Category: Religion
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The Horror of Death and its Cure
There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other. While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying.…
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The Passion of Martin Scorsese
Not everything in the NYT is leftist crap. The new Scorsese effort is based on the novel “Silence,” by Shusaku Endo. My copy should be arriving today. A tip of the hat to Karl White for informing me of it. “The novel poses a very profound theological question,” Peter C. Phan, a Jesuit theologian at…
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Catholicism as True Enough
Catholicism is true enough to provide moral guidance and spiritual sustenance for many, many people. So if you are a lapsed Catholic, you could do far worse than to return to the arms of Holy Mother the Church. And this despite the deep post-Vatican II corruption. Better such a reversion than to persist in one's worldly…
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Religious Liberty and a Brooks Boner
The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are piss-poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading. But the following from Brooks (28 October) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right: The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and…
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What Does Abortion Have to Do with Religion?
What follows is a re-post, slightly redacted, from 3 November 2012. Occasioned by the Biden-Ryan Veep debate in 2012, it is equally applicable to the 2016 Kaine-Pence Veep debate, except that in 2016 only Kaine is (nominally) Catholic. ………………….. The abortion question is almost always raised in the context of religion. The Vice-Presidential debate provides…
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There is no Religious Liberty Under Leftism: The Albanian Example
Do you value religious liberty? Then you must work to defeat Hillary Clinton, which is to say: you must vote for Donald Trump. The Left, being totalitarian, brooks no opposition and is brutal in its suppression of religion. Consider the example of Fr. Ernest Simoni: Persecution in Albania was exceptionally harsh, even for Communist Eastern…
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Hillary’s Nonsense About “No Religious Test”
Hillary got clobbered in last night's debate, but Trump missed an opportunity to refute her nonsensical claim that vetting Muslim immigrants involves the application of a "religious test." In Article VI of the U. S. Constitution we read: . . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or…
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Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views
Univocity. There is an absolute reality. We can speak of it literally and sometimes truly using predicates of ordinary language that retain in their metaphysical use the very same sense they have in their mundane use. For example, we can say of Socrates that he exists, and using 'exists' in the very same sense we…
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Is the Real a Tricycle? Plantinga versus Hick, Round One
In his Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford UP, 2000), Alvin Plantinga mounts a critique of John Hick's Kantianism in the philosophy of religion. In this entry I will begin an evaluation of Plantinga's critique. I will focus on just two and a half pages, pp. 43-45, and examine only one preliminary argument. The question, very simply,…
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Intelligence and Religion
The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.
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Two Guises of Religion
Religion can appear under the guise of a childish refusal to face the supposed truth that we are but a species of clever land mammal with no higher origin or destiny. It can also appear under the guise of transcendence and maturity: the religious seek to transcend the childish and the merely human whereas worldlings…
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Do You Care About Religious Liberty?
Then you had better vote for Trump. Martin Castro, an Obama appointee, is chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Here’s Mr. Castro: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any…
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Kolakowski on Religion: Man Does Not Live by Reason Alone
Leszek Kolakowski has a message for New Atheists, leftists, transhumanists and any other bunch of religion bashers who think religion will wither away, be put out of business by some technological advance, or will eventually be confined to the sphere of the merely private. The following quotations are from an interview with the philosopher conducted…
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Will Science Put Religion Out of Business? Against the Folly of Transhumanism
A correspondent writes: Here's how I think science will eventually put religion out of business. Soon medical science is going to be able to offer serious life extension, not pie-in-the-sky soul survival or re-incarnation, but real life extension with possible rejuvenation. When science can offer and DELIVER what religion can only promise, religion is done.…
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The Debate That Won’t Go Away: Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?
Not again! Yes, again. On 5 September 2016 anno domini, in the pages of Crisis Magazine, Fr. Brandon O'Brien opined (emphasis added): While some similarities may exist between the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God, it is certain that the Christian who prays “Our Father, Who art in Heaven” each day is not praying to…