Lost on the Last Continent, Episode 39, War in the Wild Blue Yonder, is now posted on Patreon.
Episode 39 War in the Wild Blue Yonder
In this exciting episode, the heavens of Pangaea roar and burn with the clash of superhuman energies. Colonel Lost is flung, toppling, through the atmosphere, and desperate to flee pursuit. He learns the drawbacks of solo flight without instruments. Or flying machine.
The question before us is whether belief in God is voluntary or involuntary. Here are the errors in the Freethinker argument proposing that belief is involuntary:
The same word “faith” can refer to various different objects, some of them opposite each other. To speak of belief and faith without defining the terms is to speak a verbal Rorschach-blot, where each reader reads into the word his own meaning. It is to risk speaking nonsense.
Faith, here, means placing trust, despite irrational fears or irrational doubts, in the conclusions reached by wisdom and reason, or in an eyewitness or an authority trusted for other reasons.
It behooves a man who sets out to prove a point also to say what he does not intend to prove.
Faith is not offered as a substitute or an alternative for reason and experience. Those who claim that faith is belief beyond reason and doubt, or that faith lies outside the realm of logic and evidence, are uttering something sharply against historical Christian teaching.
To be sure, there are Christians of other denominations who hold that faith is not faithfulness to a known truth, but is instead the mechanism by which the unknown becomes known, a mechanism separate from and independent of reason and experience and perhaps superior to reason and experience. This position, known as ‘fidelism’ is a teaching explicitly condemned by the Church as a heresy.
Here is the official teaching of the Catholic Church:
Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator; yet there are many obstacles which prevent reason from the effective and fruitful use of this inborn faculty.
For the truths that concern the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence it, they call for self-surrender and abnegation.
The human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin.
So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.
— Catechism of the Catholic Church, ss. 37.
Armed with his teaching, we can now define what role faith plays, at least so far as this present argument is concerned.
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Aslan is on the Move. Here is good new, long overdue, from our own Brain Niemeier:
It’s refreshing to see a member of the Catholic hierarchy taking the adjudication of Church doctrine seriously. Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, IL continues his juridical tour de force by publicly barring Democrat Senator Dick Durbin from receiving Holy Communion.
His Excellency wrote on the diocesan web site:
I agree completely with His Eminence, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee on Pro-Life Activities, who called the U.S. Senate’s failure to pass the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act “appalling.”
Fourteen Catholic senators voted against the bill that would have prohibited abortions starting at 20 weeks after fertilization, including Sen. Richard Durbin, whose residence is in the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois. In April 2004, Sen. Durbin’s pastor, then Msgr. Kevin Vann (now Bishop Kevin Vann of Orange, CA), said that he would be reticent to give Sen. Durbin Holy Communion because his pro-abortion position put him outside of communion or unity with the Church’s teachings on life. My predecessor, now Archbishop George Lucas of Omaha, said that he would support that decision. I have continued that position.
Canon 915 of the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law states that those “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” In our 2004 Statement on Catholics in Political Life, the USCCB said, “Failing to protect the lives of innocent and defenseless members of the human race is to sin against justice. Those who formulate law therefore have an obligation in conscience to work toward correcting morally defective laws, lest they be guilty of cooperating in evil and in sinning against the common good.” Because his voting record in support of abortion over many years constitutes “obstinate persistence in manifest grave sin,” the determination continues that Sen. Durbin is not to be admitted to Holy Communion until he repents of this sin. This provision is intended not to punish, but to bring about a change of heart. Sen. Durbin was once pro-life. I sincerely pray that he will repent and return to being pro-life.
Read the whole thing here: http://www.superversivesf.com/2018/02/23/now-excommunicate-the-rest/
Our own celebrated Zaklog the Deplorable than most writes:
The idea that we have an unconscious or subconscious mind seems perfectly reasonable to me. I mean, unless my experience of my own being is radically different from yours, do you not sometimes do or say things for reasons you cannot remotely explain? There’s far more going on inside our heads than we can fully account for. With a system as complex as our brains, how could it be otherwise?
My comment:
I cannot answer the question without making a distinction.
Each man, from history to prehistory, has certainly had events happen to him like seeing a dream, forgetting something he once knew and later remembering it, suffering sudden ideas and emotions for which he cannot account and so on.
That is the given. We all acknowledge that there is more to the mind and soul of man than man is aware.
But next is theory. How do was account for the unknown? We all agree that, like Eskimos fishing through ice, there is something alive down there, which from time to time rises up to our hooks, or breaks through the ice and grabs us.
We do not all agree about what is down there, or what means.
Freud and other charlatans pretending to “science” these things by making up Latin words for the parts of the soul, or by inventing non existent entities, events, and racial trauma. That part is all hogwash.
I do believe that there are things out of mind which come into mind and go out again, and many mysteries and strange dealings. I do not believe that the hogwash Freud and others made up about these things, and I certainly do not believe the all-materialism all-the-time assumption they slide into their creepy little theories without ever explicitly so saying.
I read Freud in college. He is a mythographer, not a scientist. He is a mountebank, about as legit as Professor Harold Hill from THE MUSIC MAN.
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A reader ask whether belief in God is a matter of choice.
“Your several uses of “accept or reject” leave little doubt in my mind that you think it is. What are your grounds for that assumption? Can you put yourself in the shoes of someone who does not agree?”
As for the second question, let me put myself in the shoes of the freethinker, and you tell me if I have characterized the argument correctly.
Freethinker argument:
I propose that faith in God is involuntary. Those who believe in God have no choice but to believe; that those who disbelieve have no real choice but to disbelieve.
I propose, moreover, that a man cannot make himself, by an act of will, believe what he does not, and, even if he could, it would be morally wrong.
If you approach a man at noon, and say, ‘Convince yourself that noon is midnight’ the mere fact is that he cannot do it. He can, perhaps, say that world is round, and that the words midnight and noon refer to places where the sun is at the zenith or he nadir, so that both, in some sense of the world, can refer to the same thing, that is, the sun’s position relative to Earth … but this is just a semantic argument, and like all semantic arguments, are like the two armies spoken of in the Book of Wonders, who swapped uniforms but continued the war just as before.
So the answer is no. Read the remainder of this entry »
The modern book market is a fickle thing, and no one has a handle on all its changes yet. My publisher, Castalia House wisely decided to re-publish the Dragon Award winning Best Novel for 2016 SOMEWHITHER in a new multivolume format. The first volume is out now:
SOMEWHITHER: DOOR INTO NOWHERE
Just to avoid confusion: this is the same story as SOMEWHITHER, merely broken into neat, bite-sized bits.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
The Door into Nowhere is a tale of a greater and darker evil with longer reach than anything Man can imagine, of despair without bounds, of pain beyond measure, and of the faith required to surmount all three. It is a story of inexorable destiny written in the stars and the stubborn courage that is required to defy it.
Ilya Muromets is an oversized young man whose father is often absent on mysterious Church missionary work that involves silver bullets, sacred lances, and black helicopters. Ilya works as a janitor for Professor Achitophel Dreadful of the Cryptozoological Museum of Scientific Curiosities, who warns Ilya of an unthinkably powerful enemy determined to rule the many worlds of the multiverse. And, as it happens, the Professor has left his transdimensional equipment in the basement of the Museum plugged-in and running….
So it is that Ilya, as he has secretly dreamed, is called upon to save the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter. With his squirrel gun, his grandfather’s sword, and his father’s crucifix, Ilya races to save the girl, and, incidentally, the world.
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Some European or Leftist readers from overseas are puzzled about American love of liberty, and the role of firearms in preserving those liberties from Europeans and Leftists.
I here reprint an excerpt (edited for wording) from the following article.
This is from the pen of columnist Susan Smith of the Daily Caller. The full column can be found here: http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/17/guns-politics-the-battle-of-athens-tennessee/
The time was 1946, and the place was Athens, Tennessee. The American GI’s, who had spent years fighting against Hitler’s Germany and the Japanese Empire, and survived, started coming home to the sleepy little Southern town, population 7,600 people, they knew and loved.
They knew from letters that with all the brave young men missing from the town, that something insidious had happened in their absence.
They had one more battle to fight, this time on the home soil.
Those who stayed behind while brave men fought perpetrated what we know now as a classic Democrat party “Machine Politics” operation, and in the most corrupt and underhanded of ways, took over Athens.
A wealthy local Democrat named Paul Cantrell decided to use his family power and political connections to run for and win the position of sheriff of the town. Though it was obvious to the citizenry of Athens this victory had not been achieved by legal means, they thought they had no way of negating the outcome and so did nothing.
Part of an ongoing discussion:
A reader named VicqRuiz comments:
Indeed, it would be wonderful if there was a loving creator of the universe. and it would be the greatest news ever if Christ truly came offering eternal release from pain and grief for all humanity.
But Christ unfortunately comes with a whole lot of additional baggage that I reject in mind and in spirit.
One of the main parts of this baggage is a God who, if he knew in advance that Adam and Eve would fall, is akin to someone who would set a blind and deaf man to walk a tightrope, and then condemn him for failing to keep his balance.
My reply:
Please wake up. Please think about what you are saying.
Should God have aborted Adam and Eve, then? Killed them before they had a chance to sin? Would it have been better, speaking as one member of the human race to another, for the human race never to have existed? Would it have been better not to give them the free will which makes sin possible? For such a creature, whatever it is, is not a human being.
God gave free will to angels also, and some of them fell into sin. Should he have not created them? Or made them robotlike, unable to love or be loved?
I do not think you have thought this thing through.
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A column by Susan Goldberg from PJ Media should be studied with care by those eager to blame the gun rather than the criminal for the recent moral panic over gun crimes:
Now that the gun control advocates have had their fifteen minutes of fame, let’s start focusing on the real issues impacting the rise in school shootings since that infamous day in Columbine in 1999. Issue number one that no one in the mainstream media or government wants to acknowledge: fatherlessness. Specifically, the impact of fatherlessness on the boys who grew up to become school shooters.
Here is a list of companies with whom you will want to avoid dealing if you support the U.S. Constitution and the Second Amendment.
The full NRA statement reads:
The more than five million law-abiding members of the National Rifle Association have enjoyed discounts and cost-saving programs from many American corporations that have partnered with the NRA to expand member benefits.
Since the tragedy in Parkland, Florida, a number of companies have decided to sever their relationship with the NRA, in an effort to punish our members who are doctors, farmers, law enforcement officers, fire fighters, nurses, shop owners and school teachers that live in every American community. We are men and women who represent every American ethnic group, every one of the world’s religions and every form of political commitment.
The law-abiding members of the NRA had nothing at all to do with the failure of that school’s security preparedness, the failure of America’s mental health system, the failure of the National Instant Check System or the cruel failures of both federal and local law enforcement.
Despite that, some corporations have decided to punish NRA membership in a shameful display of political and civic cowardice. In time, these brands will be replaced by others who recognize that patriotism and determined commitment to Constitutional freedoms are characteristics of a marketplace they very much want to serve.
Let it be absolutely clear. The loss of a discount will neither scare nor distract one single NRA member from our mission to stand and defend the individual freedoms that have always made America the greatest nation in the world
Sorry, but I am a little late with this signal boost, but our comrade-in-arms against the forces of tedium in SFF, Brian Niemeier, had his latest book came out while I slept.
So here it is! Ring the bells, bang the drums, blow the sounding brass!
Dragon Award winner Brian Niemeier’s groundbreaking Soul Cycle reaches its startling conclusion in The Ophian Rising, the highly anticipated sequel to The Secret Kings.
A reader with the valleylike but unkempt name of Glenfilthy writes and asks:
I know there is a God; I can feel it and that is good enough for me. I am up to my ears in the New Testament and working my way through it. It’s slow going; frequent stops are needed for me to go on the internet, and suss out the historical content and confirm the meanings of certain passages. I am starting at ground zero, there are elementary school children that know more about the faith than I do. If I understand you correctly, there was a time that you were in a boat similar to mine.
How do you make the leap of faith – as a reformed atheist or agnostic – to accept the bible? I have no problem accepting the morality and acknowledgement of God. I have big problems with the miracles and mythology of the biblical characters. How do you reconcile that with the underpinnings required for a rational mind? Or maybe phrased better: how do you dispense with doubt?
Let me answer in order: Read the remainder of this entry »
A reader writes in with a heartfelt plea:
I am asking for a prayer request for my cousin’s son.A few days ago, her one year old son had a seizure. It came out of nowhere. She and her husband are still at the hospital. He has only just begun to recover enough to be allowed eat and his facial paralysis is receding.They still don’t know the cause and are waiting for test results.His name is the Greek Alexandros. Or Alex.
O Good St. Anne you who cured the sick and laid a healing hand upon the lame, the blind, and the crippled, look with compassion upon Alex in his trouble.
O Good St. Anne, compassionate mother, pray for your weary child.
We have been treated this week to one of the most appalling and cynical displays of pure, malign, mocking evil recent memory records. In the wake of an atrocity too raw and new to repeat, when the bodies of the slain are not yet cold, and the enemy had trotted out children, and with fake tears in eyes and vile cusswords on lips, placed those children in positions of groveling on the steps of the halls of power, begging for chains and fetters.
Perhaps, to the casual eye, the vision looks like students, whose peers have just been murdered at random, begging to be protected. Look more deeply.
Listen with care to what they say. Listen with more care to what they do not say.
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