As a Traditional Anglican Catholic Christian, What do I Believe?

The Theotokos of Vladimir, one of the most venerated of Orthodox Christian icons of the Virgin Mary. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The American philosopher William James, in his classic book, The Varieties of Religious Experience,  pointed out that a belief has to be a “live option” for a person in order for that person to seriously consider that belief. Other beliefs are closed options–and everyone, whether or not they are willing to admit it, have closed some options to serious consideration. As a traditional Anglican Christian, a member of the Anglican Catholic Church, there are certain beliefs I have about the nature of reality that close off other beliefs:

I believe in one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one substances. He is a personal God, both transcendent of the universe and immanent in it, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, all-loving. He is the personal ground of all existence and the source of all value.

I believe that God created the universe and thus that the universe is contingent.These two beliefs rule out pantheism. I will not consider it as a live option–period. I am open to versions of panentheism that preserve Christian orthodoxy if such could be found.

I believe that Jesus Christ is fully God, fully man, “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substances (homoousias) with the Father.” Jesus is qualitative different from the Buddha and the great Hindu teachers. Although non-Christian religions can and do contain truth and Christians can learn from them, ultimately Christianity has the fullness of the truth. Although non-Christians can be saved, everyone who is saved is saved through Jesus Christ.

I believe that Jesus came to earth as “very God of very God,” yet fully human as well. I believe that he taught in Palestine in the 30s of the so-called “Common Era,” that he was crucified, died, and was buried, and “on the third day rose again.” That is, I believe Jesus’ body was really dead, cold, dead by any standard, and had been dead for three days–then he was raised from the dead–literally. No Bultmann or Tillich or Crosson game playing allowed. I believe the literal bodily resurrection of Christ.

I believe that Jesus “ascended into Heaven,” though I do not fully understand what that means. I accept it through faith. He remains fully man and fully God, and is literally present in the Eucharist (the Mass or the Lord’s Supper) in both His human and divine natures. This takes place in a church in the apostolic succession that holds to catholic and orthodox teachings. What God does with other churches’ Eucharists is up to God, but His real presence is guaranteed in the Catholic Church (Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, some Old Catholic groups, and the Anglican Catholic Church and some continuing Anglican groups).

I believe that we are born with the capacity to sin, a capacity that will inevitably be actualized once someone is of the age of accountability (which will vary from person to person). “Original sin,” the capacity to sin, is a reasonable concept. “Original Guilt,” Augustine, Luther, and Calvin’s idea, is not.

I belief in salvation through Christ that is normally given at the point of baptism.

I believe that one day we will be raised in physical, bodily form, from the dead–but with glorified bodies, physical bodies under the complete control of the spirit.

I believe in Purgatory as a place of continued sanctification after death, in Heaven as an actual place of eternal life in the presence of God, and in Hell as a possibility, praying that if possible God might save everyone, but realizing this may not happen.

I believe in the traditional moral teachings of the Catholic Church, including:

The duty to perform corporeal works of mercy.

The sinfulness of hatred, wrath, jealousy, and envy.

The sinfulness of adultery and of premarital sex.

The sinfulness of abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

The sinfulness of practicing homosexual activity.

The sinfulness of most wars.

The sinfulness of ALL torture.

The need to hate sin for its destructive power but still loving the sinner.

I am a Christian, certainly not a good one, whatever that means. Lord knows I have violated some of the Ten Commandments, but that is where God’s grace comes in. Grace is not a totally private matter but is mediated through the Catholic Church; Protestants may receive grace as well because their church is imperfectly in fellowship with the Catholic Church and retains the sacrament of baptism. If anyone asks why I try to put other systems of belief in a Christian framework, it is because I think there is something to those beliefs, and I am trying to find a niche for them in Christian orthodoxy. Any belief that is not able to be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church is a false belief, period. Am I closed-minded to some options? You betcha. So is any reader of this blog.

Voting Straight Republican in Academia

English: A female African Bush Elephant raises her trunk as a warning sign in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

President Obama and Small Businesses

Halloween

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Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays, and I refuse to allow Fundamentalist Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, to spoil it for me. It is because of that that I am writing my second post on this topic.  I am quite aware that October 31 is the eve of All Saints Day. Why should that face forbid Halloween parties and trick-or-treating? Some Fundamentalists behave as if Halloween is the doorway to the Satan‘s closet. They claim that the holiday began in devil worship; therefore, those who celebrate Halloween today are celebrating a Satanic holiday. Now this reasoning is as fluffy as the neural structure of many Fundamentalist Christians because it is a classic case of a genetic fallacy. It is not legitimate to argue from the origin of a practice that the practice has the same meaning today. The same reasoning applies to holidays. Even if Halloween began with Satanic worship (which is historically false anyway), it would not follow that trick-or-treaters are engaged in Satanic worship today. What is the harm in dressing up like monsters and skeletons and presidents and going out to ask people for candy? I enjoy the ambiance of Halloween, the ghost stories, the horror movies and books that come out this time of year. I enjoy giving candy to trick-or-treaters who drop by my house (as long as they don’t try to double-dip). I do not own a Satanic altar on the side, nor do I use one owned by someone else.

Halloween has its roots in a Celtic fall festival associated with nature religion. The pre-Christian Celts were “pagan,” but paganism is not the same thing as Satanism, the early church fathers notwithstanding. True, from a Christian point of view, nature religion confuses the creature with the creator, but it does except the existence of some kind of transcendent and it recognizes the awe people sometimes fell in a beautiful or sublime natural setting. As C. S. Lewis remarked, there is a dignity to high paganism even if its theological premises are flawed and/or incomplete. Paganism has nothing to do with the worship of evil demons, at least in its classic forms. Even if the Druids had a fall festival that marks the roots of contemporary Halloween celebrations, it does not follow that that is what Halloween means today. Even if there are contemporary Druids who engage in pagan rituals on Halloween–and there are–this does not mean that a child saying “trick-or-treat” is a pagan practice. Neither are similar holidays, such as the Day of the Dead in Mexico, which is practiced by Roman Catholic Christians.

Children should take proper safety precautions–if they do, then I say, “Go ahead and have fun!” If a Fundamentalist Christian objects, that is that individual’s right under the law, even if his case were weak. The Fundamentalist needs to be careful in judging others and calling them pagans or Satanists without adequate evidence. Their zeal can move them to the borders of slandering the children who are only out having fun. My word to the Fundamentalists about Halloween is to “lighten up!”

Does Thomism Really Avoid the Lockean Epistemological Gap between Idea and Thing?

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John Locke thought of himself as a realist (not in the Medieval sense of accepting the reality of universals, but in the modern sense of believing in a mind-independent world). Yet it seems that his philosophy leaves no room for any knowledge of that alleged world, as Berkeley and Hume pointed out. Locke believed that all knowledge comes by means of sense experience (thus he is an empiricist, as opposed to being a rationalist such as Descartes–it is ironic that in his hierarchical classification of knowledge Locke lists intuitive knowledge as first, demonstrative knowledge as second, and sensory knowledge as the lowest form of knowledge, barely to be called knowledge). Locke believes that knowledge arises by means of ideas in the mind. Whether these ideas are images or something else remains a subject of debate among Lockean scholars. In any case, Locke believes that that a quality is the power to produce an idea in the mind. Primary qualities are actually in the thing-in-itself, and our ideas of primary qualities are isomorphic with the actual structure of the physical substance we perceive. Primary qualities are measurable, and include size, shape, and mass. Secondary qualities are not in the thing itself; our ideas of secondary qualities are not isomorphic with the actual structure of the material substance. However, the primary qualities interact with human sensory organs and with the human brain to produce ideas of particular colors, odors, sounds, and tastes. Thus, secondary qualities have a partial basis in the thing-in-itself despite the lack of isomorphism between idea and thing.

The classic problem with this view is that Locke claims that we are only aware of our own ideas. We do not have any direct access to the material substance, to the thing-in-itself. In fact, substance is just that which underlies the qualities, a “something-I-know-not-what.” But if we lack access to the thing-in-itself, there is no way to compare our ideas to the actual object allegedly causing those ideas to determine which qualities are primary and which ones are secondary. Access to knowledge of extramental reality seems impossible, and a trip down the phenomenalist brick road of Berkeley, Hume, and the sense data theorists of the early twentieth century. Such an idealistic journey is not what Locke wanted to make. Idealism has serious difficulties; the source of the ideas (our own minds? the mind of God) remains a mystery, and the orderly nature of the phenomena we experience is left unexplained unless a person takes the Berkeleian route of positing God to explain natural laws. Direct realism is another option; the label of “naive realism” is a pejorative and is a blatant attempt to beg the question regarding the truth or falsity of direct realism. As for the straw men critics of direct realism try to knock down, no direct realist has denied the possibility of illusion. It is Berkeley and Hume’s phenomenalism that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality except by taking Hume’s route of more vivid ideas (which he calls impressions) being the most “real.”

Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas were both direct realists. Aquinas accepted the idea that knowledge comes through the “phantasm,” or sensory image, from which the mind extracts the intelligible content from a material substance. Thomists today often say that the difference from Locke’s view is that Locke believed we have access to ideas, not the thing in itself–it is the ideas that we know. In contrast, Aquinas believes that it is through the phantasm that a person gains some knowledge, albeit limited, of the thing-in-itself. But does this really avoid Locke’s problem or does it evade it by a kind of word game?

After reading more of how contemporary Thomists deal with the epistemological gap, I must back away from my earlier position that Thomism does not avoid an epistemological gap between mind and thing. Contemporary Thomists believe that humans have evolved as part of their environment, not as creatures separate from their environment. Even thought knowledge is of “external” things, there is a communication of intelligible content from object to subject–agent causation is not limited to human agents. The phantasm contains the information that human beings extract to help them to live in the environment in which they are embedded, to the point that the person becomes “intentionally one” with the thing-in-itself. While Duns Scotus posited intuitive knowledge of an object as existing in addition to a rather traditional Aristotelian account of knowledge, I am not sure that such an intuitive knowledge is necessary for human beings to get by in the world. If such intuitive knowledge exists (perhaps in the form of psi), such knowledge could speed up our apprehension of a thing and determine whether or not it is dangerous. But if the mind is not considered a container, but as one way of an organism’s acting in the world, that seems to eliminate the Lockean gap between idea and thing. The phantasm becomes that “by which” a person apprehends some aspects of the being of a thing.

 

Why Library Sales Have Such Good Choices in Books

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I love library sales. Lately, I love them even more. The choices in books, especially the classics of Western literature, are incredible. Libraries are discarding good books so they can make room for those from a multicultural perspective. With all the officially accepted minority groups (African Americans, Arabs [Muslim Arabs, not Christian Arabs], Latinos, women [feminists only], homosexuals [only when they write on gay culture]), libraries are hard-pressed to include all these perspectives without discarding a large number of books. The books that suffer most are those that reflect the great tradition of Western Culture from its ancient roots in Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Jewish and Christian thought to present day writers who focus on Western culture. Thus, poorly written, highly politicized books from a predominately Marxist perspective (Marx through the lens of Marcuse) replace literary classics, science books, and any other work that does not reflect a so-called “minority viewpoint.” For traditionalists, this situation provides a great opportunity. We can go to library sales, buy the fine books they have, and be enriched by the treasures of Western Culture. Those individuals who only read politicized pseud0-scholarly pablum will become dumber than ever. The bad thing about this situation is that people who visit libraries are exposed to intellectual left-wing multiculturalist ideology rather than to good, or even average, literature and scholarship. The course libraries and educational institutions have taken will leave the common person isolated from Western Culture unless he knows the Internet provides excellent options for reading great classic works. For more recent material, say, in popular science, the common person will have to look elsewhere than a library if he wants a good selection of books. Libraries today, especially academic libraries, are becoming more ideologically driven as library schools take over the values of multiculturalism, moral and epistemological relativism, and a lack of respect for Western civilization. Those of us who take advantage of the intellectual void in some libraries should buy wisely, read the books, and use their insights to live a better life–and to teach others the value of works that are classics, of informational guides in science–of any work that can increase knowledge and encourage wisdom, the wisdom that helps a person to develop good moral virtues. Hopefully students who miss good books in the library will go online to see which books are available. Years from now, what is left of Western Civilization might be preserved by some customer at a library sale.

The Failure of the Welfare/Warfare State

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In the future the United States will not be the country it once was–thank God. The U.S. will not have the money to keep its empire, and like all empires, it will lose its client states such as Iraq and Afghanistan. If we’re lucky, U.S. troops will also be withdrawn from South Korea and from Europe. The utopian Wilsonian idea that the United States has the duty to “spread democracy to the world” will hopefully be laid to rest. The military-industrial complex, with its drain on resources and its support for continual warfare may fade away, hopefully to engage in manufacturing more than instruments used to kill other human beings.

Even if the empire falls, the money saved will not be nearly enough to balance the budget or stop high deficits. The welfare state, developed during the massive New Deal programs designed to ease the Depression (whether they did or whether they prolonged the Depression is a matter of legitimate debate), and vastly expanded under Lyndon Johnson, will have to make deep cuts in its programs. It may be too late to avoid social chaos. Years of making people dependent on the government have contributed to large numbers of individuals who take advantage of the system and do not attempt to get a job. Those who do try to work quickly realize that welfare leaves their families better off than a job–even a job that pays significantly more than minimum wage. Although there are many exceptions, there are also many people in the underclass whose behavior is morally lacking. Promiscuity, drug use, drug dealing, a failure of fathers to care for children–all are the products of the welfare state, moral relativism, the decline of the family, and the decline of religion. If the federal welfare state is dismantled, there may be social chaos for a while, but hopefully the dismantling would force people out of the dependence on government mindset and encourage them to go to school, go to work, and contribute to the American economy, both monetarily and in the old sense of the word “economics,” oikomounia, the social economy that is part of every household. When the household is run well, this helps the overall economy by providing productive workers to the workforce, and it helps the social and political economy by providing virtuous people to contribute to society’s good.

There are no guarantees. But the United States may default on its debt if current spending levels are not radically lowered That could lead to a Depression and to violence in the streets. A firm hand in dealing with phenomena such as flash mobs should restore a measure of social order, although it will take decades to expunge the harm of the New Deal and of The Great Society. These systems have helped undermine the basis on which republican government can be run. People who demand “bread and circuses” from the government seldom make good citizens.

Welfare is a necessity is some cases when there is no family or friends to help someone who is having a difficult economic time. Its allocation by government should remain, at the broadest, at the state level. The United States has become too large to effectively govern, and it may be in the future that at least some of the states will be independent or have more limited autonomy from the federal government. Local resources can be used to help those locally in need. Then the United States should have policies that encourage Americans to manufacture items in this country. If more manufacturing comes, this would ease the burden on society by giving jobs to those previously were not able to find work.

Entitlements of every kind must be cut. The U.S. has no other choice. Pork barrel projects must cease. If the president refuses to have fiscal discipline due to his support of the welfare/warfare state, someone should point this out. Cursing out the Tea Party, as Maxine Waters did, reveals her ignorance of economics–that the United States must get its fiscal house in order, balance the budget, and use any surplus to help to pay the national debt. If fiscal responsibility does not happen, any recognizable U. S. may quickly succumb to the resulting economic chaos.

 

 

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Airlines’ Treatment of Passengers

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The first of my flights left a half-hour late, but arrived in the connecting city only two minutes late. Great, it won’t be a problem reaching my gate for the next flight–so I thought. The plane remained on the tarmac for almost thirty minutes before a gate was available, and it took another ten minutes for the jetway to pull up and for the doors to open. Ten minutes remained to make it to the gate for the final flight. Of course I was at the far end of one terminal with two more terminals to go. I arrived two minutes after the flight time. The agent informed me that the flight had closed eight minutes early to make sure it took off on time. The next two flights were full. I was on standby for the next flight, and after seeing someone else in the chain of employees, a flight after that was guaranteed. Everyone showed up for the standby flight–how many times does that happen. So I waited for the 5:55. It was late, and didn’t leave until 8:20 p.m. I arrived at my destination city at 11 pm, got a cab to the hotel, and finally put my things in the room. By then I was so hyper I needed a drink at the bar. Then I still couldn’t get to sleep until after 2:30 a.m., in plenty of time to get up bright and early to attend an 8 am session at the conference–riggghhht….

Airlines have been involved in some well-publicized incidents recently in which planes stayed on the tarmac for two to three hours with no bathrooms available and with the plane getting hot inside. Obviously the passengers were hot and were suffering from other…discomforts. This has lead to a movement for passengers’ rights, since when these things happen the passenger is powerless and is at the mercy of the airline.

I have never cared for rights language; even the theory of natural rights is based on an overly individualistic view of human nature based on the myth of the autonomous, isolated individual. Natural law seems more reasonable to me. Yet the airlines are still behaving in a morally reprehensible way, not because of a violation of abstract “rights,” but because they are treating human persons as mere means to profit and not as people who should, by their very nature, be treated with respect. This may sound like a Kantian point, but the idea of human dignity is present in the old natural law tradition stemming from the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas. People are not mere cogs in the machine and should not be treated as mere means to profit. “They’ve paid their plane fare, so it doesn’t matter if they get too hot, have to go to the bathroom when there is no bathroom available, and miss their connecting flights. People who were supposed to make business presentations might miss their meeting time. Academics scheduled to give a paper might miss their session (this happened to me three years ago; thankfully I arrived this time at my destination two days before my presentation). Even worse, some people may miss a loved one’s funeral or the last breath of a loved one. When airline executives consider people in the abstract, they seem to have no feelings about the real people who are hurt by their policies.

What is the answer? More federal regulation? Generally such regulation does more harm than good, however well-meaning it may be. However, the large number of flights at the busiest airports does create a safety concern, and safety can be regulated by the FAA. My own thoughts on this matter is that from the very beginning of training of future business leaders, there should be an emphasis on character development. Obviously if someone has already lost his virtues, this will do no good. But in people who have a conscience, in-class exercises on empathy using real cases may educate students’ moral imagination so that they can put themselves into the shoes of other people. Businesses, including airlines, must be careful to ensure virtuous leadership. If they do not, then the airlines may accrue further federal reglulation whether or not airline executives want it.

Criminal Justice Professionals vs. “Pure Academicians”

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Criminal justice professionals, such as police officers, corrections officers, crime scene investigators, attorneys, and judges have a variety of political opinions ranging from left to right. This is to be expected, since professionals in any field hold diverse ideas. But most professionals in criminal justice are constrained by the practicalities of their chosen field to avoid extreme positions. Their focus is on what works in everyday life, at a practical, concrete level.

Academics live in a much more sheltered environment. Many, though not all, academics who teach criminal justice lack practical experience as criminal justice professionals. As such, they can “afford” to be more radical in their political views because their views are not necessarily tested in a real-world setting. It is perfectly acceptable to be naive about evil in human nature if one is standing before a classroom or sitting in a room with other academics.

Recently I attended a criminal justice academic conference–not one of the national ones, but local. There were almost no criminal justice professionals in the audience, as one might expect–the audience was composed almost solely of academicians. There was one police officer who presented an excellent paper on police leadership as well as some interesting student papers. The academicians were focused, sadly, on the usual mumb0-jumbo quasi-Marxist theories of identity politics so popular in colleges and universities today. Instead of focusing on personal responsibility, the papers focused on social oppression as the cause of crime, and on race, class, and gender being the only determinants of personal identity and behavior. “Diversity” was interpreted in the narrow sense of gender and race, now and then with economic status interspersed. A true diversity of ideas (or even a true cultural diversity) was not celebrated–any deviation from the radical left wing determinism by race, class, and gender was considered unacceptable–a sign of racism, classism, or sexism.

The problem with such theories is that the ignore the fact that all human beings have freedom and dignity–and freedom includes the freedom to make wrong moral (and legal) choices. The criminal justice system preserves human dignity by affirming that crime is an evil against others, that it must not be tolerated by society, and that the guilty should pay for their crimes. Disparities in crime statistics regarding minorities are not necessarily due to oppression by the majority of a minority, but due to the breakdown of family and social order in some minority communities that leads children to have poor role models and thus to grow up with a vicious, rather than a virtuous, character. To deny a minority the right to be punished for wrongdoing or to always blame the majority for the minority’s crimes is to deny the minority freedom and dignity. It is to place a member of a minority outside the bounds of the universal human condition of “fallenness” and outside the knowledge of sin. Such a view, in effect, dehumanizes minorities. Police officers see this human fallenness on an everyday basis and do not care, in general, for making excuses for bad human behavior. Unless criminal justice academics remove their heads from their rear ends and examine the real world of the police or correction officer, lawyer, or judge, they will remain oblivious to reality–and criminal justice professionals and academics will remain permanently estranged.

Spite: The Essence of Evil

In the second book of C. S. Lewis‘ science fiction trilogy, Perelandra, Ransom, the hero, is imprisoned by Professor Weston, a demonically possessed man sent to corrupt the “Eve” of the planet Venus. At one point Weston begins saying “Ransom.” Ransom turns around, and the demonic being does not reply.  Weston then repeats “Ransom,” over and over–just for spite.

To me spite has more of the essence of pure evil than the so-called primal sin of pride. Spiteful acts are done for “sheer meanness,” as Southerners like to say. Spite is the person who cuts in front of you in line not for any good reason, but just to make your day miserable. Spite is the person at the bookstore who moves into your aisle, and when you move out of the way to a different aisle, moves to that aisle, and so on. Spite is someone trying to agitate people into hatred and strife, not for power, but for the twisted thrill of watching people fight. Spite is the person who orders from the take out menu at a restaurant, then takes a table and refuses to leave, denying other customers that table. The essence of a spiteful person is the agitator. Those readers who are in organizations, whether the organization be a church, a civic group, or a special-interest club, probably knows about agitators. These are the people who, for example, go from church to church, stirring up members and causing a division–then they leave the church they destroyed and go to another church. They don’t desire to run the church; all they want is the enjoyment of creating hatred and division in the church. The same kind of people infect other organizations, and sometimes they are able to destroy an organization.  It is no surprise to me that Agatha Cristie’s detective, Poirot, commits murder in the last novel with him as a character–and the person he kills is not a murderer, but an agitator who stirs others to kill one another. Someone wholly dominated by spite is a psychopath–not necessarily one who will become a serial killer, but one who will destroy relationships and damage people wherever he goes. Avoid being spiteful at all costs–and avoid spiteful people. Those who are dominated by spite, unfortunately, rarely respond to grace, and they are extremely dangerous, both to individuals and to organizations. They are the truly evil–read M. Scott Peck’s fine book, People of the Lie, for more insight on the nature of evil.