A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

What you get with a culture divorced from Christianity January 30, 2012

I don’t do much on Facebook.  I’m on there, but not “on” there, except rarely.  But last week, I pressed the apparently all powerful “like” button with respect to a certain sermon, on marriage and contraception and the HHS mandate.  I’ve liked things before, and never gotten a response.  But this time I did, including a response from my (I pray, still) best friend.  I don’t know how friendly we are, actually, anymore, I haven’t seen him in years and we are on precise opposite paths.  I want to still be his friend, and I pray for his conversion daily, but he lives in Europe and is following a very bohemian lifestyle.  He is full-bore into the socialism that predominates in Europe.  And he is a fallen away Catholic (another victory for St. Mark CCD!), now militant atheist.  So, in response to that sermon, he sent me this:

“I heartily enjoy many “San Francisco behaviors”, thank you very much. Wonder where your man comes down on contraceptive mindset in relation Father Bill sticking it to little Tommy. Morally wrong only if a condom was involved? Take a look at the entire 2000 year history of the One True Church guys – Crusades, Inquisitions, Greed and Depravity from the Holy See on down and you might get a better picture. Oh…and close quote. “

So, obviously alot to unpack here, but I’m not going to address the constant “low-hanging” fruit that those opposed to the Church always, and I mean ALWAYS bring up.  What I will address is what all those who hate God, reject His Church, and feel that all of us poor religious saps are a bunch of hoodwinked brain-dead fools think this culture will be like if Christianity is excised from it?

It won’t be pretty.  Many enamored of a left-friendly, secular pagan viewpoint like to imagine that there was some ideal human civilization before Christianity came along (for their invective is almost exclusively reserved for Christians – the muslim is too threatening and the buddhist/hindu too strange and irrelevant).  Wrong.  The culture of the Greco-Roman world, of early empire China, of the Mayans, etc., was violent and cruel.  It was a strictly utilitarian world – what can you do for me?  If nothing, then you have no worth.  The bleeding heart sentiment that fires so much left-wing thought came from the Judeo-Christian ethos.  Where did the large scale opposition to slavery as a practice come from?  The Church.  Where did the idea of hospitals to care for the indigent come from?  The Church.  Where did the university, from which so much Church-hating invective originates today, come from?  The Church.  Where did the idea that there should be some kind of social safety net to keep the most poor and vulnerable from being left to the hand of cruel fate?  The Church.

Modern secular pagans feel that they can somehow keep all this good stuff (and much more, including the very idea that we should love our fellow man as ourselves), while gutting the culture of the world of any element of religion (again, especially Christianity).  This is fantasy.  A world without the Christian Faith will be greedy, licentious, barbarous, and cruel.  As the world has become increasingly decoupled from Christianity (especially, the Catholic Church), it has undergone just exactly this process of decay.  Don’t believe me?  Well, how about this small data point – two oxymoronically titled “bio-ethicists” have declared that it is morally wonderful to kill the very disabled to harvest their organs:

Two bioethicists — one from Duke University, the other from the National Institute of Health — bring up the question “What makes killing wrong?” in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Using their definition of killing, the authors conclude if the person is “universally and irreversibly disabled” and has “no abilities to lose” then killing them to take organs for donation in order to save the lives of others should not be considered morally wrong. [this is precisely the utilitarian argument used to defend abortion]

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a professor of practical ethics from Duke, and Franklin Miller, a senior faculty member in the NIH Department of Bioethics, state in their abstract ”What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities.“ [greedy, barbarous, and cruel.  Life  only counts if you have some ‘ability.’  Defined by who?  How many?  Any?]

The actual issue at hand in the above is whether it is OK to take brain-active and heart-beating patients off respirators, to facilitate death and organ harvesting.  Harvesting…..like a crop.  C0ntinuing:

“[T]he dead donor rule is routinely violated in the contemporary practice of vital organ donation. Consistency with traditional medical ethics would entail that this kind of vital organ donation must cease immediately. This outcome would, however, be extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view [because patients who could be saved will die]. Luckily, it is easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing.”  [This of how many can be “saved” if we just kill a few people!   Utilitarianism, pure and simple, without any reference to the inherent value of each person, no matter what their condition is]

“[I]f killing were wrong just because it is causing death or the loss of life, then the same principle would apply with the same strength to pulling weeds out of a garden. If it is not immoral to weed a garden, then life as such cannot really be sacred, and killing as such cannot be morally wrong.” [I can’t believe an adult human actually made that argument.  So a human being is just like a weed?]

This is culture increasingly divorced from Christianity.  Compassion is at best an afterthought.  Utilitarianism rules.  Abortion is freedom, empowering.  The medical care you receive will depend on your estimated future economic productivity. You can be killed if someone else really needs your organs (or, perhaps, even your things).  All manner of perversion is good, wonderful, and worthy of emulation, but religious belief is intolerant and must be banished. Marriage is not a union of man and woman ordained by God for the furtherance of humanity, but is whatever the state defines it to be. Birthrates are plummeting, as people are so anethetized in their state approved materialism that they can’t even bother to reproduce.  They have no hope, they’re just waiting to die.  How many examples of decay and collapse do we need?  There is no limit to where society can descend in this environment.

We hear the terms “Judeo-Christian” worldview alot.  Many don’t know what it means.  It means loving your fellow man even at great cost to yourself.  It’s not the violent subjection of islam or the mind-numbing nihilism of the eastern religions.  It’s unique in the history of the world, and it is the religion God has revealed to man in His time for our good and in accord with His Will.  But it’s being rejected by a mindless, self-serving materialism.

Have a nice day!