make an abyss and a zero.

CLAIM 5: God died.
 

 
All atheism has its ultimate source in Jesus Christ then, for by his death he negated the existence of God. And in his death, sin itself died, for he became sin itself. And if sin died, suffering died, for suffering is the result of sin. And if all suffering died, than death itself — the ultimate human suffering — dies.
But again, we arrive at a paradox. What happens to the man who by his death, destroys sin, and by destroying sin, destroys death? He certainly cannot die, or else he could not have destroyed death. He could not die: He would have to rise.

Claim 6:
 

 
(OBJECTION 4: Why then, if this is all true, do we still suffer, sin and die?

Time is a product of the universe, and if there is a Creator of the universe, he must exist outside of universe, and thus outside of time. The saving action of an infinite God cannot be limited to time.

It’d be a mistake to believe Christ killed death and suffering, freeing from suffering and death only those born after him. Such an expectation assumes that Christ’s sacrifice is limited to the laws of our time, that his action affects only the future, as a human action only affects the future. But his action was infinite, outside of time. He died once, for the entire world, for the past, present, and future, lifting all things to Perfection.

Thus the place without the suffering we are promised cannot be a part of earthly space and time. It must be part of the “time” of an infinite God, a time that contains all our past, present and future. Thus we are told that Christ died that we might have eternal life, life free from suffering outside of earthly time, a place Christianity has given the name Heaven.

But more than this, we suffer now for the precise reason we can sin. God will not force salvation upon us. He will not demand we claim his victory over sin and death. We are not his puppets. We must choose his salvation as we chose to sin.)

And this, finally, is the answer Christianity gives to suffering. Since Christ became all sin, and suffering is the result of sin, Christ took upon himself all suffering. Since his act was for all earthly time, this includes our current suffering. If this is true, no suffering is apart from the suffering of Christ. All is his. I am a Christian because I can acknowledge the reality that my suffering is in fact the suffering of Christ, and thereby “offer it up” with him, giving it meaning and the most glorious of purposes: The end of all suffering.

As Paul says: “Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.” Our suffering, because it is Christ’s, saves the world.

This changes everything: To see the child with leukemia is to see Christ suffering in that child, suffering to bring the world back to Perfection. To experience agony is to cry out with the strain of lifting this fallen world to Paradise. We are called to recognize this, and to actualize this. This is why I am a Christian.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with author's permission.