My previous post on my experience of the National Health Service elicited a large number of comments–both pro and con. I think some of the people were missing the point. Because I said my experience of national health care in Britain was more positive than negative, and that in principle I have no objection to a state organized health insurance program does not mean that I favor Obama care, that I think it’s okay for state medicine to make me... Read more
Would a good God send anyone to hell? Some folks tootle on about the Christian God being some sort of “invisible moral enforcer”. He’s the big school monitor in the sky; the eternal policeman. They reject that sort of God, and that’s okay because that’s not really the God of the Catholic faith anyway. We believe hell is a place of justice–where the evil folks got what was coming to them. However, there is an aspect to God which we... Read more
Atheists like to tell us that they can be “good without God.” What they rarely do is define what they mean by “good”. If they mean they can have good manners, do volunteer work, give to worthy causes to make the world a better place, then of course they can be “good without God.” If they mean they can be sophisticated people of good taste with fine connections in the world and a place at high table, of course they... Read more
Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy has a new book out, and this article highlights his approach. Duffy has avoided propaganda and worked with primary documentation to show that the Protestant Reformation in England was more along the lines of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Red China. A whole complex and beautiful culture was systematically and brutally destroyed. Churches and monasteries stripped and destroyed, libraries burnt, music banned–by the reign of Elizabeth I the English existed in a police state similar to those... Read more
I usually avoid reading the atheists because I find (not surprisingly) that they don’t have much to say. Not believing in anything gives one precious little to write about. All that is left is to attack what other people believe in. The atheists are rather like the ultimate Protestant. What belief they have is derived from the thing they hate, and with the atheists it is even worse: they have no belief, so nothing left but a constant sophomoric rant... Read more
On this feast day of St Thomas More we do well to remember that the Tudor Revolution in England (sometimes given the euphemistic term: Reformation) was not immediately violent and catastrophic. It began with Henry VIII and his counsellors deciding that the church courts should not deal with cases of civil law. In the Middle Ages the church courts were the only form of objective justice and all of Europe accepted that the clerks and justices were also usually high... Read more
In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Caroline says to Mr Bingley, I should like balls infinitely better, if they were carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing were made the order of the day.’ ‘Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would not be near so much like a ball.” There... Read more
I have spent some time this afternoon reading the combox for Leah Libresco’s last post for the atheist portal. The comments from the atheists are very interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it is amazing how many of the commenters speak rather aggressively about religion being “irrational”. We must believe that this is their honest and sincere perception of religion. They must have got this impression from their experience of religion, and therefore we must blame the Christians who have preached... Read more
Evelyn Waugh has been mis quoted as saying, “There are only two choices: suicide or Catholicism.” I believe what he really said was in a letter responding to a friend who asked why, if the Christian faith was supposed to make you happy, Waugh was such a miserable character. Waugh replied, “If it weren’t for my Catholic faith I would have committed suicide long ago.” However the thought (and the misquote about it) raises an interesting question–one linked with a... Read more
Am I getting older or is the news getting worse? All around the world seems to be disintegrating. What was considered immorality by everyone is now championed as good and progressive. The Christian church in America — Catholics included–seem to be swept along by the crass materialism, commercial mentality and all the complacency and desires of the world. The political and economic scene seems corrupt and rotten to the core. I feel like we are all on the Titanic in... Read more
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Fr. Dwight Longenecker
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