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Monthly Archives: June 2014

What’s right for you…

30 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Josef Pieper, Morality, Politically Incorrect, Truth

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Conscience, Philosophy, Search for Happiness

He who wishes to know and to do the good must turn his gaze upon the objective world of being. Not upon his own 'ideas', not upon his 'conscience', not upon 'values', not upon arbitrarily established 'ideals' and 'models'. He must turn away from his own act and fix his eyes upon reality.

From Living the Truth, by Josef Pieper

The quote above is from the second half of the book that is cited. The second half is titled Reality and the Good. Although I have only finished reading the first few pages, which the author titles “The Thesis”, it appears that this essay is in regards to how mankind can know right and wrong and therefore be able to do that which is good. This is evidenced by the three sentences that precede the above quote where Pieper writes, “All obligation is based upon being. Reality is the foundation of ethics. The good is that which is in accord with reality.”

When I first started this essay I had to read those three sentences several times. They seemed to me to be disjointed – that they did not fit together. It now seems to me that the reason it seemed disjointed was because of my lack of background in philosophy. After all, you cannot really understand what someone is trying to say to you unless you understand his frame of reference. But as I continued reading the thesis statement the point the author is making began to make sense to me.

In order to understand this we must first have a correct understanding of reality. First of all, mankind is not the author or definer of what is true or good, but he can come to know it. In other words, we do not create the reality in which we live, instead we exist within an objective reality. And we experience this objective reality through our sense perception. It is through our senses that we experience the things around us. 'Things' here is to be understood as the word res from philosophy. Pieper says, “Res is everything that is 'presented' to our sense perception or our intellectual cognition, all that has being independently of our thinking.” Another word from philosophy, realis, is taken from res and denotes reality. Of this Pieper says, “Reality (in the sense of realis) is the whole of being which is independent of thought.” And elsewhere says, “Reality is the basis of the good.” Also realis means “that to be good is to do justice to objective being…the good is that which is in accord with objective reality.” “All laws and moral principles may be reduced to reality.” 'Reality' here meaning objective being outside ourselves.

As a result of all of this the author makes the conclusion that this “makes impossible the attitude of always referring to oneself and to the judgment of one's conscience*, which is considered as providing the norm in each instance. We are forced now to look through and beyond our own moral judgment to the norm presented to us by the objective reality of being.” I most heartily agree with this conclusion. [*Just a side note: here the author is referring to people who use their consciences as an excuse to do whatever they want. He is not referring to the use of our conscience in the correct sense. The Church teaches that a “human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience.” (CCC §1800) But the Church also teaches us that we must have a well-formed conscience that “formulates its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator. Everyone must avail himself of the means to form his conscience.” (CCC §1798) This is completely the opposite of using your conscience as a scapegoat to do whatever you want to do.]

But our modern society most certainly does not agree. The world is no longer viewed objectively by society but instead it is interpreted in a relativistic way. What I mean can be shown through an example: people who don't want to abide by traditional norms of moral behavior seem to have adopted the slogan, “What is right for you may not be right for me.” (You can replace right with moral or with good.)

Now to a certain extent this slogan is correct. For instance, if someone has cancer it would be right for them to have chemotherapy because that is one of the only methods we have to get rid of cancer. Whereas for someone else, who does not have cancer, it would not be right to have chemotherapy because to a person who is healthy chemotherapy is poisonous. Like I said, this would be a proper way to understand the above slogan.

But in saying this slogan our modern society means something completely different. For them the slogan turns everything upside down. To use the previous example about cancer – when modern society says “what is right for you may not be right for me” it isn't talking about whether or not a person should have chemotherapy. Instead, it is trying to change the rules to such an extent as to say that there is nothing wrong with cancer in the first place and that we don't need anything to fix it. Obviously, this is just crazy talk.

With this in mind we can begin to understand why our modern society is so disordered. It has left behind any idea of objective truth (like cancer is bad for you) in favor of just doing what feels right. And obviously, the chemotherapy this society needs (that being objective standards to determine morality) to fix its diseased nature would not feel right (because it would cause people to have to let go of the fantasy world they have created for themselves where right and wrong is determined by their own judgments). But nevertheless, objective truth is the only medicine that will cure us.

 

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The Amount that I Don’t Know

26 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Update

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Tags

Philosophy, Search for Truth

The two or three of you who regularly look at my blog may be wondering if I have fallen off the face of the earth since I have been posting so sparsely. I could make excuses and say it was because I was out of town on vacation, which I was. But the main reason is that I do not feel I have had much to say. There is a reason for this.

I have mentioned in previous posts that I have been reading more books of a philosophical nature. It started with von Hildebrand and from there to Josep Pieper. I have learned a great deal from these two wonderful authors but I have also learned something else – how much I do not know. Unlike most of my brothers in the priesthood I do not have any background in philosophy. The reason for this is that philosophical studies are not a part of the curriculum at the Episcopal seminary I attended (or any other Episcopal seminary as far as I know). Due to this lack of knowledge I have felt that I have nothing worth saying.

I addition to this general feeling of ignorance I have also been mentally kicking myself for all the time I wasted earlier in my life. I spent so much time just watching TV or playing video games and had no real desire to learn. All that time I wasted that I could have been laying the groundwork for what I now need to know. Instead, I indoctrinated myself (through the seemingly tame influence of television) in the wrong thinking of our modern society. And now, how much I have to unlearn and how much I have to learn!

Thanks be to God I have a friend at the parish (who is a systematic theologian) who has agreed to help me get ‘up to speed’ in my deficiencies. And I ask you, the reader, to pray that God may open my mind to understand.

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Lewis on Faith

16 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Faith, Mere Christianity

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Heaven, Joy

Sorry I haven't posted. I am on vacation with my family. Therefore, I probably won't be posting much this week. But this quote from Lewis simply had to be posted. The first few sentences give an excellent definition of what Faith is.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

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Pain after Death?

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Death, Eternal Life, Salvation, Theodicy

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Pain and Suffering, Purgatory

It has been too long since I posted anything. Things have been very busy at the parish with the end of school, graduations, and now I am preparing something for a group of nuns I will be addressing today and tomorrow. (First time I have done this, by the way, so please pray that what I have prepared will be adequate.) I haven’t the time to write something original but I wanted to make some kind of post. Today’s selection is from Lewis. He asks many hard questions which would be good for us all to consider.

Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? I don’t mean that I fear the worst of all. Nearly her last words were, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She had not always been. And she never lied. And she wasn’t easily deceived, least of all, in her own favour. I don’t mean that. But why are they so sure that all anguish ends with death? More than half the Christian world, and millions in the East, believe otherwise. How do they know she is ‘at rest’? Why should the separation (if nothing else) which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover who departs?

‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.

Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive God.’ Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn’t. He crucified Him.

A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis

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Story of a Confused Child and Evil Parents

03 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in What's Wrong with the World?

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This poor child is confused, not transgendered. | The Matt Walsh Blog.

The above link will take you to an excellent post on The Matt Walsh Blog. I am not sure how parents could do this to their child.

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Lewis on the Presence of Christ

03 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Presence of Christ, Promises of Christ, Thought for the Day, Uncategorized

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Faith

I believe this is the first time I have posted something from Narnia but there is good reason for doing so. Narnia is much more than stories to entertain children – Lewis wrote them for a purpose: to teach truths that are otherwise hard to explain. (At least that is what I remember from something else Lewis wrote on his understanding of myth.) And in a world where we are so wrapped up in only those things that we can see this passage can teach us all – children and adults – something very important: that what we perceive with our senses is not all that exists. Take the Blessed Sacrament for example – what appears to be before us is bread and wine when in reality it is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinty of Jesus Christ. I bring this up as an example because it seems to me that Lewis is trying to teach us about the presence of Jesus in the following passage. (Nevermind that he was an Anglican and, therefore, the Mass he attended was invalid and therefore Jesus was not physically present in the Eucharistic service Lewis attended. Let us look beyond that – as we should with everything that comes from a non-Catholic author – to the Truth that is contained within it.)

[Lucy] turned on and found to her surprise a page with no pictures at all; but the first words were A Spell to make hidden things visible. She read it through to make sure of all the hard words and then said it out loud. And she knew at once that it was working because as she spoke the colors came into the capital letters at the top of the page and the pictures began appearing in the margins. It was like when you hold to the fire something written in Invisible Ink and the writing gradually shows up; only instead of the dingy color of lemon juice (which is the easiest Invisible Ink) this was all gold and blue and scarlet. . . . And then she thought, “I suppose I’ve made everything visible, and not only the Thumpers. There might be lots of other invisible things hanging about a place like this. I’m not sure that I want to see them all.” At that moment she heard soft, heavy footfalls coming along the corridor behind her; and of course she remembered what she had been told about the Magician walking in his bare feet and making no more noise than a cat. It is always better to turn round than to have anything creeping up behind your back. Lucy did so.

Then her face lit up till, for a moment (but of course she didn’t know it), she looked almost as beautiful as that other Lucy in the picture, and she ran forward with a little cry of delight and with her arms stretched out. For what stood in the doorway was Aslan himself, the Lion, the highest of all High Kings. And he was solid and real and warm and he let her kiss him and bury herself in his shining mane. And from the low, earthquake-like sound that came from inside him, Lucy even dared to think that he was purring.

“Oh, Aslan,” said she, “it was kind of you to come.”

“I have been here all the time,” said he, “but you have just made me visible.”

“Aslan!” said Lucy almost a little reproachfully. “Don’t make fun of me. As if anything I could do would make you visible!”

“It did,” said Aslan. “Do you think I wouldn’t obey my own rules?”

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

Aslan (Jesus) makes an important point here – if God says He will do something then He will do it! “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matthew 28:20b, RSV-CE) Even though we may not experience Him with our senses (i.e. we do not see His human body) we must believe He is with us because He has promised to be.

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“He” finds this to be funny!

01 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Humor, Politically Incorrect

≈ 3 Comments

Those of you who regularly read this blog (all 4 or 5 of you) have probably noticed that I do not use politically correct language. In part, this is because I was raised in Henrietta, Texas, a part of the country that was (at that time and still to a certain extent today) unaffected by such stupidity. But today I was reading one of my newest books – Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft – and found that Dr. Kreeft has put into words a much better explanation with which I am in complete agreement. (It also happens to be very funny, which is why I typed it out in its entirety. I will be enjoying the humor of this for quite some time.)

The use of the traditional inclusive generic pronoun “he” is a decision of language, not of gender justice. There are only six alternatives. (1) We could use the grammatically misleading and numerically incorrect “they.” But when we say “one baby was healthier than the others because they didn’t drink that milk,” we do not know whether the antecedent of “they” is “one” or “others,” so we don’t know whether to give or take away the milk. Such language codes could be dangerous to baby’s health. (2) Another alternative is the politically intrusive “in-your-face” generic “she,” which I would probably use if I were an angry, politically intrusive, in-your-face woman, but I am not any of those things. (3) Changing “he” to “he or she” refutes itself in such comically clumsy and ugly revisions as the following: “What does it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole world but loses his or her own soul? Or what shall a man or woman give in exchange for his or her soul?” The answer is: he or she will give up his or her linguistic sanity. (4) We could also be both intrusive and clumsy by saying “she or he.” (5) Or we could use the neuter “it,” which is both dehumanizing and inaccurate. (6) Or we could combine all the linguistic garbage together and use “she or he or it,” which, abbreviated, would sound like “sh…it.”

I believe in the equal intelligence and value of women, but not in the intelligence or value of “political correctness,” linguistic ugliness, grammatical inaccuracy, conceptual confusion, or dehumanizing pronouns.

Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft, p.36 n.1

If you agree with Dr. Kreeft’s sentiments then please share this with people you know whether they be politically correct or incorrect. This will serve one of the two following purposes: 1) to hopefully enlighten those who use such ridiculous language; 2) to give those of who are politically incorrect a reason to laugh. And by achieving either of these goals you will also bring an increase in hits on my blog. (So maybe I can move up to 5 or 6 regular readers.)

 

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Fr. Moore

Fr. Moore

Parochial Vicar Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio, Texas FrMoore@truthwithboldness.com

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