I was approached recently by Joshua, whose friend Tad had recently decided against Christianity, opting instead for atheism. Tad wrote a short apologia what led to his decision. Joshua asked me if I would like to write a 45-minute talk and deliver it to a group of LifeTeens. I was delighted to do so. It occurred to me that you might like to read it.
I approach this topic as a Catholic, not as a representative of generic Christianity. Only the Catholic faith embodies all truth; the 38,000 Christian sects have varying degrees of Truth. Much of my talk is derived from the audio book, “What’s so Great about Christianity” by Dinesh D’Souza. You all need to listen to this book several times, as he gives great answers to questions raised by today’s atheistic authors.
Tad says that neither he nor his family were particularly religious. I suspected that this was the case. An old proverb says, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” He was probably sent to public schools, which in our day tend to turn students against religion in subtle ways. If teachers are not teaching goodness, they are teaching badness. There is no neutral ground: they have to be teaching SOMETHING. So Tad’s decision is less his own and more a result of the way he was raised.
Tad says, “I took a fancy to biblical prophecy at a young age, thinking it to be a fascinating matter of mystery.” Biblical prophecy exists to point the way to fulfillment in Jesus, not to be mysterious. We say the Old Testament points to fulfillment in the New.
Tad says he had a generic understanding of the (religious) matters at hand. He needs to expand this at some length. What did he know exactly? Where did he learn it? How long did he study? Who were his teachers?
Tad says, “Biblical prophecy being dense, however, I looked to the work of Nostradamus for easier-to-digest work.” Going to Nostradamus for knowledge about religion is like going to Madonna for knowledge about Relativity. Nostradamus dabbled in the occult, a practice forbidden by the 1st Commandment. Even if lots of Catholics paid attention to his predictions, that does not make him a Catholic in good standing. Catholics believe that there IS objective truth, that the Holy Spirit keeps the Catholic Church teaching it. So even if a majority of Catholics wind up believing a certain error, that does not change error into truth. Truth is not decided by “majority rules”. It’s possible to be the only one with the truth in a stadium of 70,00 people.
I quote Tad: “Anything written as cryptically as the Bible can be interpreted any way at all”. Cryptically means obscurely. Well, there are many books that are hard to understand. One doesn’t throw up his hands and look for easy books to read. One develops a life-long habit of study, especially of a book like the Bible that makes the claim that it has the way to life eternal. When Martin Luther and the other “Reformers” broke away from the Catholic Church, they invented the new idea that anyone could go to the Bible and interpret it without the interpretation of the Catholic Church, and that the Holy Spirit would give all readers the same interpretation. Clearly this has not worked, as it has led to the existence of 38,000 Christian sects, each in good faith thinking it has the true meaning. Some of them were founded just last week. So, yes, an interpreter of the Bible is needed, and Jesus has made the Catholic Church IT.
The Bible is not a book of universal knowledge. Fundamentalist Protestants believe that. If you want that, go to the encyclopedia. It’s a book whose purpose is religious. We Catholics say that God used human authors to speak His thoughts. That means that the authors of the Bible used their own literary styles, their choice of genres, their understanding of the physical world around them. One writes in a very descriptive style, another uses few words. One writes a romantic poem (The Song of Songs), another writes a short history (the book of Samuel). One describes a great dome in the sky keeping rain water up there; another believes that having sheep and goats mate in front of poles whose bark has been removed in alternating strips - will produce striped offspring. Gen 30:35-43. God allows such idiosyncrasies (personal peculiarities) to show that He is making use of individuals’ uniqueness. That is why we call them, “The Gospel according to St. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John”. When re-telling a story, no two people will get all the little details the same. That doesn’t invalidate the story.
Tad confuses Intelligent Design with Creationism. They are not the same. Creationism holds that everything that the Bible says about how the world was created is exactly as the Bible describes it. This is what Protestant Fundamentalists believe. In a moment I will explain the Catholic view on Creation. Intelligent Design says that when you look at, e.g., the way the body works, it shows that some intelligence must have put it all together. To believe that such a complex organism just evolved out of nothing is really not very intelligent. Look at all the things that the skin does, for example. Look at the marvel that is the eye. Or take the fact that certain things in nature can be reduced to a mathematical formula. We call these the Laws of Nature. That shows intelligence. Scientists that refuse to look at Intelligent Design are really not being open-minded.
As far as ID advocates forcing their views into classrooms, isn’t it really a case of atheistic scientists forcing their view - that kids can’t look at both sides of things?
Tad says, “I realized there are many creation stories out there.” There ARE many creation stories out there. When one accepts the Catholic faith, he accepts all that the Catholic faith prescribes. So what DOES the Catholic faith say about Creation? It holds that at one time there was nothing beside God, not even time or space. At a certain “moment” God decided to create angels, the universe, then Man. Science says that the universe evolved out of “space dust” that was always there. It’s funny: they can’t believe in a God who had no beginning, but they CAN believe in “space dust” that was always there. We believe that He created the first Man and Woman. Whether their names were Adam and Eve is unimportant. We believe that Man may have evolved from apes, so long as you grant that at a certain point God put a soul in two of them. I believe OUR creation story because I believe that Jesus gave the Holy Spirit to His church to keep it in the truth. All those other creation stories are false in varying degrees.
Tad says, “Creationism could not be tested as a science”. There are lots of things that we hold valuable that are not “science” if by that term you mean, “It needs to be put under a microscope”. Take Sociology, Art, and Literature. And think about Paleontology. How do we REALLY know what happened to the earth millions of years ago? We’re in the area of speculation, and today’s theory is replaced by next year’s.
Tad says, “…it doesn't hurt anyone physically to consider that something had to start the process…” The pagan philosopher Aristotle was a great thinker who lived about 300 BC. He saw that there is a kind of chain in which one thing causes another. He deduced that there had to be a beginning to that chain; there had to be a prime mover. He called that prime mover God.
Tad brings up the harm that religion does, citing the Inquisition. Those who hate the Catholic Church love to trot out the Inquisition, hoping to embarrass the Church. The common ideas about the Inquisition are myth, shaped mainly by 19th century English writers who hated Spain. The English had already regarded Spain as an enemy for a long time before that. When England went Protestant, there was all the more reason to hate Catholic Spain and vilify it.
All kinds of claims are manufactured from thin air. I’ve heard that “95 million people were burned at the stake during the Inquisition’s heyday”.
Finally, a historian (Would you call a Historian a scientist?) by the name of Henry Kamen – a Jew, so he has no reason to whitewash the Church – wrote most recently a book called, “The Spanish Inquisition, a Historical Revision”. I read it, and found it written in a very well-balanced way, ie, without hidden persuaders, without the author’s showing hostility. Much of the Spanish Inquisition was aimed at certain Jews, so this is very remarkable.
One of Kamen’s chapters is called, “Inventing the Inquisition”. He means that much of what has been received was made up. Inquisition trials were fairer and more lenient than their secular counterparts, says Kamen. Frequently the only form of punishment was fasting or doing “community service”. Torture as a means to get information was a method that went way back in history. You can’t entirely blame the church for using it, for not rising above it. To do so is to apply 21st century standards to the Middle Ages. As it was, very few heretics were burnt at the stake. The figure given in the book is about 2,000, and that is over a 350-year period. I recommend reading the book. It gives the historical background out of which the Spanish Inquisition evolved.
Another area that Tad brings up of the harm that religion does, is The Salem Witch Trials. I believe that the number of people executed was less than 25. There are some authors who say that it was no more than 17.
But what of the harm that atheists have done? First of all, there was the hunting down and killing of priests, nuns and nobility in France during the French Revolution. They even enthroned a statue of the goddess of Reason on the main altar of Notre Dame Cathedral.
There is the hunting down and killing of priests and nuns in Mexico in the 1920s. The same thing was carried on by the “Republicans” during the Spanish civil war of 1936. “Republicans” refers to a group that wanted to replace the Spanish monarchy with a republic. There is no relation with our American Republican party.
Then there is Adolph Hitler. It is ludicrous for Tad to call him a Catholic. If you want to see how a practicing Catholic talks, read the works of St. Francis of Assisi or St. Faustina. Hitler’s parents were nominal Catholics; they probably had him baptized only out of social custom. But he declared an all-out war against Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Why would he go against his own religion? Hitler regarded Catholicism as a religion for slaves. He detested its ethics.
In his climb to power he sought the support of German Catholics and Lutherans, so he occasionally used rhetoric such as Tad quotes from Mein Kampf: "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” This is said without any real conviction and has to be viewed in the context of Hitler’s whole life. It shows that Hitler has lost sight of reality. Hitler’s leading advisors – Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann - were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany. There was the SS and the Gestapo.
Working for Hitler was Dr. Josef Mengele, who experimented on living people in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Hitler was responsible for 10 million deaths.
Then there is Joseph Stalin and the millions he has murdered. After invading Poland in 1939 he rounded up all the Polish generals and upper brass of the army – 14,500 men, and had them shot in the back of the head in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. That plane that went down with the Polish president and 95 government officials was on its way to a commemoration of that event. Stalin set up a string of slave labor camps all over the USSR, called the Gulag. He starved to death about 10 million Ukrainians during the 1930s. He set up show trials and firing squads of his enemies. He relocated entire populations. Besides Stalin there were the other atheistic murderers Lenin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. There was the NKVD and later the KGB. Stalin is responsible for the deaths of 20 million people.
Let’s not forget other atheistic murderers from the satellite nations. Enver Hoxha of Albania, Nicolau Ceaucescu of Romania, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Ho Chi Minh of North Viet Nam, Kim Jong Il of North Korea.
Or Pol Pot of Cambodia. He set up “Killing fields”. There was a movie made about this. For 4 years he carried on mass relocations and killings, eliminating 1/5 of the Cambodian population: 1.5 – 2 million people.
Chairman Mao is responsible for the deaths of 70 million people. Even today, China practices the “one-child” policy. If a woman gets pregnant a second time, they kill the baby in the womb. If somehow the baby gets born, they inject poison into the soft tissue of the skull, killing it. They even have restaurants where human fetuses are served up in a variety of ways. They harvest the internal organs of prisoners without their consent and sell them. Much of the goods we buy these days are made by slave labor. Girl babies are undesirable, so they are killed. There is now a serious woman shortage in China.
All in all, atheistic regimes in just one century are responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people. Religion-inspired killings don’t come anywhere near the murderous atheistic regimes. Taken together the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the witch burnings killed perhaps 200,000 people. Adjusting for population increase, that’s the equivalent of 1,000,000 deaths today. Now I’m sure that Tad is not going to give up atheism after hearing these statistics, but I’ll bet he thinks Christians should give up Christianity because some of its members did not practice its principles. Remember: the atheists WERE living up to their principles, for if there is no God, do what the 19th century atheistic philosopher Nietzsche suggests: go for it. Do whatever you please.
Let’s look at the good that religion does: Science as we know it owes its origins to the theological reasoning and philosophical debates held in medieval universities. Science was originally called “natural philosophy” there. In fact, Universities owe their existence to the Catholic Church.
But there are good things at the heart of the Catholic religion itself. I will list only 6.
1. Love of neighbor. Look at Maximilian Kolbe giving his life for another prisoner at Auschwitz, or Mother Teresa, gathering up the dying in Calcutta so that they could spend their last days in clean, safe dignity. I very much doubt that if Christianity, more specifically Catholicism, were removed from the earth, that Atheists and Agnostics would practice love of neighbor.
2. Deriving meaning out of suffering. I can use my sufferings to alleviate my time in Purgatory, or to ask God to give grace to someone else. If one doesn’t have God, suffering is something to be avoided. It has no meaning. Hence, one can become addicted to drugs, or resort to suicide.
3. Servant leadership. Jesus told His disciples not to imitate the pagans who see being in leadership positions as an opportunity to lord it over the masses. Remember His washing of the feet at the Last Supper.
4. Helping the needy. When I left Chicago in 1992 Catholic Charities supported over 107 agencies. All this charity is given without trying to turn the recipients into Catholics. Call the diocese of Jacksonville and ask them how many agencies are supported here. I attend 12:10 Mass almost daily at Immaculate Conception church. Catholic Charities shares the block. Daily I rub shoulders with lines of people coming for free food. It’s hard enough to get Catholics to give to charity or to put themselves out to help the needy. I can’t imagine atheists doing this at all.
5. The exaltation of women. In the world before Christianity women counted for little. Christ changed that. He accepted their ministrations. He talked with the woman at the well. Look at all the religious orders founded by women in the last 2000 years. Look at all the women saints and their writings that have influenced the Church. Radical feminism has turned women into little more than sex objects.
6. The idea that all men are created equal. It is interesting to study atheistic Communism, esp. as practiced in the USSR, to see the reverse of all these Christian ideals.
Tad devotes some time to Homosexuality.
One doesn’t have to go to religion to see that homosexuality is a disordered condition. All one needs to do is to study Nature itself. Let’s say that you ARE an atheist. You would have to agree that the inborn goal of animals as well as plants is survival and to multiply. The human race is no different. A man’s body has a penis, and a woman’s has a vagina. These complement each other. This means that they complete each other. They fit. Not to mention that a man’s personality is to provide, to lead, to analyze, while a woman’s is to be provided for, to be led, and to be intuitive/nurturing. When two men try to make a marriage, you have 2 with the same equipment, physically and emotionally. There is bound to be conflict. One of the things that is operative for the male homosexual is the search for the daddy who is perceived to have rejected the boy, or whom the boy has rejected. When 2 homosexuals try to get together, you have friction, since both are looking for the same thing. Each resents that the other will not act as father.
“Well, speaking of complementarity, there is anal intercourse”, you say. The anus is the expulsion chute of corrupt matter that the body needs to eject. It is full of germs and disease. Unprotected anal intercourse can guarantee a host of lesser diseases and many major ones, not the least of which is AIDS. And the act does not result in a child.
Let’s look at heterosexual intercourse between a married man and woman who came to marriage as virgins. The marital act is the fruit of their love and is open to a child. Not only is marital intercourse of penis and vagina not harmful, but it is beneficial. A man’s semen and a woman’s vagina produce hormones that benefit the spouse.
Tad says, “Many of my friends at the time were gay rights supporters”. Gays already have the right to vote, to hold office, to live with each other, to have sex with each other, to rent an apartment or own a house, to hold a job, to be evaluated fairly on how well they do that job. Gays occupy a substantial part in the entertainment industry, the hairstyling, art, dance, librarianship and interior decorating industries and other fields. Many, many laws are written with a provision that “no discrimination will be exercised on the basis of sexual orientation”. There is no right that they do not have.
Tad really should be talking about What Gays Want. They want our schools to teach that the practice of homosexuality is OK. No society - going way back into history - has considered homosexuality OK, except the Greeks. They want to deprive Christians of their 1st-amendment rights to free speech. They want priests and ministers not to speak out against gay sexual practices. They want to shut them up. They want to force landlords to rent to them, even tho their lifestyle offends their consciences. They want to call their couplings Marriage and to be given all the benefits of Marriage. They want priests and ministers to be forced to perform these “marriages”. They want gays who desire to go straight to be deprived of that right; they want mental health professionals - who treat homosexuals wanting to recover their heterosexuality - to be prevented from doing that. How are gays being suppressed? Seems to me that THEY want to do the suppressing.
Homosexuality is a mental/emotional disorder and the compassionate thing is to do what one can to see that gays receive treatment. Contrary to Tad, it’s not just “the archaic standards of a 2000-year old book” that condemn the practice of homosexuality; as I said, that condemnation is much more universal. By the way, the Catholic Church doesn’t say that a person is going to hell merely because he IS homosexual. Certain Fundamentalist Protestant sects say that. The Catholic Church condemns the practice of homosexual acts.
Tad implies that Christians say, “Gays are ‘different,’ so what harm is there in hurting them?” Homosexuality is a protected lifestyle in our politically-correct culture. The media - newspapers, magazines, movies, TV - blow up and milk incidents of crimes against homosexuals and ignore incidents of homosexual crimes against straights. The handout will lead you to a website where you can learn about a case in which 2 gays in Arkansas threw a young boy face-down onto a bed, to which they duct-taped him, stuffed his shorts into his mouth and repeatedly sodomized him. He eventually died of asphyxiation.
There was a time in the past when police made raids on gay bars, and names of the habitués were printed in the paper. Of course that was unjust. There was nothing particularly religious about that. The situation has completely reversed itself today. I doubt that Tad knows any gay who has suffered harm.
The media deliberately misled the public in the recent Sexual Abuse Scandal among Catholic clergy, slyly calling it pedophilia. The latter is sex between an adult man and a pre-pubescent boy. This was true in less than 1% of cases. The fact is that the overwhelming number of cases was between homosexual priests and teen-age boys, ie., boys between 13 and 19. The media had to hush that up because homosexuality is a protected lifestyle.
It is sad when Christians harm abortionists. They are acting against Christian principles. There have been just a few incidents of violence against pro-abortion people; there is far more violence against pro-lifers. The media refuse to report this. Abortion is another protected practice in the USA. Every year on January 22nd there is a march of about 700,000 people in Washington, DC. You won’t see any reference to it on TV or in the newspapers. Check me out next January in the media. Then turn on EWTN. I was active in the pro-life movement in Pittsburgh and was the victim of pro-abortion violence myself. The handout will give you 3 websites where you can learn about violence against pro-lifers.
Tad says, “Worse, however, were the crimes and violence committed in the name of that book (the Bible).” People DON’T commit atrocities in the name of the Bible. Jesus told us to love our enemies.
To my mind, Agnosticism makes more sense than Atheism. Atheism is a religion, for it relies on the FAITH that there is no God. That is Atheism’s main dogma. Some of its other dogmas appear in this paper. Agnosticism says it just doesn’t know.
Tad says, “…so I began to study religion itself…” I wish he had studied the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It puts things that are all over the Bible into a logical, systematic form, with one idea flowing naturally out of the last. It saves a lot of time.
Tad says, “…People see some happy event, a coma patient waking up after 10 years for example, and are all too eager to praise god (sic) for it, but when something goes catastrophically wrong, it's the doctors (sic) fault.” That isn’t necessarily true. Still, God has described Himself as good in various places in the Bible. It’s natural to attribute good things to Him. But He permits evil so that good can be drawn out of it. It may not have been God’s will that the coma patient woke up, and God doesn’t have to grant success to a doctor. We don’t know His actual will in any particular case. All we know is that He does not wish evil; He wishes good.
I have never understood the problem people have with evil in the world (Theodicy). God, in His extreme goodness, gave us free will. He wants to be loved by choice, not force. But man can misuse his free will. Much of the horror in human history arises precisely out of man’s not using his free will correctly.
I agree with Tad that natural disasters – tornadoes, tidal waves, earthquakes – merely happen; they are not punishment for anything. Pat Robertson famously said that the Haiti earthquake was God’s punishment on Haiti. He is a Fundamentalist; of the 38,000 Christian sects, Fundamentalists comprise a small number. He doesn’t speak for Catholics.
Tad refers to books that were burned or banned. He should give instances. Gay activists would ban the Bible because it condemns the practice of homosexuality. No Catholic opposes the printing or distribution of books like The Golden Compass. We oppose its being taught in schools. Atheists would oppose the Bible’s being taught in schools. Atheists oppose Intelligent Design’s being taught in schools. Seems atheists have a double standard here.
We Christians will use all legal means at our disposal to fight books or ideas that we find harmful. That’s how politics is supposed to work. Do atheists see something wrong with that? When I was a pro-lifer in Pittsburgh we took our 4’x8’ signs showing what an aborted baby looks like to West Virginia U. An opposition quickly formed of people planting themselves in front of our signs so as to keep the truth from the students. In Vancouver at a Provincial university pro-lifers set up a large display like a maze involving many huge free-standing signs and tables with literature. The students came in and destroyed everything. No one from the University did a thing to stop the rampage. So much for freedom of speech.
When the Judeo-Christian ethic was in the driver’s seat at universities, speakers with disagreeable views would be invited in to speak. Audiences were polite and asked courteous questions. Now that an atheistic ethic is in control, such a speaker would more than likely not be invited in the first place, and if he were lucky to get by the thought police, instead of polite questions he would be mooned.
Tad says, “…the church does quite a lot to halt progressive thinking…” Tad needs to spell out the “progressive thinking” that the church is against. Truth does not change. The Catholic Church has been teaching the same truth for 2000 years. Just because the mores of a society degenerate and some people want to call that “progressive” is no reason for the Church to go along with that.
Tad says that the church interferes in fields that some people feel they should have no hand in. There are no areas that are outside of the purview of the Catholic religion, and that includes politics. Who are the people who think the church interferes? Religion is a total way of life.
Tad says, “Atheists are not rebelling against God”. If Tad were not rebelling against God he would not have written his paper; he would have just let believers believe. Why didn’t he write a paper against Zeus or unicorns? Atheist writers like Hitchens, Dawkins et al are NOT content just to live and let live; they attack Christianity. Atheistic organizations like the ACLU hammer Christians.
Catholics don’t go around hurting others who don’t believe in hell. Remember Pascal’s wager: Let’s say that I live according to Jesus’ teachings but there is no heaven or hell. Well, I’ve had a pretty happy life and that’s the end of it. Let’s say that there IS a heaven and hell. I live according to Jesus’ teachings as found in His church and I go to heaven. Let’s say I don’t and I go to hell. So the best bet is to live according to His teachings whether there is a hell or not.
Tad says, “The Golden Rule is a secular guideline as much as a religious one.” If there is no God, it makes the greatest sense to follow the teachings of Nietzsche, who said, “Use your fellow man. To hell with everyone but ME.” Hitler followed Nietzsche. Both of them went mad.
Tad says, “…Faith has, in my opinion, very little bearing on a moral standard…” I’m not quite sure what he means here. For me as a Catholic, my opinion has nothing to do with getting to heaven. God has revealed certain things that He wants believed and practiced. We believe those things. That’s Faith. If I did not believe that there is a God, or that there would be a reward in heaven, or a punishment in hell, I might not be very anxious to comply with The Golden Rule, especially when what is required is tough.
Is human reason the only way to comprehend reality? Atheists think so. There was a philosopher named Immanuel Kant. He came up with 2 words. The first one is phenomenon. It means what a thing seems like to me by using my 5 senses. Joshua, what color is this? I call it black, too. Now how do you or I know what true black looks like? Only God knows. So that leads to the 2nd word: noumenon. That means what a thing really is. Science can only deal with the world of the phenomenon – what a thing appears to be, based on our 5 senses. All they know about reality is their experience of it.
We Catholics believe that there is another world not accessible to the 5 senses. God has been revealing it for several thousand years, and that revelation is found in the Bible. We would never be able to figure that out by our reason alone, or by consulting our 5 senses.
Catholics believe in Reason and Faith. Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen used their reason to work out much Theology in the Middle Ages. St. Augustine said, “Fides quaerens intellectum”: faith seeking understanding. Or “I believe so that I may understand”, meaning that once a person believes, there is so much knowledge open to him from then on. There is another saying: “Intellectum quaerens fidem.” Translated strictly it means, “Understanding seeking faith”. Translated roughly, it means “I will believe only when I understand everything”. This would be a good motto for Unitarians, or atheists, who may be said to think there is nothing that a human being should not be able to understand. The wise person realizes that there may be things that we will never understand.
One atheistic scientist advocates their calling themselves “Brights”, (You know, as in “He’s such a bright boy!”) to show that they’re smarter than we are. But Christianity exalts the common man. Certain atheistic writers advocate indoctrinating kids away from the beliefs of their parents. They would like to use the power of the state to impose their religion on our school kids.
Western civilization was built on Christianity, specifically Catholicism. Christianity is responsible for many of the values atheists treasure most. You’ll have to read What’s so Great about Christianity? for examples of this. A state has to be based on some philosophy. Ours was based on Judeo-Christian beliefs, but it grants to all believers, including atheists, the right to practice their religion. Our founding fathers believed that we can’t maintain morality without religion.
Separation of Church and State is actually a Catholic idea. This idea has been wrongly interpreted in the USA as, “Get rid of religion”. Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s”. Later, St. Augustine wrote 2 books: “The City of God”, and “The City of Man”.
How can we say that the Catholic Church is holy when some of its members have done so much bad? It is holy because its Head - Jesus, its Teaching, its Sacraments, its Grace, its Saints in heaven and Purgatory - are all holy. Yet on earth it is composed of sinful human beings.
Jesus wanted everyone in the world to become Catholic so that everyone would be following the same standards. That’s why Catholics put themselves “under the book”. This means that we put ourselves under the authority of the Bible, Sacred Tradition and the teaching authority of the Church (the Magisterium). In the political realm it means that we put ourselves under the Constitution and the rule of Law. Atheists don’t agree among themselves as to what standards to follow. If atheism became the official religion of the land we’d have one atheist conflicting with another to try to impose his will on the people.
We Americans don’t know what living in a completely atheistic society would be like, but we get hints from the Obama regime. He may call himself a Christian, but he – and those he puts into political positions – are in practice atheists. They don’t follow our Constitution. His judges interpret laws arbitrarily. They make laws, in clear violation of their designated duties. Obama forced his health care on a society, 63% of which did not want it. Senior citizens like me will be called before “Death Panels” who will determine whether we are worthy to continue to live.
Those who control our media are in practice atheists, too. Like atheist Karl Marx they and the Obama regime promote class warfare: the poor against the rich, Blacks against Whites, gays against straights, women against men. They all promote the state coming between parents and their children. Are they “doing unto others as they would have done to themselves?” I think not.
It’s interesting that all the atheistic regimes mentioned in this paper were also totalitarian regimes. I think it is inevitable that totalitarianism follows on atheism. The Bible preaches “servant leadership”, “I must decrease; He must increase”; “Love thy neighbor as thyself”; “Turn the other cheek”; and that there will be a reward for such behavior in heaven. Obviously if there is no heaven, one has to get his reward in this life, and that means imposing my will on my fellow man. We are seeing this develop in our country under the current regime.
Atheists are fond of stating that religion is against science.
The greatest ideas in modern science are based on one article of faith that comes from Christianity. It is this: that the universe is rational, that this is true everywhere in the universe and has been true, and will be true, for all time. Another way of saying this is that there is order in the universe based on laws such as E=mc2. There is no way to prove this article of faith.
The myth of a warfare between religion and science was begun by 2 men.
1. John William Draper in his 1874 book, “The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science”.
2. Andrew Dixon White, president of Cornell University in his 1896 study, “The History of Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom”.
The atheists Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin both persecuted scientists. And by the way, BOTH banned and burned books.
Evidence has been found in physics and astronomy for the creation of the universe. Modern scientists have discovered that the universe was created in a huge explosion, now called the Big Bang, calling to mind Creation in the book of Genesis. The universe was created in a burst of energy, manifest in the form of light. Since then the planets etc. have been traveling apart from each other. We call this the expanding universe. The sun was created later, so Genesis is right, for it describes the creation of light in Gen 1:3, and the creation of the sun in Gen 1:14.
Much more detail about all this is given on Disk 5, tracks 1-17 of “What’s so Great about Christianity?”
When the universe was just the right age, and had expanded to just the right vastness, life began. It couldn’t have begun before, and it would have been too late afterwards. This shows Intelligent Design. Physicists call this the Anthropic Principle. (Anthropic comes from Anthropos, Greek for Man.)
Anthony Flue was an atheistic scientist; now he believes in God.
Darwinism is not the same as the theory of Evolution because it includes the notion that there is no God. Darwinism is the atheists’ spin on evolution. Catholics are not opposed to evolution, as this paper shows.
Why do people REALLY go atheistic? In my experience it is because they don’t want to be constrained by morality. The biggest part of morality that they object to is in the area of Sex. That’s why atheists try to reduce us to being no more than animals. The 19th C atheistic philosopher Nietzsche insisted that the “death of God” would signal the end of morality. He explained it in a book called, “Beyond Good and Evil”.
I will conclude by asking, How Is Catholicism Better than Atheism? I’ll give you 5 points. There certainly are more.
1. Catholicism has a better way to deal with suffering in the world, either personal suffering or natural catastrophes. Where are the atheist agencies, like Catholic charities, that respond to tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes? Religion “works” at a time of tragedy. Where are the atheist chaplains on the battlefield telling a dying soldier, “That’s all there is; there ain’t no more”?
2. Catholicism infuses life with a powerful sense of purpose, while atheism posits a universe without meaning, a universe that is irrational.
3. Catholicism offers a solution to the cosmic loneliness that we all feel.
4. Catholicism helps us to cope well with death.
5. Catholicism enables us to become the better persons we want to be.
I want to thank Tad for giving me the opportunity to gather my thoughts on this subject. Thank you for your attention.
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Pertinent books I’ve read:
What’s so Great about Christianity?, by Dinesh D’Souza. Excellent defense of Christianity against its modern critics, e.g., Christopher Hitchens CD 230 D’Souza
Best work on the Inquisition is by Henry Charles Lea. 4 volumes, 1870s.
The Formation of Christendom, by Christopher Dawson 261 D
Progress and Religion, by Christopher Dawson 201 D 1929
Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, by Christopher Dawson 901.9 D
Ten Books that Screwed up the World, by Benjamin Wiker 909.09821 Wiker
How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by Thomas J. Woods
Pedophile Priests, by Philip Jenkins
The Spanish Inquisition, a Historical Revision, by Henry Kamen. Jax Cat #272.20946K.
Basic Library on Homosexuality:
Homosexuality: a New Christian Ethic, by Elizabeth Moberly
Reparative Therapy, by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi
The Battle for Normality, by Gerard van den Aardweg
The Politics of Homosexuality, By Jeffery Satinover
For information on the rape and killing of Dirk Hising
http://www.covenantnews.com/dirkhising.htm
Violence conducted by pro-abortion people against pro-lifers:
http://www.abortionviolence.com/ http://www.lifenews.com/nat1519.html http://sflillinois.org/1127/violence-against-pro-lifers
Atheist Authors attacking God
The End of Faith, by Sam Harris
God, the Failed Hypothesis, by Victor Stenger
The God Delusion
God Is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens
The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, by John William Draper, 1874.
The History of Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom, by Andrew Dixon White, president of Cornell University, 1896.
Atheist Authors Saying Things Favorable to God
Just Six Numbers, by Martin Reese
Other authors
Paley, an Anglican theologian who proposed a famous argument that the universe shows signs of design, 1802
Lee Smolen, Fred Hoyle, astronomers. Owen Gingrich, biologist
Steven Hawkins, Robert Jastrow, Theodosius Dobrzanski
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