Therapeutic State’s Inherent Evil versus Roman Catholic Faith

Therapeutic State’s Inherent Evil versus Roman Catholic Faith

By Joseph Andrew Settanni

“There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.”  – Léon Bloy

With its virulent roots deep within the 20^th century, the phenomenon known as the Therapeutic State has, unfortunately and logically, arisen in tandem with the Regulatory State, Administrative State, and Bureaucratic State into the 21^st century.  In brief, it is a world without God, i. e., the secularist Utopia believed to exist in the contemporary world, though rarely and honestly called by that name, if ever.¹

Elements of it include: Gestalt Theory, Freudian psychiatry, Jungian psychology, and other such means toward seeking to bring about a therapeutic attitude toward all of human life and allied relationships and interrelations thereof. It has, generation by thoughtless generation, become truly much more than just the medicalization of American and Western life.  Now, there is a therapy available for just about any or all human ailments, possibly real or, perhaps, if only merely imagined to be thought real or not.

The “Therapeutic State” is a phrase coined by Dr. Thomas Szasz in 1963.  It was the so quite naturally institutional-oriented collaboration between psychiatry and government that has resulted in to what Szasz had called the Therapeutic State.  This helped, in turn, lead to the normalization of statism and statist attitudes so generally prevalent in contemporary society and culture, for the ideology of statism favors greatly the often haughtily presumed normalcy of the (usually covert) insanity of the therapeutic attitude and cognate justifications thereof.

Reading may include: The Rise of the Therapeutic State by Andrew J. Polsky and The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End by James L. Nolan Jr., Counseling and the Therapeutic State by James L. Chriss; and, of course, The Therapeutic State by Thomas Szasz. Cognate reading would be: Jeffrey Schaler, ed., Szasz Under Fire: A Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics.

Philip Rieff, by 1987, called the situation and process “the triumph of the therapeutic” to so indicate its surely quite dominant pervasiveness for many societal and cultural perspectives as such.  For Roman Catholics, the theme to be pressed forward concerns the secularization of the State and how the lack of faith, the rise of a broadly based atheist humanism, has then corrupted human life and degraded human existence, though this is too often not recognized, if at all, by any dedicated secularists.

Examination of Glorified Secularism: Myth, Magic, and Superstition Galore

Since this topic is too enormous to be fully taken on here, this discussion will focus mainly upon how modern, urban, industrialized society deals with PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder.  Because millions no longer see their inherent dignity coming from being made in the image of God, the then secularized society and culture deals with effects or symptoms, not real causes of mental and emotional difficulties.  Connections between, e. g., the Welfare State and the Therapeutic State are definitely there but beyond the immediately selected scope of this particular discussion.²

Today, any public employee or most private employees would lose their jobs if they dared to denounce or, perhaps, possibly challenge the publicly acknowledged “sacredness” of the Therapeutic State and its dictatorial mandates.  Veterans, police officers, fire fighters, emergency care workers, and many other categories of personnel can be diagnosed with PTSD, which now covers even those veterans who may, in fact, not ever have been in combat, which fiercely denotes its incredibly pandemic nature.   Veterans and others are, for instance, given therapy dogs as life companions, if felt needed, to deal with such tragedy.

While, say, some 5% to a possible maximum of 10% of people may be that very terribly emotionally or psychologically afflicted; however, the remaining 90% to about 95% do then raise serious questions, to say the least.  When, e. g., back in 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th century frontier America, meaning when wild savages could literally strike out of the forests at any moment, was life then much less filled with excessive real anxiety, trauma, danger, fretfulness, distress, strain, etc.?   Were there actually less severe and tragic traumas back then?  Probably not.

During the early Middle Ages or, say, when being a Christian under the Roman Empire meant more than a mere chance at bloody martyrdom, were these the “good old days” for the common folk having no actual care in the world? Besides such things as the Black Death, in some estimates, having wiped out at least about one third of Europe’s entire population, leaving dead bodies piling up quite discordantly no doubt, and eras of mass starvation in the world, were people then less prone to profound suffering at extreme levels?   Probably not.

But, unlike the people fixated by modernity and its secularist attitude, ancient, medieval, and those people not yet influenced by an abundance of modernity up to about the 20^th century had, for the most part, a religious sense of life and reality.  Death and disaster, certainly more common even in so-called civilized societies of the past, were not without meaning.  For Christians, faith, hope, and charity were not wiped off the face of the earth in preference for purely therapeutic notions or, dare one say it (?), modernist superstitions.

In the premodern world and especially within Christendom, all of tragedy was placed, in a more natural manner, into an ever much wider perspective in terms of salvation. Christianity, moreover, offers such means of intimate and profound solace even at the worst of times, and Roman Catholicism has, of course, endured for over 2,000 years of human history and suffering, for the Gates of Hell have not prevailed against it and, moreover, St. Peter is still the Rock of Jesus the Christ.

There were no, back then, grand-scale existentialist, phenomenological, or positivist exercises to rob spiritual meaning from the lives of human beings, unlike the doings related to the advancement of modernity and, now, postmodernity in the world. Secularization has, thus, substituted PTSD as the terrene explanation for what earlier ages would have attributed to spiritual suffering by people unable to reconcile themselves intimately with the deep sorrow and grief, agonizing distress and anguish, due to the human condition.  But, they knew that salvation was in, by, and through Christ the Lord.

Fallen creatures living in a fallen world are necessarily subject to the dictates of their having been the existence of Original Sin and the ongoing consequences thereof of sin in this earthly place of suffering, torment, loss, frustration, deprivation, etc. Secularization normally blinds people to the harsh truth and, therefore, compounds human troubles by removing the ground of being from consideration, by seeking to abscond with the Supreme Being of all metaphysical order.  When God is removed from reality, the perception of what is real gets related to what is amenable to the therapeutic ideal, as is sanctioned by the secularist-humanist attitude toward life.

For the spiritual disorder of those suffering from PTSD cannot be addressed by secular therapies alone stressing the externalities of outer turmoil, meaning with no substantial regard for the inner reality of that person’s individual soul. Religion gets forcefully discounted and, thus, superstitiously ignored for the most part as a result of the humanist-materialist fixations upon therapeutic values, not the profound spiritual concerns of suffering human beings.³

Secularism made substantial advances by the dividing of Christendom by Protestantism, moreover, and its many baleful and continuing influences that did lead, eventually, to the ending of any real sense of Christendom after World War I. Martin Luther’s obnoxious denigration of human reason, e. g., led to the intensification of emotions and feelings as when guiding of many religious sentiments toward a spiritual individualism, for “the spirit” was felt to supposedly move people, not the disparaged reason of a man’s mind.  Emotionalism had largely replaced concern for dogmas, doctrines, and the formalities of institutional religion.

This absurd individualism of private judgment, wherein each man becomes his own pope, encouraged a desacralization of human life into separate compartments, favoring more and more secular societal and cultural attitudes.   PTSD has become, therefore, the bold acronym for the enjoyment of the dubious “blessings” of a highly secularized society and, thus, its truly decadent culture.  The insanely rabid kind of dreary compartmentalization, rationalization, routinization, and bureaucratization of societal and cultural efforts has, truly, encouraged the cult of victimization; millions, through the therapeutic dispensation, now want to seem special by being victims, including, of course, the victims of PTSD, ADHD, ADD, etc.

There are many severe consequences. They no longer have the good knowledge, capacity or, perhaps, willingness to see their dignity as children of God, made in the image of the Creator, as to their being, by definition, special beings, not random acts of mindless evolution.  Millions now see themselves as being the mere victims of evolution, though the Lord Almighty is actually the measure of all things.  As a result, various therapies exist to make people feel special, for they are doubly “blessed” in all becoming classed as among the victims that exist and who are, thus, formally recognized as such.

Any special relationship with the Lord God is, therefore, to be cut off through secularization, for the gospels of evolutionism, humanism, pragmatism, positivism, relativism, materialism, hedonism, and naturalism all teach people otherwise. They, these horrid modes of thought, are the highly abusive intellectualist underpinnings of the now rampant Therapeutic State, which is then cognitively armed with its integral rapacious demands made always upon human character and personality.

This is, therefore, to the nth degree of disgusting intolerance and possessiveness, ugly fanaticism and greediness for earthly power over the human heart, mind, and will.  The PTSD diagnosis, thus, deals with the mere effects of the suffering and never attempts to try to get to the real inner cause of the effects, which are, in fact, spiritually related.  But, it could not be logically otherwise.

Mental crutches are absurdly provided, usually for life, by various kinds of therapists who do thereby invidiously assist in preventing the needed wholeness that human beings seek, as they naturally may reach out for spiritual help for their immortal souls, not just their wounded psyches.  The therapeutic comprehension of human tragedy oddly and strangely “celebrates” and “commemorates” the nature of tragedy by trying to superficially cure symptoms, not the cause(s) of the intense suffering and agony.

Thus, the cause of secularization that creates the effects upon lost people thinking that they live in some sort of existentialist or phenomenological vacuum of a world lost to God, of an experiential mode lost to metaphysical order and its realm. What is needed here to be understood?   People in past ages, the vast majority, were able to much better cope with misfortunes and terrors because they were close to the Lord, not made increasingly distant from the Almighty due to the ever enervating, so grossly weakening, superstitions, myths, and magical formulations of an arrogant and very aggressive secularism, meaning pragmatism, evolutionism, naturalism, humanism, etc.

It is the secularly intentional deprivation of spiritual sustenance that has wrongly robbed millions of people of the requisite ability to properly seek healing from the divine source of all healing, all mercy, and all compassion, meaning God.   There can be no real substitute found in any supposed liberating therapeutics for, say, any PTSD in that the vast majority on average will remain, more or less, mental-psychological cripples their entire lives.

This will be with the growing need for drugs, psychiatric sessions, therapy dogs, and the ever available panoply, exemplary of myth, magic, and superstition, merely distracting them from turning to God for authentic solace and genuine salvation.  It is, thus, no real surprise that various forms of neopaganism has arisen among the Western populace, meaning as always much needed faith in the one true God has substantially decreased.

Many people suffer from what may be termed ISSS (invidious secular suffocation syndrome) that keeps them distanced from the Supreme Being, meaning as they pursue different or, sometimes, multiple therapies and/or drug treatments.  After all, it is known that, e. g., Sigmund Freud had, eventually, reached the secularist conclusion that all profound human problems could be solved by getting people on to narcotic drugs and, thus, simply maintaining them there during their lives, for he himself became a cocaine addict.

Freud, moreover, had to receive reconstructive surgery for the extreme damage he did to his nose from snorting the stuff, and people are to be amazed at his “virtue” of actually practicing what he preached?  It must be rightly and logically concluded, however, that there would be almost no cases of (supposed) PTSD if religion, once again, because the truly central and controlling aspects and reality of the lives of extremely distraught people.

What is needed, from the Christian point of view, is the reconciliation of the wounded hearts and minds with the souls of the people afflicted by seeing their salvation in Jesus Christ by forgiving and loving their enemies.   All things, all experiences of human suffering and trauma, are to be seen in, by, and through the reality of Christ for the lives of all people.

Unfortunately, most people do not know the difference between loving and liking; one is not required to like one’s enemy; many of the saints of the Church did not like each other but tried very hard to love each other for the love of God.  The often noted severity and presumed profundity of almost all traumas would be greatly minimized or, perhaps, eliminated, for the vast majority of the sufferers, if they would truly see the liberating light of the Lord in their lives.

For instance, Christian soldiers in combat ought to fight with the spirit of chivalry by hating the evil that the enemy represents, while trying to know that the love of God extends also to the enemy; of course, the opponents are to be killed when essential to saving one’s life or those of one’s comrades or civilians; and, this logically requires, at the least, the ability to dislike them reasonably enough to shoot at them to inflict death when needed.

But, with the unfortunate fading away of the beneficent fullness of Christianity and its implications and ramifications, today’s typical secularized soldier, firefighter, police office, etc. facing potential death and destruction is found unable to find the needed peace of Christ that properly enables the ever requisite reconciliation of mind, heart, and soul.   The secularization of society and culture mandates that millions will, therefore, necessarily remain with severe mental-psychological wounds making them cognitive and emotional cripples for their entire lives; this is because the therapies, inclusive of therapy dogs, are only equipped to deal merely with the surface effects and not the deep cause of the affliction to be found in the soul.

Secularity, thus, has its ongoing disastrous, surely terrible, and remorseless consequences, for there can then be only the extreme rarity, if ever, of true and final spiritual healing (through the possibly applied therapies), which is what is actually needed for achieving the wanted and loving wholeness within one’s soul.  The always greater and surer path toward such spiritual liberation is by rightly seeking Christ and His Kingdom first, not the vainglorious allures or alleged therapies of this world that are, in the end, only distractions.  Faith in Christ is primary, not the sorry illusions of the Therapeutic State certainly.

Secularization, though rarely admitted to these days, blinds people to the real need to seek spiritual wholeness; this is by which, in turn, mental and psychological peace and reconcilement can be obtained because the pursuit of holiness, not earthly personal exaltation, is what is properly required for better achieving spiritual wholeness, for overcoming traumas and their effects and affects.

The cure of mind and body from the excessive shock, stress, and strain of significant traumas must be concerned primarily with the condition of the person’s soul, not with value-neutral judgments-attitudes or relativistic opinions.  The therapeutic point of view, necessarily oriented toward secular “salvation,” is obsessed with the treating of mere symptoms that do then relate to a quite superficial understanding of and myopic view toward man’s precious humanity.

Therapies that do claim to be humanistic are, in actuality, mechanistic in approach more than would be ever admitted, of course. Man is also a spiritual animal, not just a creature of various appetites.  Secular society deals operationally and functionally with the primary manifestations of inward disorder in those pragmatic, positivist, and materialist terms of practical reference appropriate, of course, to a Godless perspective.

Secularity of outlook must ever tend toward a “logical” reductionism in thinking as a direct result. The results, predetermined as it were, then must deal oddly with symptoms, not causes, as when adults, as with war veterans, are bizarrely given the equivalent of a baby’s pacifier by being assigned a therapy dog.  What does this ridiculous situation really imply?  What is here the reprehensible scandal involved?

Neither spiritual maturity nor mental-emotional maturity are, thus, permitted to be obtained whenever the supplying of, in effect, four-footed pacifiers become poor substitutes for the realization of the need for genuinely seeking that true peace and inner comfort that, in fact, only Christ can give. Until then, only infantile attitudes get professionally encouraged and, moreover, intellectually supported, through these therapeutic gambits of sadly making presumably substantial social science paradigms, out of mere disguised infantility oddly denominated as being helpful therapy.

So, yes, this is what one strangely gets when so relying upon the secularist dictates of a degraded and degrading, decadent and depraved, societal and cultural reality sliding off, ultimately, toward nihilism that must lead, in its turn, to eventual insanity. This is to be perceived in the glorification and attempt at the assumed professionalization of modal cognitive infantility, as codified by certified professionals, who need, one suspects, to find appropriate places for themselves in lunatic asylums.  Instead, they have a completely unapologetic and shameless regard for what is being seriously or routinely offered as the modern treatments and therapies.

Of course, speaking of any of the above harsh truths among a congregation of professional therapists, psychiatrists, etc. would bring upon the supposed “heretic” massive amounts of denunciations, scorn, derision, and personal vilification, as being just an ignorant, heartless, vile, and inhumane cynic.  It is supposed to be much more humane and caring, humanitarian and considerate, to help keep people as, perhaps, permanently being mental and/or emotional cripples for their entire lives if needed, rather than for them to leave Plato’s Cave to gloriously seek the real world.

And, as for Christians, to find their much needed salvation by achieving spiritual wholeness, ethical and moral completeness, for their souls through, by, and with Christ.  Dedicated humanists and atheist-naturalists, however, have only their supposedly sophisticated contempt and definite disdain for such blatant nonsense.  This all terribly assists, unfortunately, in maintaining and supporting the prevalent therapeutic mentality that upholds the ugly fanaticism usually so encountered; this is whenever the demands and superstitions of the Therapeutic State are properly and righteously questioned and confronted by an educated, concerned, knowledgeable, and compassionate opposition.

Insane Abolition of the Human Condition

Contrary to the quite worldly ways of the majority, there is a decided difference, markedly so, between vain aspirations to live as a successful, well-adjusted secularist and, on the other hand, striving mightily for the needed holiness of a confirmed Christian life. The two widely different choices are, therefore, both inherently incommensurate and indicatively incompatible goals, to say the least.

Upon critical analysis, what is going on consists of the abnormal desire to normalize insanity through various euphemisms. Pain, suffering, anguish, loss, deprivation, shock, etc. used to be considered parts of just normal human life; Moreover, the reading of history so easily demonstrates that, e. g., war, not peace, is much closer to the true norm of things and reality.

So, what is really going on here in deceitful terms of the Therapeutic State and its often unmentioned intentions?  It is, in reiteration, when honestly observed, the quite vainly attempted normalization of insanity to then supposedly remove all social and psychological stigmas attached to it, by this highly absurd effort, to, thus, do the impossible on earth.

Of course, to the now amassed professional armies of ardent defenders of ADHD, PTSD, ADD, etc., these words sound deliberately offensive, harshly impolite, necessarily discordant, and, in all honesty, even very nasty. Yes, the truth hurts.  For if it was not the truth, then people could just, perhaps, shrug all their collective shoulders and then say, so what? If what has been asserted were, in fact, not the truth, there would be no negative reaction from social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, etc. who do vigorously adhere to the therapeutic creed or faith adamantly affirmed by modernity in thought.

In the very early 13^th Century, Pope Innocent III wrote his On the Misery of the Human Condition to so dramatically help highlight the sadness, corruption, sinfulness, and frailties of such mortal creatures.  The Therapeutic State, in sharp opposition, wishes emphatically to deny the existence, the reality, of the human condition, which covers fits of insanity, mental/emotional derangement, and plain insanity itself, of course.  Any other view, naturally speaking, simply presents an unreal world that would be inhabited by many equally fictional people; but, Catholicism offers an alternative and opposite vision of life.

Supporters of PTSD and related matters seek an exemption or an odd reprieve or, perhaps, a supposed remediation of the human condition, which, this side of death, is still just impossible to ever achieve on earth; the condition of humanity is, therefore, fully coincident and congruent with human nature itself, not foreign to it nor can it become alienable through therapeutic superstition or magic; this is, usually, backed up by  the mythic structuralizations of a pseudo-reality conjured into existence by the “priests” of modernity or, now, postmodernity.

Because it really does need to be constantly repeated, as if it is just a mantra, human beings are fallen creatures living in a fallen world; and, consequently, the tremendously idyllic conditions of the Garden of Eden, regardless of all utopian/collectivist attempts made to the contrary, cannot be ever brought back into being in this sorry world.  The human condition, in reiteration, is an absolutely definitive and inescapable reality naturally pertaining to what actual human nature is all about on this terrestrial globe; it is, in truth, entirely unavoidable.  What are, however, the rather necessary implications involved?

This then means, logically, any effort to fruitlessly, uselessly, try to ever to find any supposed real exemptions from man’s obviously innate humanity becomes, by definition, insane. The final project of modernity, which has been sadly carried now into most of postmodernity, is always the so ludicrous attempt to somehow or other normalize insanity for achieving the reification of human nature against the will of God.

Consequently, the heresy of immanentism, backed by philosophical nominalism, manifestly so resides within the demonic aspiration for achieving Utopia on earth, even when millions of people must be terribly sacrificed on the bloody altar of Moloch (by whatever euphemism). Though unrecognized and, of course, unacknowledged as such, (professional) therapeutic support for PTSD, etc. is, therefore, directly related to this Satanic lust for normalizing insanity for the, thus, cognate degradation of man’s humanity, of course.

Where this architectonic concern for glorified emotionalism and the rather intensive cultivation of sensitivities leads can be perceived right empirically; this is in how the college and university campuses are generously overfilled with too many precious snowflakes, emotionally overcharged and intellectually undereducated students, who wish to overtly manifest symptoms of infantilism.  It is really no joke or exaggeration on how such things as coloring books, which have advanced forth for today’s increasing adult use, and play dough have actually gotten distributed to the young adults who wish to escape the urgent demands of mature adulthood, of course.

It is extremely frightening to consider that most of these oh-so-tender snowflakes, graduating from the elite, Ivy League universities no less, are sincerely being groomed prepped become many of the future major leaders and shakers of America and, by extension, the Western world.  There is no rational doubt, moreover, that PTSD diagnoses will then inevitably be extended, one knows, to these notable hapless idiots, schooled pantywastes and wastrels, who are seen as functionally incapable of reaching any truly meaningful mental adulthood.  Many, of course, have been assigned therapy dogs to sooth their nerves.

And, of course, their highly pathetic protests and enervatively emotive gripes, very childish petulant screaming and obnoxious crying, are simply just expected to be taken both seriously and respectfully. What is needed by them will, unfortunately, never occur: a good, vigorous, and decisive spanking of each and every one of these spoiled-rotten children, most of whom are so certainly children of privilege, taking up academic space, at the Ivy League level.  For this is the way it must be, meaning as long as religion and informative traditional theology remains foreign to the actual realities of the secularized campus.

Since the time, generations ago, when William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote his revealing God and Man at Yale, it is so easily known that conditions there and elsewhere have now definitely become, at a bare minimum, many times worse.   When Buckley wrote it, there was, at least, the semblance of the veneer or façade of some Christianity that could so, perhaps, plausibly claim still a fair linkage to some broadly Christian aspirations, more or less.

Today, the brutal victory of secularism in academia, minus the yet overtly religious institutions that are in the distinct minority, is readily evident beyond the need to supposedly document the too obvious fact asserted confidently here.  Of course, suitable to the bigotry of the enforced conformity to be found, no therapies or counseling sessions are to be found for those assumed miscreants who may object to the secularization.  And, further in this specific context and regard, the suspicion arises naturally as to why there is no PTSD diagnosis to be discovered for those who do suffer the agonies of secular society and culture.

In this case, as G. K. Chesterton might have ironically remarked, they won’t even do them the mere assumed courtesy of sending any of them to the canine therapists. What has now happened to human beings?   Modernity has sought to increasingly anesthetize and cushion mankind from what used to be the basic reality of people normally experiencing the profoundest depths of suffering, shock, and trauma that do define the sad human condition.   It is fundamentally inconceivable, therefore, that, for instance, any of the metromen snowflakes would be eagerly prepared to volunteer themselves for any present or future American wars/foreign conflicts.   (God forbid that any military draft be reinstituted!)

Such tremendous hardships and mind-shattering horrors to be found upon typical battlefields are to be kept far away from these pathetic specimens, precious pansies, who do faint at the mere thought of any severe adversity. People who absolutely cannot tolerate any ideological viewpoints contrary to their own are not likely to willingly endure the much greater and graver impacts of life’s so truly deeper and important traumas, which surely bodes ill for America in particular and the Western world in general.  They are, no doubt at all, the true children of the Therapeutic State.

Reflecting seriously upon such troubling thoughts does not aid, to put matters here rather mildly, in the encouragement of optimism; appropriately contrary judgments, however, would fairly seem much more realistic and, thus, justifiably applicable for proper rational and reasoned consideration.  Academia, in its mainstream reality or plain manifestation, will be usually turning out emotional retardates and psychological misfits basically incapable of any sustained or, perhaps, truly sustainable adult maturation process to be seen in their lives.  And, they are mainly people without any theological training and religious hope for their then degenerate and, typically, meaningless lives.

This should be perceived, furthermore, as being both a societal and cultural horror of a definitely serious magnitude, at the least, with so shuddering implications and abominable ramifications for civilization’s merely basic requisite maintenance as such.  An at least partial generational disaster is now manifestly looming, on the immediate horizon, as millions of these pitifully wretched creatures get themselves poured out of the institutions of the higher learning and, thence, into the larger society.

Not nearly enough kindergarten cribs, coloring books, and nicely soothing toys are yet available to handle their predetermined disappointment with the many annoying and uncomfortable hardships and sufferings of just normal adult life.  Oh, Captain Kangaroo, where are you when we need you?

It is not realized that, contrary to the shallow beliefs of pragmatists, humanists, and positivists, that societal and cultural secularization freely allows for the true weakening of human minds and wills, especially through sinfulness and its operation; for as Chesterton had so sagaciously noted, moreover, once people cease believing in God they are made susceptible to believe in anything, including myth, magic, and superstition galore.

One can come to realize, especially through (orthodox) Roman Catholic theology and its religion, that the epitome of the therapeuticized infantilisation of thought can be vividly seen in the absurd effort to irradiate and extirpate all evil from the world, meaning under the demonic auspices of the secularist Therapeutic State.   But, it is definitionally impossible for, in effect, Satan to make war upon Satan, so this version of social-welfare statism can, in fact, never deliver what it supposedly promises to its many “true believers” and “fellow travelers.”

Admittedly, they would completely deny, however, the truth of this aforementioned assertion as to their ultimate but covert goal behind the demonic spreading of their many superstitions, myths, and vainglorious efforts at magical conjuring through skillful usage of psychotherapeutic terminology.  The Devil, as with, e. g., the legions of therapists allied to the Therapeutic State, always claims to be doing good, for they do mightily resent being questioned as to the positive intentions ever asseverated.

Conclusion

Meanwhile, among the certainly very best that can be somehow or other “magnanimously” done by the seemingly dedicated secularist society is to just keep handing out more and more trained therapy dogs.   And, this is what gets so absurdly and strangely called modern compassion, professional concern, and informed understanding for the nation’s highly honored veterans no less – send them all to the dogs!

The point being that a genuinely good society and a frankly good culture, dedicated forthrightly to the advancement of the sincerely best qualities of humanity, ought to truly do much better and, moreover, as both history and Christianity actually teaches can, in fact, do much better.

By providing the necessary means of spiritual salvation, especially as seen through orthodox Roman Catholicism, Christianity offers the proven and time-tested alternative to the furious fanaticism and mendacious methodologies meanly proffered by the Therapeutic State and its many misdirected minions.  In short, the human condition, as was above noted earlier, cannot ever, in fact, be abolished; and, the assigning of doggy companions, for suffering people, is not the same as seeking the genuine spiritual healing of souls.

One ought to correctly and rightly see, therefore, by all that has been carefully discussed previously, that the ever proverbial road to the Infernal Regions is yet notably paved with supposed benevolent intentions on the part of the secularist-humanist therapists and their (too) many naturally allied legions of supporters and believers.  For truly, one ought to religiously see that only Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, not the delusional Therapeutic State.

 

Athanasius contra mundum!

 

Notes

 

1. http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=990
2. Ramifications of the greatly perverse thinking of the Therapeutic State can be easily seen, these days, almost everywhere, inclusive of popular culture, of course, as with many contemporary movies. A movie, e. g., entitled The Blind Side ought, if decent truth be told, to have been much better titled: “The Celebration of the Saga of Self-inflicted Pain.”

The Blind Side is a film that is supremely perfect for depicting the stereotype of bleeding-heart, White Liberals seeking to do Christian “missionary work” among the local “heathen” Black people.  It is the poignant true story of a mentally retarded, African-American, high school football player who was so solicitously “redeemed” by a White, upper-class family.  All righteous sympathies are directed, by this film, toward the self-inflicted pain of the depicted drug-addict, unmarried mother of the football player; this is by which his family, meaning dysfunctional, lower-class, family life, gets involved in the entire saga centering on his, no doubt, clearly unfortunate early life.  But, that is not the point in dispute.

Of course, in fairness, there is no denying that actual human suffering and misfortune has been, in fact, definitely involved in this both admittedly horrendous and presented situation. But, the former ghetto resident, the athlete, is redeemed by being made a part of the missionary family, by which there is seen the triumph of hope against tragedy.  But, this is, nonetheless, ultimately all false.  As Léon Bloy rightly said, “There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.”

The mother had over a dozen children, by a number of indifferent fathers, who left for parts unknown, of which this particular son had been born with mental limitations; it was, however, made a minimal handicap by his having quite substantial athletic prowess to become a remarkable, champion, collegiate football player to his, of course, undeniable credit. This cloying and unctuous cinematic production, however, toward the very end, depicts the telling of the tale of another Black man whose life was cut short, for he had not been as fortunate to have received redemption.

The impression is left with the viewers that if only there existed a much better Welfare State, then these tragedies could be avoided. No thought is given to the rather important fact that it is the Welfare State itself that inherently creates these terrible calamities, by sustaining and enabling a sadly dependent and warped Black subculture, called the inner-city ghetto. Q. E. D.

3.    Admittedly, for instance, mental disorder versus actual demonic possession is to be most carefully discerned by knowledgeable, holy, and skilled priests. Some matters that logically and reasonably point toward there being rather definite mental, physiological, and psychological ailments not amenable to religious help and counseling, even to the extent, when needed, of outright exorcism do, in fact, exist.

The directive discussion in this article covers, however, the vast majority of cases that would be properly assisted toward cures, when the spiritual dimension of human beings, the existence of immortal souls, is both freely and openly acknowledged as being, in fact, true. And, this is precisely what, in point of fact, the mainly predominant thrust, justification, and logic of the Therapeutic State denies, categorically and axiomatically, as to such an asseverated veracity.  Thus, the Therapeutic State must ever be thoroughly denounced and totally rejected in the name of (orthodox) Roman Catholicism.  Why?

The seeming paradox exists of what may be called the cruelty of kindness and the kindness of cruelty. With the exception of the criminally insane, almost no one, these days, really wants to put people into institutions for the mentally ill, mentally disturbed.  It is thought to be much more humane for them to, if necessary, wander the streets endlessly until they are found dead someday due to their own neglect, not that due to any institutional harm being possibly inflicted.

Thus, a maggot-filled corpse found in a public gutter is supposed, one guesses, to be greatly preferable and more humane than having any maggot-filled dead body found inside an institution for the insane or mentally impaired. The latter tends to get the added publicity and concern, heartfelt sympathy, and righteous outrage and allied indignation, the former usually gets, in typical comparison, only the shrug of any occasional shoulder.  Thus, there is the shocking cruelty of kindness and the kindness of cruelty exhibited by human beings toward their fellow (and suffering) creatures.

Nonetheless, an axiomatically anti-institutional bias normally is quite praised for being so very sophisticated, enlightened, humanitarian, concerned, and, of course, entirely humane in its, thus, public or empirical solicitation and supposedly genuine regard for people qua human beings.  But, is it?   Is it really so?  It would be significantly better, on average, for a new Christendom to have as one of its tasks the care of these unfortunate people, for they are still validly among the children of God.

 

Full Gospel Christianity Isn’t Real

Full Gospel Christianity Isn’t Real: The Roman Catholic Perspective

By   Joseph Andrew Settanni

Yes, the four Gospels are from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.   No, the actual entirety of the true fullness of the Gospel, the Good News, goes considerably well beyond just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  How is this to be known?   There is a limitedness, a circumscription, to Holy Scripture, which will be expatiated and elucidated upon, in this article, critically questioning the so-called Reformed Religion.

Moreover, any Sola Fide religion based upon Sola Scriptura can only, by its very restricted nature, offer up a merely partial Gospel that, by definition, can never really be the full Gospel of Christ.  The logic and reasoning to be presented is absolutely impeccable and, as such, irrefutable as to the set definitional reality.  Neither faith nor reason, therefore, should be seen in isolation of each other.

In historical fact, there was the existence of full Christianity, which Catholics can so freely refer to as Catholicism, prior to the official codification of those selected scriptures that, later, became the New Testament. Reason knows this to be a fact.

The Roman Catholic Church, therefore, had helped to create, define, protect, and preserve the Christian Bible, through St. Jerome and other efforts, for many centuries, meaning well prior to the later modern rise of Protestantism. But, the careful exegesis to be given here, however, requires a profundity of both thought and reflection, cognition and discernment, for the better informing of Christian faith.

It is, thus, a consequent and staggering fact that any so-called Reformed Religion presents only a very deformed, reduced, or partial Gospel at best, a weirdly “Christianistic” parody at worst. The full Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is, thus, always far greater than the Bible and existed, in fact, before the New Testament was finally all written down for the future reading of it, which notable point ought to set intelligent Protestants to thinking.

Inadequacy of Mere Scripture Exposed

As a result, e. g., any Protestant denomination billing itself as a “full Gospel Church” is, by definition, just a plain fraud. Only Catholicism contains the fullness of the Gospel, because it is theologically framed within the greater context of Holy Tradition and Holy Magisterium, the full wholeness of Sancta Mater Ecclesia.

For clarification, this brief article is directed toward those who hate Catholicism and, usually, claim it to be unscriptural or antiscriptural, though at each and every Catholic Mass, Holy Scripture, both Old and New Testament, gets freely cited. What is to be here plainly confronted goes by the detested names of bias, bigotry, prejudice, and, if truth be told, much sheer stupidity backed firmly by a tutored ignorance, as St. Thomas More, martyred by the Protestants, would have so surely agreed.

Before the consolidation of Christian writings into suitably readable texts, what had to exist was Church and its ecclesial tradition, inclusive of the always important oral tradition.  With the various ancient Roman persecutions that included the many burnings of these scriptures when found by the authorities, the oral tradition yet ensured that the sacred knowledge would not be ever completely lost.  And, moreover, this is very significant to note.

Prior to the changes of modernity, with its seemingly endless supply of books and other publications and communicational abilities, people were, routinely, expected to have really good or great memories for retaining vast quantities of knowledge.  Memories were valued.

This is clearly why, among other reasons, the Catholic Church properly recognizes Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Sacred Magisterium, the last being the holy teaching office, authority, and power of Holy Mother Church.  And, one manifestly sees why, logically, that the requisite fullness or completeness of the Gospel does not ever historically exist with nor did simply begin, supposedly, with Protestantism.

In short, the highly important historical reality and substantiveness of Christianity did not just begin in the early 16^th century, in Europe, for the much greater the knowledge of Church history gained, the greater, thus, becomes the obvious case for Catholicism and proper acceptance of it.

The direct contrary is, however, evidently true.  Through several centuries, inclusive of many harsh times involving extreme persecution of the faithful and the wide proscription of Christian texts, it was up to the Sacred Tradition and Magisterium to necessarily fill in the created gaps and carry on the missionary proclamation of the totality of the Gospel.  The Bible alone was not enough.  And, more importantly, the vast bulk of Protestants do not intelligently understand or comprehend that any such overconcentration upon the Bible would have then greatly retarded and made much more enormously difficult the wanted spread of Christianity, of Catholicism, the Good News.

Only a fool, therefore, would ever asininely assert that all that Jesus ever did or said is contained in the four Gospels; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not able, being mere human beings, to write down everything actually pertaining to the life on earth of the Christ, of the Savior. Human imperfection so requires that a “Trinitarian” solution be provided for this inherent problem; thus, Tradition, Scripture, and Magisterium all do come together and contribute to the larger process of always better ensuring that the truly full and universal Gospel can, hence, be really preached to the entire world.

While it admittedly took the labors of thousands of monks, priests, and scribes throughout the early, intermediate, and later Middle Ages, the composition, writing, of Bibles was only a part of the great effort regarding the needed transmission of Catholicism, generation by generation.   And yet, at best, each Gospel by the four Evangelists is only a kind of attempted synopsis, not any absolute compendium, of all of what Christ communicated to the people of that era or of all the actions that he committed.

It simply would not have been possible to actually record everything.  There is a good reason why, for instance, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are, in fact, referred to as the Synoptic Gospels.

The overt witness of St. John, in the last lines of Chapter 21 and closing his Gospel, makes the so surely notable point, “This is that disciple who giveth testimony of these things, and hath written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things which Jesus did; which, if they were written every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written.”   To which, it must be logically said: Amen!

The above citation, rendered by St. John himself remember, is a rather explicit acknowledgement that what exists, in addition, as the New Testament is so woefully incomplete, terribly inadequate, as justly being the right wholeness of the true Gospel message presented to the whole world at large, to all Christians in particular; that most salient fact, moreover, forever invalidates Protestantism’s (false) claim to giving out with a full Gospel, meaning with its then necessarily myopic regard for the Bible only as the (limited) word of God.

In point of obvious fact, the Lord’s word is absolutely unlimited, it must then, by definition, go always beyond the New Testament, beyond the whole Bible; it is seen best fulfilled in the Roman Catholic Church and its confession of the Truth; the Truth being that it is the only Church really founded by the Lord Jesus Christ, which all the Reformed Religion ignorant followers, liars, and hypocrites do, thus, vehemently deny to the peril of their immortal souls’ salvation.

It is a fair certainty, of course, that the Acts of the Apostles simply does not contain all and everything done by all of the Apostles in the time of the early Church. Thus, again, the need for both Tradition and Magisterium to requisitely provide much useful and pertinent coverage for what otherwise might have very well been lacking, in the rather myopic (read: Protestant) provision, for having only Scripture alone.  Of course, whenever Scripture is turned against the Reformed Religionists, then, suddenly do develop an aversion for it because it may not conform to their own highly selective Sola Scriptura prejudices and preferences.

Will they then think it quite so expedient to, in effect, silence the Gospel of St. John for the sake of their heretical beliefs?  After all, it is not historically unprecedented, for it is known that Martin Luther had once preferred to expunge the entire Book of St. James because it did not, in fact, conform to the heterodox Protestant demand for Sola Fide belief as the Reformed Religion’s orthodox.  This supremely proves, once again, how every heresy, with degrees of urgency, seeks to become its own orthodoxy, sooner or later, as one may both independently and easily witness the empirically observed phenomenon of Protestant denominationalism, of the horror of Reformed factionalism.

As Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, a convert from Protestantism, noticed, the more one knows the history of the Church, especially in depth about ancient and medieval times, the more it becomes quite impossible, reasonably untenable, to just absurdly remain a Protestant, for the dramatic logic of becoming a Catholic becomes, then, so greatly compelling.  Getting at the true fullness and magnitude of meaning of the Gospel requires having a historical mindset that duly recognizes the significance and critical nature of having a respect for Tradition and Magisterium, not just a singular overconcentration upon Holy Scripture alone.

Prior to the neat regularization and uniformity that officially descended upon the Church by having, at last, a written presentation of what ended up being the Holy Bible, with both the Old Testament and New Testament, there was only, in fact, the spoken word-of-mouth and the existence of the Church as founded by Christ. Out of empirical and historical necessity, the three main pillars of the Church, of the Faith, became Tradition (God the Father), Scripture (God the Son), and Magisterium (God the Holy Ghost), with all three properly confirming each other and, in addition, none contradicting the other two.

Therefore, the true sum of all three exists as being ever greater than a mere composite structure, where the whole is, indeed, of much more consequence than the mere sum of the individual parts, for the full Godhead, explicitly, witnesses to the important truth known as the Trinitarian Dogma.  What had truly happened was due to the rampant nominalism of Protestantism with its vilely inherent reductionism, which produced an endless number of sects, sub-sects, and cults apparently without an end, which is a scandal of Christianity, as well as of just basic logic itself.

The Gospel, as to the true fullness of the Gospel message, got reduced or limited to the Holy Scriptures and variegated interpretations that all could not be consistent but had to, sooner or later, conflict. This necessarily points directly to the ever expanding denominationalism of Protestantism, for heresy itself is fruitful of ever more heresies, as error spawns further errors.

The completion of the Gospel concerns how it has been properly supplemented by Church Tradition and Church Magisterium; this is why all of Lutheranism, Calvinism, Methodism, Mormonism, Unitarianism, etc. can only yield a partial Gospel or sense thereof, not the entirety, the wholeness, of the Gospel truth. One can come to the practical realization that, for instance, the Lutheran Church was, actually, founded by Martin Luther, of course, not by Jesus Christ.  The same can be exactly said for Calvinism, etc.

All these different denominations had, in fact, various different founders, though all impossibly claim to be the one true Church of Christ, which is simply illogical at best, scandalous at worst.

But, regardless of all these false claimants, there is still only the one Roman Catholic Church that has physical proof (St. Peter’s bones, etc.) in Rome, theological justification (the Vulgate Bible of St. Jerome, etc.) and tremendously much else besides to vindicate the truth, the Catholic truth.  The 11^th century schism of the Greek Orthodox Church does not at all lessen the claim to absolute validity, since it took the obvious prior existence of Rome for there being something to, thus, break away from in the first place.

The Petrine Doctrine, the Rock of St. Peter, remains fully with Catholicism, not otherwise. For if it were otherwise, then Jesus Christ was just a mere churlish and contemptuous liar, which, obviously, HE is not, in His being the Son of God no less.

“Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I shall build my Church.” Jesus said nothing about multiple churches (the scandal of Protestantism) founded upon multiple rocks or even pebbles for that matter, though all Protestants, willfully, do still insist otherwise, contrary directly to Holy Scripture no less.  Of course, they often go through incredible feats of odd biblical exegeses that torture logic so violently, to sophistically deny the very Primacy of St. Peter, as to make even a hardened Jesuit blush at the “Jesuitical reasoning,” so quite amazingly applied – one guesses it – by tendentious Protestant apologists.

Innumerable converts from Protestantism, over many centuries, including St. Edmund Campion, John Dryden, Orestes A. Brownson, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, Mother Mary Alphonsa, G. K. Chesterton, Msgr. Ronald Knox, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, Malcolm Muggeridge, Mortimer J. Adler, St. Edith Stein, etc., among many others, had freely recognized the truth and then totally agreed with it; the logic, reasoning, and rationality of the Catholic faith have, moreover, been overwhelming in their impact upon unprejudiced minds.

Nonetheless, the holy words of Jesus must be ever sincerely repeated to Protestants and all others who wrongfully and bigotedly continue to reject and deny the Truth of the full Gospel: “Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I shall build my Church.” Against each and every Reformed Religion lie this ought to be, must be ever, fearlessly and endlessly reiterated for upholding Holy Scripture, if for no other reason.  Furthermore, the sanctity of biblical truth must, then, be defended against Protestantism and all of its errors because Christ is not a liar.

The Protestant, thus, openly defames, slanders and denigrates Jesus.  If the Rock is, in fact, not the Big Fisherman, then all the other holy words in the New Testament can be also questioned and doubted, by asserting the validity of a single lie, supposedly uttered by the Savior.  This is not rationally tenable.

The Reformed Religion followers commit the old “onion fallacy” of trying to vigorously strip away, as the Puritans had claimed to radically purify Christianity, by supposedly then getting at the real onion.  The ridiculous claim is that if only all the excesses, excrescences, appendages, or such other alleged things are simply removed for, thus, attaining religious or theological purity, then there will be seen a pristine Christianity revealed in a heavenly new light.  Such attempted or asserted perfectionism, however, is not of this world filled with fallen (sinful) creatures in a fallen world.

Such utter nonsense pouring forth by revolutionary doctrines attacking the Body and Blood of Christ is an obscenity before God and His Holy Church. They repudiate the Papacy, the history of the Church, if or when it includes Catholicism; and needed veneration (not worship) of the Blessed Virgin Mary; often times, the panoply of saints, Purgatory, all, most, or some sacraments, etc. But, this ardent stripping away of all or most things Catholic is, of course, the same kind of bold reductionism and radicalism analogously seen in Liberalism and Leftism.

Revolutionism is political-ideological Protestantism, for both these quite virulent aspects of modernity triumphant do, thus, attain the fundamental essence of the revolt set against proper order, hierarchy, authority, tradition, custom, and, ultimately, upon undergoing a clear and cogent analysis, God Himself.

As there are degrees of reductionism to be found, so, also, there are many degrees of Protestantism or, perhaps, more appropriate to speak of a Protestantization being involved; this ranges, of course, all the way from High Church Anglicanism through Methodism to Puritanism and onward toward Unitarianism, Universalism, and Quakerism, all along the further and further radicalization spectrum of the well noted reductionism concerned with such nonsense.

They piously refuse to recognize the logical truth that the entire onion, not any absurdly stripped down version thereof, is the full object and aspect of any truly good Christian’s desire and devotion, namely, the Roman Catholic Church.

But, Protestants, being ingrained in their hypocrisy, deny the manifest literalness of what was said and is meant, while, in contradistinction, often affirming that literalness is demanded of the Bible, especially in those places of their own choosing, of course. And, as ever, it is publicly so known that a multiplicity of Reformed Religion believers, with their religious revolutionary notions, can certainly cite a multiplicity of interpretations of Holy Scripture, at their merely beckoned command.

What an objective person would clearly recognize as subjectivism and relativism at work, however, gets usually denominated as inspired Christian interpretation or, perhaps, an exegesis done “in the spirit.”

However, Catholics must righteously defend the unadulterated Word of God that ought never to be made vilely subject to the idolatry, though usually covert, of a convenient tergiversation to so better uphold Protestant apologetics because of its inherent nominalism. One can understand, by now, that only Catholicism, because it fully witnesses to the aforementioned and demonstrated reality of the Holy Scriptures, contains the blessedness and fullness of the Gospel, of the truthful message of the salvation of souls in, by, and through Christ the Lord.

Someday, it may be hoped that millions of Protestants will cease to be idolaters; for it is no wonder that, e. g., the Puritans had greatly idolized the Hebrews who, as to the Jewish descendants, had fully rejected Jesus as the Christ; the Hebraicism of the Puritans should, thus, be obvious in their concentration upon the Bible. They too wanted to be a people of the Book, as in the City on a Hill.

As with all “Reformed Religion,” in general, these believers have made the worship, their devotion to Biblicism, greater than God, which is, by definition, idolatry.  Equally, the reductionism involved in Protestant thought is too often simply unrecognized because of the nominalism so naturally and pragmatically inherent within Protestantism, within heresy.

To truly be a genuine Protestant is, therefore, to be an actual idolater, for there is no middle ground, as with the pompous Anglicans, thinking of themselves as the via media. As the Lord God rightly detests idolatry, so He must, logically and completely, also abhor and definitely then reject all of Protestantism, which ought to be so manifestly obvious, meaning as to the authentic truth, the full Gospel, of what can be actually known as such.  The situation that exists is simply not wrong; it is entirely ludicrous.

A so-called Bible-centered “Christianity” must, necessarily, become obsessively fixated upon a clearly myopic theology that must, in its turn, strenuously seek to self-justify itself by, thus, reducing all to the Sola Fide requirement incestuously demanded by the Sola Scriptura (supposed) mandate.  Heterodoxy, unsurprisingly, has easily found fertile ground, for when the only primary tool (the Bible) exists as the hammer of God, all the other objects then begin to look like nails.  As Richard Weaver correctly pointed out long ago, therefore, ideas do have consequences.

Because of Reformed Religion’s integral reductionism, its attendant nominalism cannot really tolerate any genuine orthodoxy within the radical theology and, as a so direct logical consequence, the many resultant religions, all of them, piously or routinely, are claiming the overtly presented purity of being Christianity. Fallacies do build upon fallacies when the logic gets corrupted to serve a highly flawed kind of reasoning, which, of course, gets called Protestantism and in all of its many variations thereof.   It lacks, by definition, the Catholic fullness of combining Holy Scripture, Holy Tradition, and Holy Magisterium, kept all together.

What is, therefore, the here absolutely inherent problem in successfully practicing a cogent logic and reasoning?   The many reformed religionists must be able, in effect, to (supposedly) believe something and its very opposite to be true at one and the same time, same instant.  But, to all such rather blatant nonsense, Catholics would rationally have to say to all these sorrowfully deluded Protestants: Get real! ¹

The Protestant Revolution, called the Reformation, helped to vilely destroy the only historically real time of the existence of and true meaning of ecumenism when there once existed, in the Medieval Era, the ecumenical reality of Christendom. This is no insignificant fact.  It was not, of course, any perfection on earth, it was, however, a true Catholic community of interest, a koinos kosmos (the sense of a shared humanity of culture).

The enormous lack of there being Christendom, let there be no rational doubt, led to many aggressive nationalisms, the rapacity of State Capitalism, formation of atheistic ideologies, both World War I and World War II, the rise of a belligerent secularist modernity, and the pandemic Culture of Death.

Moreover, the horrid and definite stepchild of Protestant culture became Liberalism with the ongoing advancement of the spreading secularization that, logically, had accompanied the Protestantization of most of Western civilization. Pragmatism, positivism, relativism, materialism, and hedonism advanced under fabulously shining and bright banners wildly proclaiming freedom and liberation from the past, meaning, of course, deliverance from the Roman Catholic Church.  A revolutionary spirit, iconoclastic to its core, was violently let loose upon the world that wished to uproot and destroy the existing order.

The Protestant Revolution led to the murders of millions of human beings; the French, Soviet, Chinese, and other Leftist revolutions had consumed well over 100,000,000 lives and still counting, with Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere still forwarding the evil Communist agenda of endless hate, bloodshed, and malice.

The above noted absence of Christendom, of a Roman Catholic ecumenical world-society, is not merely solely unfortunate or, as often denounced, just simply nostalgic for medievalism; it is absolutely tragic, beyond any question, in its surely monumental meaning and solid significance, beyond mere human imagination, which is, really, only a most minimal statement of fact.  The unfortunately permanent dividing of the former Christian commonwealth into fractious and still multiplying denominations has greatly helped to spread immorality, relativism, and hedonism leading, first, to nihilism and, finally, insanity itself set well into the 21^st century.

Rationalization and Streamlining of Religion

When one fully appreciates the amount of blood spilled, in just the past 20^th century alone, the total lack of any real ecumenism that would have had the force of Christendom reveals the profound depth of the errors of Protestantism in its always vain quest for the absolute supremacy of Sola Scriptura.   Ideas have consequences.

Vile attacks upon the Blessed Virgin Mary, by Protestants, has not helped the situation.²   Moreover, the scandalous existence, the ongoing denominationalist obsession, of the terrible Protestant worldview, its horrid Zeitgeist, has had its results, its demonic favoring of an anti-Christendom attitude that had surely encouraged secularization.

The “Bible or burn” approach to human reality, world-historical reality, has had its many so massively shocking and lamentable costs, which could not be, in fact, religiously compatible with the theological message of the Christian peace favored by Gospel truth.   Until all Protestants realize this rather obvious verity, there can be no real and actually substantive and substantial ecumenism anywhere on this face of this sad earth, for it would mean the needed and requisite affirmation for and righteous recognition of a new Christendom in the world.

And, the ugly and abominable heresy of Sola Fide would be, therefore, utterly rejected as a terrible lie, a reprehensible falsehood, truly offensive to the Lord God Almighty because such a limited Gospel, the Reformed Religion, is not Christian nor exemplary of any genuine Christianity.  For if it were Christian, it would not seek to offend the Sacred Body and Blood of Jesus Christ by denying transubstantiation of the Holy Eucharist of the Holy Roman Catholic Faith.  Q. E. D.

For the Morning Star of the Reformation, Martin Luther, with his vilely barbaric contempt for human reason, totally rejected one of the brilliant fundamental elements of advanced Western civilization by his spurning of Hellenization and its validity; even Desiderius Erasmus, among the main leaders of the New Learning as it was called, had been able to easily recognize a confirmed barbarian when he saw one.

This bold attack upon all rationality, which ought not to be confused with the ideology of Rationalism, twisted and deformed most of Western reasoning, cognition, for centuries thereafter; it lead to the two truths theory’s revival on a massive scale by which, e. g., science was held to be in conflict with faith, which is not true at all. As St. Thomas Aquinas and others had properly taught, truth does not contradict or conflict with truth, for the ultimate Truth, by definition, is God.

Protestantism had, thus, let loose fits of irrationality that, in turn, supported emotionalism as a means of substituting it for proper reason in religion.  On this matter, one can read Fr. Ronald Knox’s rather instructive book entitled: Enthusiasm.

Indicatively, the need for explicitness and the attempt at the demystification of religion by a reformed theology opened the flood gates for Rationalism, not the advancement of a reasoned religion, which already existed with Catholicism anyway.   The objective of the need to rationalize faith produces not an improved religion but, rather, the kind of rationalization that corrupts faiths with necessarily cognate efforts at applying various degrees and kinds of reductionisms within religious beliefs.

One leaves behind Catholic transubstantiation of the Holy Eucharist to go to many varying degrees of Protestant consubstantiation that gradually, as the theological radicalization process continues, leads to merely more and vaguer kinds of supposed symbolizations of meaning. These assumed symbolizations, in their “logical” turn, do become then too symbolic as to be, in fact, worthless for both intent and meaning, which ought not to be that too surprising, given the vapid and ugly premises of the overall rationalization of religion desired.

Over the centuries, as Protestantization has had time to work its many wonders, rationalist beliefs tended to cover an increasing spectrum of feelings and spirituality all claiming, more or less, to be Christian in either origin or inspiration, as is conveniently alleged.  This rationalization and streamlining of religion, versus what used to be denounced or dismissed as just mere Papist nonsense or mystical priestcraft becoming bizarre, is often not recognized as a direct threat against any attempt to bring about a new Christendom.

Rationalism and explicitness in cognition, being the result of the reducing of Protestantism into secular terms of reference, gave birth to social, cultural, and political Liberalism as with, first, the creation of classical Liberalism with it individualism and, then, modern Liberalism with its collectivism; being two sides of the same coin of modernity.  Unsurprisingly, whether classical or modern in orientation, a real (secularist) Liberal is, in effect, an inverted Protestant, a thoroughly secularized kind of Puritan.  And, this observation has been made by many Catholics and non-Catholics over many generations by now.

The dissolution of religion, therefore, became increasingly inevitable as the inherent principles of the Reformed Religion got themselves rationalized further toward the secularization of thought and life, cognizance and lived culture.

An absurd presumption found to be truly fallacious is that this lead toward a more rational and reasoned world totally (or nearly so) freed from past ancient or musty medieval (read: Roman Catholic) concerns for superstition, myth, and magic. On the contrary, both the features of modernity and postmodernity became greatly absorbed with these terrible errors of reasoning.   When true religion, the Catholic Faith, was violently kicked out the front door in the (false) name of liberation, then corrupted metaphysics was variously smuggled in through the back entrance.³

Because, ultimately, of Original Sin and human sinfulness in general, the highly mendacious promise of rationalization and its rationality is as old as the promise of the Devil in the Garden of Eden made to Adam and Eve.  Human beings, when guided by Rationalism, are not made into true earthly gods, they merely become less human, meaning less humane, and act more beastly by becoming mortal predators set against their fellow mortal beings.

Thus, for instance, the French Revolution of 1789, so loudly proclaiming its liberté, égalité, fraternité, produced instead, as to the latest estimates, about a million dead bodies and allied wicked bloodshed galore, in the “glorious” name of the Enlightenment no less.  Napoleon, in his many wars of needless conquest and with his demonic personal ambition, added at least 5,000,000 more to the total, as to the fuller price to be paid.

Yes, once again, ideas do have consequences, which can include what gets called the law of unintended consequences, as when Luther’s preaching had stirred up the Peasants War, for which he publicly urged the Protestant Princes to suppress the peasants as brutally as possible.

It has been, furthermore, observed that it is historically rare for great heresies not to provoke bloodshed in their social, cultural, and political course through societies.  Protestantism, thus, surely bears the true Mark of Cain from its ugly birth, through the massive carnage, mayhem, havoc, slaughter, and butchery provoked, by its truly revolutionary spirit and intensity.

In the quest for fairness, could all or most of the so-called Reformers foresee what the rationalization and streamlining of Christian religion would then necessarily lead to?   Certainly not.  They believed, most of them, that they had many good intentions and appropriately moral aims, of course.

However, the path toward the Infernal Regions is paved with presumably many nice goals in mind; they just neglected to properly consider the effects of Original Sin and its horrid results among human beings, not creatures of a New Eden.  The Reformed Religion was, without any doubt, tainted at its very birth with too much unexamined utopianism and various elements of millennialism, mixed oddly into a potent brew, which made spiritual drunkards of those who wrongly thought themselves to be rather quite sober Christians.

The religious radicalization process, in addition, opened the terrible door to degrees of immanentism, under different guises and names, as denominationalism ignorantly spread and spread forth mightily across Western and Eastern Europe and, ultimately, the world at large.

Of course, these days, with a heretical Pope Francis, being publicly questioned about his faith by no less prominent ecclesial personages than Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, Raymond L. Burke, Carlo Caffarra, and Joachim Meisner, trying to get people, especially non-Catholics, interested in matters contained in this article has become much more difficult.   Nonetheless, this ardent defense of the Catholic Faith, made against errant Biblicism or the entirety of Sola Scriptura fanaticism, must still be requisitely made; and, moreover, this is whether or not the world is largely indifferent because, let it be known, God is not indifferent to the Truth, for the Truth is, in fact, synonymous with God.

It is an open affirmation of the metaphysical order of reality and, furthermore, its spiritual rightness and holy righteousness, as well as the proclamation of Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, forever and ever.  Thus, the Holy Father’s recent theologically and religiously horrid co-celebration of Lutheranism, of the asserted Reformation, with the Lutherans should be logically seen as having been completely inapplicable to and absolutely incommensurate with Catholicism and its important reality as to orthodox faith versus any forms of heterodoxy, i. e., Protestantism.  Q. E. D.

Conclusion

With all the above argumentation kept cogently in mind, it becomes simply apparent that although Catholicism, for over 2,000 years has had a sensus Catholicus, no such equivalent religious claim, by definition, could be ever made by Protestantism with its odd multiplicity of conflicting denominations.  Hence, upon critical and open examination, an orthodox Calvinism or orthodox Lutheranism would, therefore, be an oxymoron, as would be any supposed claims to a Protestant orthodoxy, since it would be a mere intellectual solecism, indeed.

One could, e. g., speak of mainstream Lutheranism, Calvinism, Methodism, etc., of course, versus other variants, but theological orthodoxy means much more than specified denominationalism.

What gets even more so epistemologically odd is to hear of any Reformed Lutheranism, Reformed Baptist, Reformed Calvinist, etc. sects. Protestantism, in fact, had claimed to be itself the Reformed Religion.  To paradoxically discuss either such a thing as orthodoxy within the heresy of, for instance, Lutheranism or the nature of a Reformed Baptist religion ought to give one pause, as to the set inherent contradictions involved in confusing and conflating such matters.

The typical Lutheran today, moreover, has shifted so far to the ideological Left such that he would be, of course, rather quite shocked by the (relatively) conservative views of Martin Luther himself.

But, (an orthodox) Roman Catholic can, e. g., assent to the Nicene Creed as could any (orthodox) Roman Catholic more than a thousand years ago because there is the sensus Catholicus being fully present in the agreement with the declarations of the Nicene Creed.  Assemble, say, perhaps some several dozen Calvinists, Methodists, Unitarians, Anglicans, Presbyterians, or Episcopalians in a room, and it will be so certain that no absolute Protestant consensus dogma could be found by which all or the majority would agree with it.  Moreover, any such possibly theoretical “agreement” would be anti-Protestant in nature.

The obvious theological individualism of Protestantism, which parallels the individualism of what gets called classical Liberalism, comes to be seen and, more to the point, provides empirical proof of the lack of any so-called Reformed Religion orthodoxy.   In manifest contrast, all traditionalist, non-Novus Ordo Catholics can, however, concur completely with the fundamental assertion of orthodox Catholic beliefs as to the appropriate theological sensus fide, also, appearing in the Apostles’ Creed.  Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus.

None of this is a small matter, for such a creed acts as the affirmation of Gospel truth, the distillation, so to speak, of the substance of what the belief in the Good News is really all about, as to proper faith in Jesus Christ, meaning, thus, all that that means.

Athanasius contra mundum!

Notes

1.    The quite horrid results of all this amassed reductionism, illogic, and idolatry of Protestantism have created painful and sorrowful results beyond measure. An important example can be pointed given.

The author of this article personally knows someone who refuses to get baptized because one of his beloved and respected grandmothers told him that he was a Christian by faith and never, therefore, needs to be baptized. Since he has been told otherwise, he cannot claim being sent to Hell out of an “invincible ignorance” because he sought, of his own free will, to always deliberately remain ignorant and defiant, consciously oblivious and utterly recalcitrant.

This man is, certainly, on his way toward damnation, not salvation, if he stubbornly remains unbaptized, for even, e.g., Jesus freely submitted Himself to the Baptism given him by St. John the Baptist. Such is surely among the harshly bitter fruits of Reformed Religion that a mere sinner thinks himself better than Jesus Christ concerning this particular important matter.  Of course, he would totally deny such a characterization, but the noted facts are the facts, nonetheless.  His inordinately vapid and obnoxiously obstreperous sense of pious Protestantism, or the so wild interpretation or misinterpretation thereof, demands that he goes to Hell rather than to ever so meekly submit himself to God through Baptism.

2. In the break from the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestants felt the need to, increasingly, distance themselves from the Holy Mother of God, who they absurdly misinterpreted as being worshipped by the Catholics or as being equal to God. The disparagement and slanders, moreover, placed contemptuously against the Blessed Virgin Mary, being that She is, without question, the honored Holy Mother of Jesus the Christ, Theotokos (God-bearer), cannot really be that pleasing to the Son of God.

How either routinely ignoring, ignorantly neglecting, studiously minimizing, or just plainly spitting up Her holy memory is, thus, supposed to be really honoring Jesus all the more is, at a bare minimum, truly one heck of a thing to strangely rationalize on the part of the haughty Reformed Religion. It is, also, another of those paralleling Hebraic aspects of Protestantism (seen more clearly in Puritanism) that, more or less, disrespects the idea of the Immaculate Conception, for an incarnational theology and religion is rejected explicitly by Judaism.

Through the logic presented, one can come to correctly perceive and affirm that Protestantism is, thus, a highly retrogressive theological misconstruction and sadly cognitive deformation of the very nature of Christianity itself!

The dishonorable rejection of Mariolatry, on the part of the heretics, always supremely illustrates the fundamental nature of all such heresy that immorally negates what God directly proposes, in this case the deliberate choosing of a human vessel for the spiritually important effort to help man achieve salvation.  Holy Mary as the true Theotokos is surely the Mediatrix of all Graces.  Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus.

3. https://callthepatriot.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/myth-magic-islamic-state-and-roman-catholicisms-greatness/

The Roman Catholic Love of God versus Indifferent Gods

The Roman Catholic Love of God versus Indifferent Gods: Different Comprehensions of the Deity

By   Joseph Andrew Settanni

“We have recognized for ourselves, and put our faith in, the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.” – St. John the Evangelist, Gospel

“God’s love for us is not greater in Heaven than it is now.” – St. Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibets

It will be contended that Roman Catholicism has to the one and only logically and rationally correct comprehension of the Deity. Thousands of different religions, beliefs, faiths, cults, superstitions, etc. have, as is publicly known, widely different and many varying conceptions of the metaphysical order.

The right kind of acknowledgement of the Supreme Being, the Lord God Almighty, makes Catholicism totally unique as both a theology and cognate religion; it is a radically different religion that is staunchly antipagan to the core. For every theology develops, for better or worse, its own religious culture.¹

However, before getting directly to the topic of this article, much speculative and definitional debris must be swept away, in a requisitely heuristic manner; this is for yielding a then heightened sense of substantive clarification, of right expiation, for gaining critical knowledge of what is precisely meant.

Since all polytheisms or pagan beliefs are to be axiomatically excluded because, e. g., Aristotle’s Natural Theology had dispensed with such considerations thousands of years ago, even centuries before Jesus Christ was born on earth. This pagan Aristotle had been able to clearly reason his way toward the so important knowledge that there must necessarily be, in fact, only one true God.

Therefore, refutations of polytheism given here would be just very ridiculously redundant; it would be a total waste of time, print, and effort to, in effect, “reinvent the wheel” for any cognizant or intelligent readers.  The very significant lapse of Roman Catholic catechesis, in America and the western world in general, duly makes this exercise seemingly mandatory to explain the absolute inadequacy of all non-Catholic belief systems still existent today.   What used to be thought quite simply obvious must now be painstakingly brought forth to new generations being fundamentally ignorant of classical Natural Law teachings, the main rudiments of Natural Theology and, of course, the high points of Catholic theology.

Why Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam are All False Religions

Critically speaking, there are only four possible contenders, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam as to an offered monotheism.   Why stating four and not the supposedly traditional three faiths?   Something sensible needs to be affirmed.

There is, actually, no such supposed religion as “Christianity” because such a general knowledge or sense of faith includes covering all of Catholicism, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and variations, and, also, a seemingly endless variety and extensive number of what could be called “Protestantisms” all composing, regularly and irregularly, what gets just generally denominated as being a broadly applied Christianity. But, not all monotheisms are really ever the same thing in the end, for syncretism is ever a heresy, not an assumed greater wisdom of the world.

The next critical consideration as strict analysis of theological and doctrinal credibility concerns purity of the faith. Taking the last consideration first, Islam, under examination, is an amalgam or hodgepodge of ancient tribalistic beliefs and superstitions, Moon worship, selected parts of Judaism, clipped parts of Christianity, some superficial Hellenism, and other rather odd bits and pieces of beliefs covering, in addition, many magical and fantastic genies and jinni; all of which, if ever put on truly neutral display, should embarrass any really thinking and honest Muslim.

It is, when seen objectively, a primitive and heterogeneous belief system good only for primitive minds or for those merely seeking relatively simple attitudes toward a jumbled belief in some diverse type of or, perhaps, sort of a God. Many Natural Law teachings have been corrupted by Islam’s nominalism in its theology, for different comprehensions of the Deity necessarily produce different kinds of religions.

The religious culture created by such a wild fusion of ideas and impulses has directionally created an agitated religious orientation greatly adverse, at a minimum, to Western civilization itself, with most fundamentalists of the creed, if requisite truth be told, longing to return nostalgically to the 7^th century.  What is easily observed, especially with the ultraviolent Islamic State, is a retrograde religion tolerant of much savagery and barbarism galore in hot praise of its bloodthirsty Allah and Prophet Muhammad; such a “religious” genuineness is, nonetheless, truly exemplary of Islam and its quite demonic reality seen through the ages.  And, there are real-world consequences.

It is the most inferior and questionable kind of inadequate monotheism yet imaginable. Hilaire Belloc, though a Catholic writer, did Islam the high “courtesy” of at least calling it a Christian heresy, though that assertion is still highly debatable.  At a minimum, no rational and logical mind should accept the absurd religion of Muhammad, especially considering its rather strange militant origins and incredibly slapdash composition as to unfortunate beliefs.

In short, nevertheless, no serious intellect should bother taking Islam seriously or ever deserving of any respect as to the monotheistic test of validity merely because of its long history of brutal and brutalizing converting of peoples. It was and remains a “religion of the sword” that to this day practices slavery, concubinage, oppression, and much else still indicative of its strong affinity for barbarism, paganism, ruthlessness, and heathenism.  Truly ignorant Westerners, such as Victor Davis Hanson, a Protestant (of course), think that Islam can be helped by its having an experience of Reformation, not knowing that Islam fully thinks of itself as being, in fact, the absolutely verified reform of all religion on earth.

At first glance, Judaism, of course, would easily seem more than just superficially to be a yet genuinely prime candidate among monotheistic beliefs. Not so.  During the literally thousands of years that the Hebrews had spent both living among and near many pagan tribes and empires, they had an extremely hard time preserving the purity of their beliefs and that approximately 400 years of captivity in Egypt did not really help, (along with Aaron working on that Golden Calf, at the foot of Mt Sinai no less).

For instance, at one time Yahweh was thought of as only a regional Deity, as when David, finding himself outside the Holy Land, lamented that he was, thus, unable to worship the Lord because of this situation. Judaism is still, moreover, wrestling with its diluted paganism today and, in addition, certain Natural Law proscriptions have been intellectually ruined by Judaism.

If there be any doubt, one can go freely read Torah or what the Christians call the Old Testament for more than ample documentation and affirmation of this very confidently asseverated truth, which is more than just obvious.  Among other many integral defects that forever detract severely from the purity of their religion concerns their rather settled incorporation of the eminently pagan quid pro quo attitude, as could be found, e. g., among the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Paganism posits a functionalistic and operational kind of religion or religious belief with its theology suitably inclined either formally or informally, directly or indirectly, toward the noted quid pro quo understanding held between the believers and their gods.  Judaism has never repudiated this approach that keeps it oriented more toward paganism than its believers would ever care to admit.  It is behind all the past and ongoing rejection of Jesus Christ to this very day.

Because the Messiah did not come as a glorious, fighting, tribalist war-god to utterly best the Romans at their own game of power on earth, the Son of Man was, of course, completely rejected as just being plainly inadequate; this rejection aligned perfectly with Hebraic sensibility as to its reductionistic pagan orientation, meaning that the natural order is reduced to being just an extension of metaphysical order.

For thousands of years, the Jewish people have refused to properly understand that the God of Israel, seen by Christians as God the Father, gives to them what they do need, not what they hubristically, so pridefully, think they do deserve as the Chosen People. The Jewish people, as if through some sort of religious-cultural osmosis, absorbed a definite kind of paganistic pride from the past tribal peoples that they had encountered in their many wanderings.  Judaism, consequently, still retains these theological and religious impurities that prevent any progress toward ever acknowledging the truths of Christianity.

This has given the Jewish people a seriously defective theology and, thus, inherently flawed religion as a direct result, for the option of Christianity remains unthinkable and reprehensible because of that willful pride supported firmly by the unshakeable and aforementioned quid pro quo attitude.  The nature of paganism involves itself in this bargaining aspect with its interactions with Deity; Abraham, who saw this practice among the heathen tribes surrounding his people, had actually tried it with Yahweh who, at last, just settled for ten morally righteous men in Sodom (who, alas, could not be found).

Protestantism, in its now various multiplicitous and miscellaneous varieties of sects, sub-sects, and cults, exists as a defective assortment of beliefs, as only inferior or mighty impure “Catholicisms” at best and a hopeless and endlessly variegated miscellany of sectarian-oriented opinions at worst. The Protestant Revolution, which is still an ongoing but tiny minor force today as easily compared to the initial revolt, has, also, tended to seek paganistic reductionisms within its own belief structures and attitudes.

This is easily seen whenever, e. g., Evangelicals, unable to correctly perceive the actual truth, denounce Catholicism for its supposed paganism, while also not recognizing how Natural Law considerations have been deformed by Protestantism. One can properly read about this is E. B. F. Midgley’s The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations or Heinrich A. Rommen’s The Natural Law.

Protestant religious culture can, indicatively, be heard in its plaintive pietistic hymns; Catholicism is at home, in contradistinction, with lyrical baroque fugues or Gregorian chants; the two cultures are, thus, entirely incommensurate, disproportional, just organizationally uncomplementary, and not really ever compatible as such. A true Protestant world must, by definition, be inherently adverse to any actually Catholic one; and, it could not be, logically speaking, otherwise due to opposed theologies.

The theological and doctrinal purity standard, once again, meets a sustained failure and yet, moreover, embraces it quite steadily within the nominalist philosophical bounds of Protestantism. And, the ever tremendous philosophical problem of persistent nominalism in belief can be perceived as well in both Judaism and Islam, of course.  And, forever set truthfully contrary to the heretic Pope Francis, Islam and Christianity definitely, and Catholicism in particular, do not ever worship the same God.  This is the old heresy, by now, of syncretism that is encouraged openly by the evil Holy Pontiff himself.  But, let the main discussion still go back to the unfortunately deformed or warped Christianity of the Protestants.

The Hebraicism to be found in Puritanism, moreover, splendidly illustrates the reality of how paganism has become engrafted, so weightily, within the basic Protestant creed, though Christianity itself, as is often said, need not be just dismissed as “merely the universalizing of Judaism.”   The colonial Puritans of New England, which point can be researched independently, were so greatly fascinated by Judaism as to their expressing the public desire that Hebrew be so adopted as the new language of an independent America.  In fact, a great deal of their Puritan theology, unsurprisingly, was Old Testament oriented.

Lutheranism, furthermore, willingly adopted the largely paganistic, fatalistic attitude overtly found in Martin Luther’s bold irrational denial of the rational existence of free will. It was an odd christening of a retrograde pagan fatalism, placed under a pseudo-Christian disguise by Luther, to give it an updated but yet false credibility.  Thus, Catholics should pray for the Pope’s soul, concerning this co-celebration of Lutheranism, that he the avoid believing in such heretical beliefs as supposedly being merely variants of Catholicism, which is, of course, just absolutely untrue.

No doubt the so-called Reformation let loose upon the world various forms and types of paganism or, more properly, neopaganism, as was true, e. g., of the 16^th century Millenarian Anabaptists who took over Münster, Germany, along with their encouragements of sexual license (rape).

Calvinism, as another example, exemplifies readily the quid pro quo mentality, again, by stressing how God’s favor gets empirically indicated by how wealthy a man becomes, thus, so surely “proving” God’s anointment of him.  And, the world is still suffering from the evil consequences of the Reformation or Reformed Religion.  One comes fairly to perceive manifestly, upon both doing an intelligent analysis and objective investigation, how much paganism has, indeed, gotten retained in all of Islam, Judaism, and Protestantism, without any rational or reasonable doubt whatsoever, as to the truth of this assertion.

What needs to be properly understood is that these religions represent different but still quite highly complementary sorts of comprehension of the Supreme Being, with Islam, Protestantism, and Judaism having really much more in common than is popularly realized; Catholicism and its form of spirituality, in contrast, has a much more distinct and dissimilar comprehension of the nature of God, especially when compared to those other monotheistic faiths oriented toward naturalism (materiality).

In contradistinction, Catholicism, the truly needed fight for the salvation of souls, possesses a radically different theology, as G. K. Chesterton came to realize.   And, it takes much greater courage than ever to say this bold and liberating truth in a very heavily PC-dominated society and culture gone insane with, e. g., well over 300 genders – and still counting, though no doubt the combative Chesterton would have had a certainly glorious field day tearing to bits all or any multi-gender reams of absurd propaganda.

Spirituality as aimed toward religion with concern for proper theology ought to replace considerations favoring materiality, even, e. g., to the avoiding of having a hording mentality such as the sad need to accumulate objects, inclusive of such inconsequential things as books, as an example. Centuries ago, admittedly, they were relatively precious objects due alone, if for no other reason, to their simple scarcity.  Today, for too many people, they have become “burdens” of materiality that do hinder the development and needed progress toward spirituality, which, for Catholics, so means the desire for attaining holiness to lead truly spiritual lives.

The things of this earth are to be, in effect, held in complete contempt, including such things as books, compared to the requisite desire for God and the eternal life in Heaven, meaning the salvation of one’s immortal soul, not, e. g., the amassment of a great library for ego satisfaction. There are, in fact, people wrongly obsessed with possessing texts, tomes, and volumes.   Books, as with all such worldly objects, however, should only act as mere limited means, not ever ends in themselves, which, e. g., even such a dedicated bibliophile as Mortimer J. Adler would, in the end, have rationally agreed.

This passing world, moreover, when put into the blazing light of eternity is as nothing, for Christ is ever everything. In the end, whatever any Christians may have, do, or realize, in their entire lives, must then unquestionably be rightly oriented always toward Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.   Catholics are to willingly seek the true light of Christ in their lives.  Thus, any and all pagan or materialistic obsessions or excessive preoccupations, inclusive of any bibliomania, are to be always properly reviled and freely rejected for gaining better the needed love of God, spouses, family members, and neighbors.

What needs to be said?   Various forms ad degrees of paganism and modernist neopaganism inclusive prefer, to whatever extent, an indifferent God for different but, ultimately, related reasons.  People seek an easier way by blindly following age-old traditions as if symbolism and ritualism will magically yield the only path to salvation as with, e. g., Judaism, or linking their spiritual lives Hebraically to a book, as with Islam’s Koran or Protestantism’s Bible, notably or, perhaps, usually the King James’ version thereof.

But, that which needs to be rightly understood is that the true God is always an inconvenient Deity who really does not want human beings to “hide” themselves in any mere book, whether Torah, Koran, or Bible.   This retreat or regression to a wrongful form of religious primitivism, though still unfortunately unrecognized as such, is unworthy of any of those who profess a truly monotheist faith.  In contrast, practicing Catholics are to only live by, for and with Christ, not in the shadow of a mere text no matter how revered or old it may be.  The result is making the worship done greater than the God, which is, of course, idolatry.

What is being critically noted is too often not correctly perceived as to the truth of genuine faith that involves spiritual risk, especially the invited risk of acknowledging an inconvenient God who is so owed everything. One sees this, dramatically, as when Abraham really thought that he had to sacrifice Isaac.  Indicative of what is very significantly meant is how Jesus, after telling that His flesh and blood must be consumed, saw thousands literally walks away; but, He did not ever run after them to say that the hard doctrines could change to somehow or other suit their relative preferences.  A loving God could not do so because the Lord is Truth itself.

An inconvenient, troublesome, Messiah stood in their very midst and courageously and publicly spoke the real Truth of Being to them, as to the necessary metaphysical ontology involved for being a devout and practicing Catholic.  The choice is forever Christ or chaos.  There is, in fact, no real middle way, no middle ground.   One wonders how so many millions upon millions can remain perpetually blind to this realization, which has, unfortunately, been increasingly obscured by the horrid aftermath of the Second Vatican Council since about the late 1960s.

In firm reiteration, the strongly heathen elements properly noted and seen in Islam, Protestantism, and Judaism do not ever exist, however, within traditional (orthodox) Roman Catholicism, the needed fight for the salvation of souls. Of course, one sees that modernist Catholicism, admittedly, has been both increasingly and unfortunately paganized since the Second Vatican Council, which can be overtly seen, most recently, in Pope Francis’ supported, heretical, and so very morally perverse document: Amoris Laetitia.²

Uniqueness of Traditional Roman Catholicism

Any religion that features strong elements of paganism (aka materiality) exhibits what ought to be seen as the positing of an indifferent God or Gods, which, upon analysis, must ever be the case encountered. The God worshipped by Roman Catholics, in sharp contrast, is not at all indifferent to the reality of the Roman Catholic religion and the theology that developed that particular religion.   Jesus as the Messiah is, also, a readily personal God who is both the friend and brother of all Christians, not an unconcerned or absolutely above-it-all Deity set away far off in a distant universe; it is not the depiction of an 18^th century Deists’ version of a “Ghost of a God.”

All Christians, all Catholics, are to be immediately responsive to, loving of, and are, in fact, answerable instantaneously and eternally to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. There are no exceptions.   There are no qualifications to this straightforward belief, to this ever truthful faith.  All of Protestantism, as to its basis in Sola Scriptura, is, by definition, heretical and, as such, constitutes a false theology and an allied and necessarily untrue religion.  How is this to be better properly known as to the truthful and discoverable, the honest and verifiable, presentation and recognition of Divinity?

Though God the Father is recognized, the supposed “God” of Judaism and the God of the Catholic Faith are not, therefore, the same Deity; the Catholic doctrine of supersessionism states clearly that the New Testament is, indeed, the New Covenant because the Jews broke the Old Covenant by totally rejecting Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior.  Judaic religious culture is, by its very own nature, exclusivist, inner-directed, and most substantially opposed to any attempts at universalizing its religious sentiments, as it inherently lacks, for instance, any missionary spirit.  All this, thus, ought to be obvious as argumentation and historical facts, therefore, do exist forever in quite adamant support.

The High Priest Caiaphas had so publicly, deliberately, blasphemously, and sacrilegiously tore his sacred vestments consecrated to God from the bottom up; the veil of the Temple was ripped, by the power of God, from the top down to also publicly and plainly indicate that the Old Covenant was, indeed, then fully broken forever with the Jewish people.  It could not be otherwise.

Caiaphas, in the name of the entire Jewish people, definitely knew the profound seriousness of what he had done, meaning by so openly and irrevocably breaking faith with God, by tearing his highly sacred and blessed vestments. He, both undeniably and absolutely, had then completely repudiated the Old Covenant by thought, word, deed, and the rather obvious symbolism empirically involved.

His displayed enormous anger and excessive vitriol, moreover, gave affirmative truth to the then open acknowledgement that, in fact, Jesus was the Messiah who had been, nonetheless, rejected utterly. The High Priest of Israel had, in effect, spat at the face of God by angrily and contemptuously rejecting the Son of Man who came to earth to gloriously liberate men from the evil of sin, not Israel from the rule of the Romans, as most had thought.  The Jews, as to the majority of them, only wanted a violent warrior-prophet as the Messiah, not a personal God of love sent for the holy purpose of eternal salvation.

Although most believing Jews, usually the Reformed and Conservative Jews, do fully accept the Ten Commandments, the Orthodox Jews must believe in and accept 613 commandments as part of their faith; the Orthodox faithful, trying to stay true to the earliest origins of belief made impure by pagan elements, think that God can be fooled by human beings. How so?

To carry keys on the Sabbath, a long dangling key chain may actually be worn, meaning as if it were just a supposed unconscious “afterthought” that fits the (technical) prohibition of not doing or being ever involved with any work on the Sabbath. This is so that Yahweh is not to bother noticing how convenient it certainly was for those keys to, somehow or other, manage to get into a pocket that, thus, just had “merely happened” to be available by a coincidence.  Such is the true religious primitivism of paganism.

Thus, it becomes evident, without question, through the above reviews of the other religions given in this article, that the Jews, Moslems, and Protestants all do worship only a false god, not the true Lord God Almighty.  And, this greatly significant fact divides forever all such claimed monotheistic beliefs from the correct understanding of the demonstrated purity and righteousness of the overt standard of theology and religion so possessed by traditional (orthodox) Roman Catholicism.  Q. E. D.

Among monotheistic beliefs, an indifferent kind of Deity can best be seen in Islam in that the real actual meaning of “Allah” is not God but submission, meaning enslavement of one’s mind, thought, spirit and will to the absolutism of such an unapproachable Being.   The impression, directly or indirectly, is given that all of creation can be, at any time, an indifferent sort of concern or regard from this Absolute Being unconcerned about the doings of mere tangential creatures subordinate to the demanded enslavement of will and spirit, of the nature of Islam’s religious culture.

Judaism, connected to the God of the Old Covenant, has seen, in the past 20^th century, the response of millions of Jews becoming atheists or, at the least, near atheists by witnessing, in their minds, the lack of God’s expected compassion by allowing the Holocaust to occur.  They, meaning, thus, in their minds due to their religious culture, constituted viewing the horrid sight of an indifferent Deity who had (perhaps carelessly) so permitted such an enormous tragedy to be imposed upon some six million or so Jewish people.

What needs to be beheld here, though not often recognized as such, is also how Protestantism has wrongly constructed for itself the supposed nature of an uninterested or, apparently, dispassionate Supreme Being, which is the direct opposite of Catholicism, of course.

And, this forever very critical difference, relating to divergent religious cultures and their implications and even more significant ramifications, needs to be so appropriately understood. Luther, by willfully asserting there being the very lack of any free will, and Calvin, by then mandating in his mind absolute predestination, had raised up a rather disquieting kind of God who can, haphazardly or casually, make men into earthly playthings no more of concern as if they were, in effect, mere pin ball objects.

This all quite reasonably suggests that anyone, now consciously yet remaining a convinced Protestant, Moslem or Jew, should have his head examined, meaning as to if such a God is worth believing in with these quite terrible and imputed attributes. Why?  Only an indifferent God could satisfy the debased epistemology and corrupted ontology, required by such a theology, mandating conclusions geared to nominalism in reasoning.  It would be so highly funny, if it was not, in fact, so very irredeemably sad, especially regarding that German firebrand with his 95 Theses.³

It takes a rather profound comprehension, being further on as to requisite thought, to critically perceive the many terrible consequences of a decadent spirituality that results naturally from forms of idolatry sanctioned, by accepting an ingrained and hardened nominalism in cognition. How may this be clearly known and rightly recognized?   Decadence, as C. E. M. Joad, had correctly defined it, is the loss of the object.

Decadent spirituality becomes the very definition of the loss of the proper object in terms of correctly recognizing what ought to be the truth about the Godhead being so worshiped, celebrated, honored, recognized, proclaimed, etc.

Christ publicly denounced the Pharisees and Scribes for making the worship greater than God, which is idolatry, which, in its own turn, then became Judaism itself inverted. Spiritual decadence has made the vast majority of Jewish people into basic secularists whose earthly god, as is seen easily in America, has become idolatrous Leftist politics; the minority of truly religious Jews do knowingly reject all forms of secular salvation.

The predominant majority chose the inverted Messianism of radical politics. Moslems, as yet another illustration, favoring iconoclasm produce their own version of idolatry, though in an inverted way, by scorning images while man himself has been, in fact, made in the image of God.  ISIS, now, exists as a truly genuine expression of resurgent and authentic Islam as these evil terrorists do go about willfully destroying many ancient pagan temples and Christian churches, in widely observed open support of their iconoclastic viewpoint.

Protestants, manifesting their own sort of spiritual decadence, have made the ever pervasive idolatry of Sola Scriptura into their earthly god that must be obeyed, regardless of the high cost to theological and religious truth.  Decadent spirituality, as ought to be obvious by now, necessarily then both corrupts and resultantly deforms any attempted creation of a theology that must, logically, come to harshly ruin any such cognate religion proclaimed and adhered to by the believers.  How may this be made known?

For the three principles relating to Catholicism, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi are, axiomatically, so related logically to all theologies that produce religions.  There is an inevitability to all this discussion and philosophizing, regarding theology and any resultant religion, as is particularly as pertaining to a religious culture.  And, it is rather plain that the contemporary world aggressively challenges any such culture by often crudely pitting the entitlement mentality against spiritual gratitude.⁴

What is, therefore, the important consideration being now so vigorously proposed?   This means that idolatry, whether inverted or otherwise, corrupts the religion that reflects back upon the failures of the theology in question to, then, offer a better appreciation and understanding of man’s need for God, the manner of worship, and theological and religious truth inclusive.

Thus, one can come to better see that Islam, Judaism, and Protestantism, meaning their being all false religions, do then logically share certain definitive nominalist affinities that are, in fact, always to be found completely lacking in (orthodox) Roman Catholicism. This is a most significant point to clearly remember, furthermore, and reflects back insightfully to many earlier thoughts and ideas mentioned both analytically and positively.

Affirmative knowledge concerning the attributes about God can be gained, though He Himself will forever remain inscrutable and ineffable, by definition, in terms of the infinity of the reality involved. From ancient times, Catholic thinkers knew fundamental truth as to the Supreme Being, as is noted by St. Augustine, in his De Natura Boni, when he confidently says, “”God alone is immutable; and whatever things He has made, being from nothing, are mutable.”

Regarding the reality confronted, St. John of Damascus, in his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, related: “For He does not belong to the class of existing things: not that He has no existence, but that he is above all existing things, nay, even above existence itself.”

As St. Thomas Aquinas, in his surely impressive Summa Theologica, there clearly states, “God alone is completely immutable; for that reason true and proper eternity is His alone.”  He, further, adds in his discussion of De Divinis Nominibus, that, “To realize that God is far beyond anything we think, that is the mind’s achievement.”  However, none of this is ever meant, by Catholic thinkers, to be indicative of an indifferent Godhead presiding either forever within or beyond the mere universe experienced by mortal creatures.  Moreover, Catholic Christology completely forbids this notion, as would be correctly affirmed by the Catechism of the Council of Trent.

Realization of this understanding of a personal God was well expressed by Msgr. Robert H. Benson, in his Christ in the Church, when he says that, “If God be Truth, and God be Love, is it not absolutely inevitable that the love of God should bring the truth of God down to the level of the very simplest.” One sees here factually that Catholicism is truly an exoteric, not esoteric, religion supported firmly by a suitable theology, oriented toward urging the salvation of human beings, by proving the means for this through the Church and its cognate sacraments.  For it is, also, known that extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.

Benson further adds to the important thinking involved when, in his The Religion of the Plain Man, one notably there reads: “It was the man in the street who understood our Lord, and the doctor of the law who was perplexed and offended.”  Catholicism, way before the rise of Protestantism as the so-called Reformed Religion, knew that God through Jesus had made Christ immediately accessible and a friend and brother of common men, not just an object, e. g., for religious elites alone.

In critical contrast, Islam, Judaism, and to the extent that the absurd overconcentration upon the Bible as if it were the Christian Torah that seeks to re-Judaize the Protestant religion, all three of these faiths do posit God as the absolute Other, as with, e. g., Martin Buber’s existentialist speculations grinding on toward abstractionization. And, resultantly, the more that false notion of “the wholly Other” that gets expressed, the more indifferent the Divinity is then made to seem or appear to those who may think of themselves as being religious people.

Thus, with traditional Catholicism, the Supreme Being gets not wrongly abstracted into just being the Other; He is, forever, truly and without any question Jesus the Christ, the Son of Man, the Son of God, who suffered and died on the Cross; it is fairly hard to think of a much more personal act, moreover, and to the extremely important point being made concretely here, than being willingly crucified, sacrificed, because of His great love for mankind. Such a compassionate and loving Deity is hardly indifferent.

Against the aforementioned “Jewishness” of Islam, Judaism, and Protestantism, the opposed knowledge of a personal God is defended explicitly by Roman Catholicism; and, among many others, one could then easily give St. Francis of Assisi as a reference for this discussion of Catholic truth. The Canticle of the Sun is not just a religious song once composed by Saint Francis, for it surely is an affirmation of his personal theology of intimacy in having a private or intimate relationship with God, which, thus, did not arise as a supposed Protestant idea, as in invoking, e. g., one’s personal Lord and Savior as Jesus.

This is actually because Jesus is not to be thought of as the abstract Other; He is ever the living Christ, the reality of the redeeming Lord and Savior, the Messiah of the universe, both immediately considered and, of course, always forever.

As Blaise Pascal had correctly well noted, in his Pensées, “The Christian’s God is not a God Who is simply author of mathematical truths and of the order of the elements; that is the lot of the heathen and of the Epicureans. He is not merely a God Who employs His providence upon the life and wellbeing of men, in order to bestow on His worshippers a long and prosperous life; that is the heritage of the Jews.” He adds these words, later in the same paragraph, concerning the true God in that the Lord “is a God of love and consolation …”

But, the highly thoughtful and religiously perceptive St. Francis de Sales, in his Spiritual Conferences, so interestingly enlarges upon the theme of Divine love in that, “If God had not created man He would still indeed have been perfect in goodness, but He would not have been actually merciful, since mercy can only be exercised toward the miserable.” Added to all this is the Mystery of Deity, besides the Mystery of Evil and  the Mystery of Good.  As to fallen mortal creatures in an also fallen world, how may this be made better known to a church humanly staffed by, of, and for miserable earthly sinners all standing before a righteous and Holy God?

An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine by Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman gives the correct understanding and answer of how Catholicism works; this is not by the supposed modernist evolution of dogmas approach, but by describing the proper way Catholic teaching has become more thorough and unequivocal over the centuries, while the later enunciations of any fundamental Catholic doctrine, being orthodox, remain theologically then consistent with the earlier basic declarations; this represents, of course, the holy desire for maintaining a much wanted orthodoxy and truth for better informing Catholicism, the universal faith.

On the other hand, what often sadly exists as Catholic “ecumenism” acts as a deceitful means of hiding Catholic truth, both from believers and nonbeliever alike, in the unutterably vile and reprehensible effort to be, supposedly, more inclusive in today’s world. Such obnoxious “inclusivity” fully deserves unreserved condemnation, however, not praise; it is a true horror that should always be avoided, not sophistically advocated in any possible way, shape, or form whatsoever, contrary to the terrible desires of Pope Francis.

Thus, Pope Francis’ evil and heretical co-celebration of the harmful Lutheran Revolt, set against Holy Mother Church and (what had once been) Christendom itself, ought ever to be so absolutely rejected, spurned, and reviled without any doubt whatsoever. One ought to intelligently and theologically know that this incredible and despicable happening is, therefore, definitely not just a merely slight matter of no lasting importance or significant consequence.  It so clearly violates the doctrinal understanding of Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and its vile irregularities could not be logically or reasonably sustained according to Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma.

This is a most grave and heretical profanation of an excessive magnitude and scale that so demonically sanctions sacrilege that should not, ought not, to be ever tolerated.   It is, so right manifestly, a truly enormous abomination and contemptuous blasphemy before God; it is blatant idolatry.  The Pope and any and all Catholic prelates and laity involved, moreover, should be openly and thoroughly condemned in the strongest terms imaginable and possible.⁵

In any event, this article’s larger discourse about theological epistemology should have demonstrated why, given the proper logic of Catholicism as being the only true faith, then all other religions are, by definition, only forms of abhorrent idolatry, which ought to be then shunned or avoided totally.   Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus.

Furthermore, totally unlike paganism, there is no bargaining, no quid pro quo conditions, found with a Christocentric Catholicism in interactions with the one true God who is to be worshipped and loved unconditionally, as a plain fact of metaphysical reality. Love and justice, endless honor and praise, are absolutely due to the Lord God Almighty, nothing is owed to humanity by the Supreme Being, meaning the cause of all being, of all existence in the entire universe and beyond that matter as well.   One learns even from the ancient pagan Plato, without question, that, “God is the measure of all things.”

Moreover, even if human beings supposedly received totally nothing in return, including the possibility of salvation, the Divinity would still be quite axiomatically owed all love, justice, honor, praise, and glory forever and ever, as, also, St. Thomas Aquinas would have fully agreed. All of Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium, also, confirms the truth of the primacy of God, not the assumed supremacy of Man.

In addition to all that has been said, Catholicism rightly rejects the fallacious “two truths theory” that alleges something can be true in religion but false in science or vice versa. This absurdly posits the totally erroneous notion of an antagonism that is often supposed to exist between science and religion, which is, in fact, always utter nonsense.  As Christopher Dawson knew, this is a central understanding of all genuine Catholic culture.  When each is correctly understood to have its own proper sphere of right expertise neither confronts nor contradicts, neither confutes nor confounds, the other.

One ought to know that any physical or natural science, e. g., that attempts to ever theologize is, by definition, simply illegitimate, not really the practice of true science. As St. Thomas Aquinas truthfully taught, moreover, there can be no conflict between faith and reason when each is properly understood.

Conclusion

While saying that Jesus is the Christ has intellectual consequences, equally, the statement asserting that there is only One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith represented by Catholicism must, therefore, also have its cognitive consequences, not just simply religious or theological. By ever rejecting strongly any decadent spirituality, furthermore, a supportive liturgy, doxology, soteriology, eschatology, Christology, etc. comes to support adamantly the honest truth of what gets asseverated theologically and religiously.

It could not rationally be otherwise. The same goes for the assertion that Allah is the one true God and Mohammad is his Prophet, for there have been, most certainly, many theological and religious results, of course.  Nonetheless, mere declaration is not proof of anything nor is the relative strength or lack thereof of any believer’s faith, whether with or without any quid pro quo style paganism being present.⁶ In addition, modernity’s too often overlooked or denied significant contribution of myth, magic, and superstition has only greatly aggravated and disoriented the condition of the postmodern world, not improved it.⁷

The mere idolatrous faith of a Jew, Muslim, or Protestant is, however, set not in question as to, for instance, all possible axiological, epistemological, or ontological realities; the verifiable truth of the Catholic theology and allied religion is, though, not definitely and necessarily held seriously in question, until and if a (supposed) contrary veracity can be established beyond disproof. For what is proven is  according to the Trinitarian dogma and, thus, to be done In nómine Pátris et Fílii et Spíritus Sáncti. Amen.

What can be surely known of the advanced theological epistemology developed by the Church Fathers, Patriarchs, Scholastics, Confessors, Doctors, and others, however, truly upholds the openly presented understanding and comprehension of God that has been articulated and defended as being consistently true. Furthermore, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman would, therefore, have completely agreed, for Catholicism concurs with right reason, common sense, and, as Midgely and Rommen would have fully assented, with Natural Law as well.

Among numerous other signs and indications, attendant proofs and clues, the saints and martyrs of Sancta Mater Ecclesia do freely attest to the truth of the Faith without any question, for all are true valid parts of the known, accessible, and authentic Catholic culture that has been here, in fact, confidently expatiated and intellectually secured as such.

 

Athanasius contra mundum!

 

Select Bibliography

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.

Catechism of the Council of Trent.

B. F. Midgley, The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations

Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma.

Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law

 

Notes

1. This article, and others written by the same author, has been attempting to try, however feebly and desperately, to clearly articulate and reconstitute an authentic Roman Catholic religious culture; this is by reminding Catholics, as forcefully as is possible in mere print, of the main reality of what used to be basically understood and comprehended as to the theological and religious sensitivities and proclivities, sympathies and inclinations, of orthodox Catholicism, meaning especially since Vatican Council II. It would help the reader to read what the great Catholic historian (and convert) Christopher Dawson had prominently written about the great importance of authentic Catholic religious culture and the need to defend it.
2. https://callthepatriot.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/discerning-the-higher-magisterium/
3. One can, relatedly, cite Thomas P. Neill’s Makers of the Modern Mind, especially his quite revealing chapter on Martin Luther.
4. https://callthepatriot.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/catholicism-and-the-moral-struggle-of-contemporary-life-gratitude-versus-entitlement/
5. https://callthepatriot.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/heretic-pope-francis-vaticans-embrace-of-lutheran-quincentennial-celebration/
6. This article’s consideration of how one may objectively judge the different merits or failures of monotheistic belief systems has not meant to slight the reality of the affects, definite influences, of history upon religions. Catholicism is, of course, an assuredly historical religion; Christ was born, died, and resurrected all within historical time, not outside of it.  Furthermore, one factor, among a number, that contributed to the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was, surely, the humanizing process of Hellenization.

Hellenization can be defined as the spread of the ideas and ideals of the ancient Greeks, especially after the conquests of Alexander the Great.   Inferior and cruder societies and cultures, over time and through increased interaction as an osmosis, tended to yield more and more to these quite humanizing Greek attitudes and aspirations, sometimes for better or worse, depending upon a wide variety of historical situations and circumstances, of course.

In general, one could fairly say that the splendid humanization of thought brought culture into a more receptive civilization that, in intent, sought to thoughtfully, philosophically, encompass all of mankind within the greater koinos kosmos (a shared world, common humanity), a truly ecumenical, meaning universal, world for all peoples.

In St. John the Evangelist’s Gospel, the Logos, the Word, was freely adopted to mean Jesus Christ, which is a prominent example of how a definite part of Greek philosophy got itself transmuted into Catholic theology.  Notably, the entire Septuagint, in the 3^rd century BC, was a translation of the Old Testament that had, of course, been then written entirely in Greek.  Because it was much too indicative of the true signs of the Messiah, the Jews, only after the rise of Christianity, then rejected it suspiciously as being a supposed poor translation from the Hebrew.

If it confirmed Christianity, ergo, it just then had to be wrong!   The nasty “logic” of sheer bigotry, by definition, always thinks it’s so totally impeccable and should not be ever questioned.

The elders of the synagogues made sure that the Hebrew scribes, especially after the Diaspora, rewrote selected parts to help skillfully exclude any references to the Savior that could in any way be attributed directly to Jesus Christ.   That is why only expurgated versions or editions of the Jewish Torah now exist today, which considerably help to obscure or deny that Jesus is the Christ; and, this obscurantist belief system is, proudly, called Judaism, for Hellenization, after all, had its limits.

To really say more about the impact of Hellenization would only be just redundant, beyond any real need. One can reasonably conclude, therefore, by saying that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam had all benefited substantially by the past process of Hellenization since few, if any, religions are truly freed of historical reality.  The main flaw of such Hellenism is, of course, the anthropocentricism to be found hidden at the heart of all paganism, however disguised, since it could not be otherwise.

7.  https://callthepatriot.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/myth-magic-islamic-state-and-roman-catholicisms-greatness/