learning lessons to practice lessons

The Lord wills that his disciples possess a tremendous power:
that his lowly servants accomplish in his name all that
he did when he was on earth.
St. Ambrose

(a pair of red shoulder hawks hanging out in the pine tops / Julie Cook / 2021)

“Some people who think themselves naturally gifted don’t want
to touch either philosophy or logic.
They don’t even want to learn natural science.
They demand bare faith alone—-
as if they wanted to harvest grapes right away without
putting any work into the vine.
We must prune, dig, trellis, and do all the other work.
I think you’ll agree the pruning knife, the pickaxe,
and the farmer’s tools are necessary for growing grapevines,
so that they will produce edible fruit.
And as in farming, so in medicine:
the one who has learned something is the one who has practiced
the various lessons, so that he can cultivate or heal.
And here, too, I say you’re truly educated if you bring everything
to bear on the truth.
Taking what’s useful from geometry, music, grammar, and
philosophy itself, you guard the Faith from assault.”
St. Clement of Alexandria, p. 13
An Excerpt From
A Year with the Church Fathers

it’s all metaphysics…or is that Greek??

I devote my very rare free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted
to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person.
It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level.
The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation,
indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.
This evil is even much more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order.
To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must oppose,
rather than sterile polemics, a kind of ‘recapitulation’ of the
inviolable mystery of the person.
(In his continuing struggle against Marxism in Poland after the Second Vatican Council,
Cardinal Karol Wojtyla identified the doctrine of the person as the Achilles’ heel of the Communist regime.
He decided to base his opposition on that plank.
In 1968 he wrote to his Jesuit friend, the future Cardinal Henri de Lubac—
John Paul II and The Mystery of The Human Person, Avery Dulles)

(detail of Socrates and Aritstole from the School of Athens by Raphael / The Vatican)

Metaphysics: noun, plural in form but singular in construction
1. a division of philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of
reality and being and that includes ontology, cosmology, and often epistemology
metaphysics … analyzes the generic traits manifested by existences of any kind

When it comes to metaphysics, well, it’s all pretty much Greek to me.
get it…Greek?? HAHAHA…

In all seriousness, it is such thinking, those of the various schools of philosophy,
that can push my poor brain to the limit.

That whole ‘if no one is around to hear it when a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?’
Well, duh…yes, yes it does…
I think we call it vibrations and sound waves but I digress.
Why even waste breath and time debating such??

However, man has always debated the world around him as well as debating his
very own interior being.

My son was a philosophy minor…and yes, I thought he was off his rocker.
But philosophy is very connected to the study of religion so I took pride
knowing that he was there to defend the faith of the Triune God in today’s very very hostile
area of thought regarding Christianity.

The pharse Cogito, ergo sum comes to mind…
I think therefore I am…uttered by René Descartes,

But I say no to that thought…it’s more like when I get poison ivy…I itch therefore I am.
That’s how you know.
A physical reaction to and from an outside source…but again, I digress.

I was afforded a bit of uninterrupted quiet time yesterday morning and I actually listened
to a brief podcast offered by the British periodical The Spectator.
The podcast was a discussion between my newest favorite Catholic, Dr. Gavin Ashenden (aka our dear
favorite former Anglican Bishop) and British journalist, Damian Thompson

This is the written intro for the discussion:
Boris Johnson’s package of Covid restrictions announced this week included
a rule that weddings will be limited to 15 people and funerals to 30 –
numbers plucked out of thin air that will have questionable effect
on the transmission of the virus.
You might think that a ruling that affects only weddings and funerals
isn’t such a big deal for the churches, but that is to underestimate the fanatical zeal
of their leaders for implementing, and expanding, restrictions on their own worship.
The control-freak Archbishop of Canterbury, predictably,
seemed quite thrilled by the government’s intervention.
My own reaction, informed by conversations with many clergy outraged by their
bishops’ baffling willingness to accept any curtailment of church life,
was to wonder whether some Christians will be forced to ‘go underground’ –
that is, find a way of worshipping that quietly disobeys their own leaders.
To an extent this is already happening: at the height of the pandemic,
Catholics were holding secret Masses that reminded me of their ancestors’
defiance of Protestant penal laws.
I didn’t report it because I didn’t want them hunted down by their own ‘fathers in God’,
the local bishops.
So that’s the subject of this week’s Holy Smoke,
a very wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Gavin Ashenden of the sort that you
would never hear on the BBC.

What I took away from listening to the discussion was that our friend Dr. Ashenden
finds that this whole control and resist mindset regarding the restrictions
placed on us by our leaders regarding COVID boils down to something quite
simple…

We can go out to eat, we can go to stores, we can get a haircut, we can visit a liquor store,
and in limited numbers, we may attend a wedding as well as a funeral…
however, only 15 can go celebrate a wedding while 30 can go celebrate the passing of a life—
odd numbering given life vs death, but I am obviously not in leadership.

And yet…our worship services are being curtailed, canceled, or simply
shut down.
And therein lies much of the frustration.

Will the faithful eventually find themselves in the underground?
Worshiping in secret?
Shades of the early days of Roman persecution?

Dr. Ashenden notes that it seems
we are either prioritizing the immediate power structures of our day or we
are prioritizing the teaching of the Gospel…and sadly it seems as if it is our power
structures that are receiving the total focus.

The good doctor notes that this seems to be a power struggle between the secular, or non-supernatural,
vs the Metaphysical, that being the Spiritual

Secular vs Spiritual…and sadly— secular is winning.

Here are the links…enjoy exercising your brain…

https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/57442176/posts/2929431852

https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/is-it-time-for-christianity-to-go-underground-

What is truth? or more aptly…where can we find it

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
Mark Twain

(the 2200 year old mouth of Truth found in the portico of Santa Maria Cosmedin Church
in Rome, Itlay.
Legend has it that if you are a truthful person and place your hand in the mouth,
you will be fine but if you are a liar, the stone will bite off your hand / Julie Cook / 2018)

So yesterday, I wrote a post about the local (as in Atlanta home-based) fast-food chain,
Chick-fil-A.
I had written about the latest news story that the chicken sandwich mega-giant had
cut ties with two of its charitable organizations—
The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and The Salvation Army.

It seems that the LGBTQ communities had loudly complained regarding the Christian based
food chain Chick-fil-A and that of its charitable contributions going to LGBTQ unfriendly
organizations and in turn, they wanted Chick-fil-A to stop—as in ASAP.

And so the latest news, both local and national, was that Chick-fil-A had given into
the loud protests and thus decided to distance themselves from these two
Christian based organizations.

I was so upset because I have long supported Chick-fil-A and was so proud of the Biblical
foundations that founder, Truett Cathy, had built this favorite fast food restaurant upon.

I feared that if an institution such as Chick-fil-A would give into the rabid cries
of a liberal left, then who might remain standing for their Christian based
principles and values?

So I sounded the alarm.

Yet the alarm I sounded need not have been sounded.

A dear friend, who’s husband both owns and operates his own Chick-fil-A,
sorted out the falsehoods that had been found in the narrative of the news reporting.

She offered the truth behind what I was posting and I, in turn, offered a new post
with her clarification.

I had read and seen both local and National news reporting on this story—
and these were all sources that I have always believed to be truthful…as far as
news reporters can be or should be truthful.

But sadly it turns out the real truth was buried deep behind the headlines.

Yes Chick-fil-A continues to contribute to their charities and you can read
about it from Lynn’s comment I posted yesterday as an addendum to my original post.

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/11/21/an-update-with-clarification-to-the-bending-of-the-cows-knees/

So naturally, I have felt very badly that I got this one wrong…
That I had read and seen what I had taken as truth and in turn, shared that “truth”–
yet the truth I thought, was not exactly the real truth or the full truth now was it?

I strive to be an accurate person, especially when I write a post.
I am passionate about my posts…otherwise, I wouldn’t write.

I also felt bad that I had let Lynn down by not touching base with her first.

I had my wealth of excuses.
Lynn and I have both been so busy that in turn, we’ve not chatted in quite some time.
I had recently been out of town.
I was tired.
I’ve been dealing with my own health issues.
Blah, blah, blah…

And so yesterday when I’d gotten home, I was mad when I’d seen the latest news stories
regarding our hometown based Atlanta business, Chick-fil-A.
A business built upon Christian principles.
Principles that a now-deceased founder had staked his life’s beliefs upon in order to
build a successful corporation, yet I feared I was now seeing a supposed shift in
those initial guiding principles…

Yet despite my best efforts at setting the record straight, I was still distressed
because I adamantly want to be known for talking about and writing about truths.

So I had to stop and ask myself, what IS truth?

Did Pilate not ask the same question as he stood a battered Christ
before a salivating and angry crowd?

So I looked back to the ancient philosophers who first discussed this notion of
truth.
Plato.
Soccrates
Aristotle…

According to Logic museum regarding truth and Metaphysics—they state that
“Possibly Aristotle’s most well-known definition of truth is in the Metaphysics, (1011b25):
“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false,
while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”.

Britanica.com tells us that “Truth is the aim of belief; falsity is a fault.
People need the truth about the world in order to thrive.
Truth is important.
Believing what is not true is apt to spoil a person’s plans and may even cost him his life.
Telling what is not true may result in legal and social penalties.
Conversely, a dedicated pursuit of truth characterizes the good scientist,
the good historian, and the good detective.

Yet I realized that I could philosophize, pontificate and ruminate over this
notion till the cows come home.
However, I fear that the real concern here today is not so much what
truth actually is, but rather that our culture no longer cares much about
that particular ideal—that ideal of truth.

We’ve heard more than our fair share regarding fake news…
so much so that we question almost everyone and everything.
And in turn, there is very little trust in our culture.

But here’s the thing.
I still want to believe that deep down, man longs for truth.
He longs for what is versus what is not.

There are small truths or more aptly exacts…truths such as 2+2=4
or ‘for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’…
mathematical and scientific exacting truths.

But what of the essential deep meaning of truth for man?

I found the following piece of wisdom on the site exploreGod.com

Philosopher Roger Scruton has argued,
“All discourse and dialogue depend upon the concept of truth.
To agree with another is to accept the truth of what he says;
to disagree is to reject it.”
In other words, we can’t even talk to each other without the notion of truth.
To say that I’m lying is to presuppose there is truth to be told.
To say that I’m wrong or even mistaken assumes the existence of a truth from
which my statement departs.

Truth According to the Bible:

So what, then, does the Bible say about truth?
It might surprise you that the question
“What is truth?” is itself found in the pages of Scripture.
When standing trial before the Roman governor Pilate, Jesus said to Pilate,
“For this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.
Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Pilate responded by asking,
“What is truth?”

If only Pilate had known that the truth was standing before him,
looking him in the eye.

You see, the Bible teaches that truth isn’t just an abstract idea or
philosophical puzzle.
Instead, truth is a person­—the person of Jesus Christ, to be exact.
Jesus said to his disciples, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.”
The Apostle John, reflecting on the whole of Jesus’ life, wrote,
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came
from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
In Jesus, the truth took on human nature.

For the full treatise on a Christian take on truth see the link–
https://www.exploregod.com/what-the-bible-says-about-truth-paper

And so yes, the Truth, a real and lasting deep soul sort of truth,
is found in the One who claimed, and continues to proclaim,
to be the living Truth.

Truth can only be found in Christ Jesus and in Him alone.
Not in or from man…only if man proclaims Christ.
All other truths and false truths will leave us empty and still looking,
seeking and searching for more.
An endless and tiring quest.

Yet from all of this talk, I will say that the one take away that I’ve gotten…
other than the fact the our world now plays fast and loose with the truth,
is that the progressive left will not rest until Christianity is silenced.

Because within Christianity is found the Truth.

So, therefore, lies will continue.
Half-truths will dominate.
Accusations will fly.
Questions will continually be leveled.
Protesters will shout with both anger and resentment.
The Christian fold will be pushed to attack from within…
because the enemy knows that there is success to be found in the divide and conquer mentality.

And thus if we are to find satisfaction in life and in our living,
if we desire to have a real sense of peace..it will only come in knowing who is Truth.
You can choose to live the empty quest…such as Pilate…a forlorn yearning.
An empty unsatisfied existence of seeking while dodging the lies.

Or you can follow the one who came into the world to save the sinner by bringing us the Truth.

Jesus answered,
“You say that I am a king.
In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth.
Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate.
With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said,
“I find no basis for a charge against him.
John 18:37-38

guarding faith from assault

“When we attend to the needs of those in want,
we give them what is theirs, not ours.
More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.”
Pope Saint Gregory the Great

(shelf fungus / Julie Cook / 2019)

Some people who think themselves naturally gifted don’t want to touch either
philosophy or logic.
They don’t even want to learn natural science.
They demand bare faith alone—as if they wanted to harvest grapes right away without putting
any work into the vine.
We must prune, dig, trellis, and do all the other work.
I think you’ll agree the pruning knife, the pickaxe, and the farmer’s tools are necessary
for growing grapevines, so that they will produce edible fruit.
And as in farming, so in medicine: the one who has learned something is the one who has
practiced the various lessons, so that he can cultivate or heal.
And here, too, I say you’re truly educated if you bring everything to bear on the truth.
Taking what’s useful from geometry, music, grammar, and philosophy itself,
you guard the Faith from assault.”
St. Clement of Alexandria, p. 13
An Excerpt From
A Year with the Church Fathers

Is our post modern cultural Marxism rooted in a sexual revolution that was disguised as a women’s movement?

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.
Lyrics by Graham Nash
Teach your Children

What do Critical Theory, Marxism, Socialism, cultural liberalism, women’s equality,
homosexuality, transgenderism, and the sexual revolution all have in common?
They are the underlying lynchpins to our current day’s ills…

And they all seem to have begotten the other in some perverse orgy of thought, action and protest.

I wrote a post last week referencing a recent letter penned by Pope Emeritus Benedict
in which he states that the ills of the Chruch today can actually be traced right back
to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.

“Pope Benedict XVI has broken his silence in a rare essay on the sex abuse crisis
in the Catholic Church, claiming that it was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s
and the liberalization of the church’s moral teaching.

“Since I myself had served in a position of responsibility as shepherd of the Church
at the time of the public outbreak of the crisis, and during the run-up to it,
I had to ask myself — even though, as emeritus,
I am no longer directly responsible —
what I could contribute to a new beginning,”
Benedict wrote, in explaining why he is speaking out now.

But his comments on the sex abuse crisis seem certain to inflame tensions between
conservative Catholics, who largely blame homosexuality and lax sexual ethics for the scandal,
and liberals, who say there is no known connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

In the essay, Benedict asserts that the changes in traditional moral standards
on sexuality both in society and within the Catholic Church laid the groundwork
for the sex abuse crisis.

“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68,” he writes,
“was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”

Bishop Gavin Ashenden actually expanded on this notion albeit as a separate thought than that
of the former Pope’s, all of which I shared in that same previous post.

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/04/12/silent-no-more-the-absence-of-god/

Contrary to what many critics now argue, I don’t see the former Pope’s letter as some
sort of feeble excuse for the scope of predation and the decades of lies and cover-ups,
but rather I see that Benedict is identifying a marker…
A key and crucial marker, marking much of our current ills and woes.

But before we proceed, you might need to read over another previous post.
It’s a post which might refresh your memory about Critical Theory,
The Frankfurt School and Marxism—all of which have been identified and brought to our
attention by Melvin Tinker in his book
That Hideous Strength:
How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in The Chruch,
The World And The Gospel of Change

Here is a link to one of the previous teaching posts regarding Mr. Tinker’s book:
https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/01/30/new-left-not-so-new-raison-detre/

In a nutshell, however, “according to Tinker–
“In 1923 a week-long symposium was organized by Felix Weil in Frankfurt,
Germany in which they laid out a vision for a Marxist think-tank and
research centre.
The original name for the centre was the Institue for Marxism (Institut fur Marxismus),
but a more innocent sounding title was subsequently given,
The Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Sozialforschung).
Since that time the ISR has usually been known simply as the Frankfurt School.”

In the early 1940s, many of these German philosophers made a mad dash to the US once
the Nazis had shuttered their Institute—bringing with them not merely an academic philosophy
but rather a desire for a “new world order” of Marxism—
bringing it directly to the forefront of America’s academic schools of thought.

Their “school” of philosophy (a cultural Marxism) was readily accepted and absorbed into
America’s academic elite thinkers and schools.
New, refreshing and cutting edge, or so it seemed.

Fast forward to today…

As we now stand bewildered and nearly helpless while looking at the nation we thought we once knew,
I believe a key and crucial breadcrumb will be found if we look back to those heady days of 60s.

Those days of protests, revolutionary movements and a summer of love.

While we painfully scan the horizon, looking for reasons as to why we are currently in
a terrible mess, I believe we need to not only re-explore but we need to understand…
we need to understand that what appeared to be a movement by and for women vying for
equality in the mid-1960s was far more serious and far more sinister than equal
pay for equal work.
So much so that most of the women protesting had
no idea how their “movement” was to morph into a damning Sexual revolution.

Vietnam, Civil Rights, Women rights, peace, and love…
what a churning boiling toxic kettle of foreboding ills.

A movement shattering certain social norms set the stage for our
current culture’s spiraling demise.

And sex was going to be a key factor, if not the pivotal factor.

According to Max Horkheimer (one of the German philosophers) and his fellow scholars,
bourgeois society is inherently sexually repressed,
which is a major factor in neurosis and other forms of mental illness.
‘They believed,’ as Breshears makes clear, ‘that a revolutionary,
post-capitalist and post-Christian society could liberate humanity
from this repression, so sexual liberation from the restrictions of a patriarchal society
was a major theme in their ideology.’

Both Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich (more of the German philosophers) re-worked
Freudianism into the neo-Marxist ideology.
Fromm argued that sexual orientation is merely a social construct,
that there are no innate differences between men and
women, and furthermore that sexuality and gender roles are socially determined.
It was Reich who coined the term
‘the sexual revolution’ (the title of his 1936 book) and contended that the
innate sexual impulse should be liberated
from artificial and man-made moral restrictions.

But perhaps more than any other member of the Frankfurt School it was
Herbert Marcuse who was to have the most far-reaching influence in this aspect of
the neo-Marxist ideology.
In Eros and Civilization he
sought to bring together neo-Marxism with a version of neo-Freudianism in order
to turn the power of the throwing off of all traditional values and sexual restraints
in favour of ‘polymorphous perversity.’ The very idea of marital love and
fidelity was considered by Marcuse to be counter-revolutionary.
Although cultural change was the ultimate goal, Marcuse understood the tactical appeal
if the pleasure principle. For we are often reminded, ‘sex sells,’
and it sells politics too, what better way
to recruit revolutionaries than to convince them that sexual promiscuity
is a sure way to bring
about the revolution?
Dinesh D’Souza notes in ‘What’s so great about Christianity?’
the centrality of this tactic by quoting neo-Marxist,
‘Against the power of religion, we employ an equal if not greater power—
the power of hormones.’/em>

These are names that are mostly foreign to those of us today who are looking for answers,
yet they are names of men who were to play pivotal roles in ushering in the mess
you and I are currently living in today…

Yet as there is much more to write, share and say…I’m off to Atlanta.
So this is part I….Part II and possibly Part III will be forthcoming…

But the Mayor is calling.

It seems her chief aides are going on a little date night prior to the arrival of their new addition
and of course, the Mayor needed a babysitter.
Plus I’ll be on baby watch this weekend standing in while my son is out of town for a wedding.
His overtly pregnant wife is in no condition to trek a couple of hours away from home
this late in the ballgame…

Stay tuned…

Oh, by the way… Percy is still at the Vets…
the surgery seems to have been successful as long as he stays
in a cage, unable to jump…sigh

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil,
for the devil has been sinning from the beginning.
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
1 John 3:8

just running with it…

I can understand a person believing in God without knowing science;
I cannot understand a person knowing science and not believing in God.
Oneta Hayes

(detail painting on a column within Cathedral of Our Lady of Bayeux, France / Julie Cook/ 2018)

Yesterday I offered a few quotes.

Life is still hectic as I continue playing catch-up.

So, therefore, spending the proper amount of time and energy necessary for more
meatier posts continue to be proving elusive.
And so I offer thoughts and observations that I find to be heavenly and even Grace
filled in their offerings…

Yesterday I had found some rather interesting quotes…quotes regarding both
science and Christian faith…
as there seems to always be some sort of friction between the two.

And probably the most famous clash was between Galileo and the Catholic Chruch.

We all know that Galileo actually got had gotten it right…
he had realized that the planets revolved around the sun rather than the sun revolving
around the planets…with the particular planet being that of the earth…
as the earth was and continues to be, the seemingly center of all of our little universe.

Yet his thoughts, observations, and theories challenged a church that was unsure
and even afraid…as the hierarchy was unwilling to think outside of the box.
And so Galileo, who was a devout Catholic and whose daughter was actually a nun,
was in a bit of a pickle.

The Chruch demanded Galileo recant his conclusion…or if he chose not to,
he would be imprisoned as well as excommunicated.

History affords us the answer to this quandary.
He was imprisoned, living his life under house arrest and was indeed excommunicated
from the Church he respected and loved.

A great book which affords us a small snapshot into this moment of history…
is a collection of intimate letters written between a father and his beloved daughter–
Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel

Letters that were written from a father, who was currently under house arrest
by the Chruch, written to his daughter who was living her life for that very Chruch.

It wasn’t until 1992 that the Chruch actually owned up to the fact that they, the Chruch
as a whole, was wrong in their treatment of Galileo.

More than 350 years after the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo,
Pope John Paul II is poised to rectify one of the Church’s most infamous wrongs —
the persecution of the Italian astronomer and physicist for proving the
Earth moves around the Sun.

With a formal statement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Saturday,
Vatican officials said the Pope will formally close a 13-year investigation into
the Church’s condemnation of Galileo in 1633.
The condemnation, which forced the astronomer and physicist to recant his discoveries,
led to Galileo’s house arrest for eight years before his death in 1642 at the age of 77.
(New York Times)

Pope John Paul II, who had one of several degrees in Philosophy, and who actually delved
deeply into the study of both science and philosophy, understood better than most,
the relationship between Science and the Church.
“Karol Wojtyla’s second doctoral dissertation,
submitted in 1953 to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland,
concerned the thought of Max Scheler (1874-1928)
a leading exponent of the philosophical school known as phenomenology.
Phenomenology, together with the more conventional Aristotelian-Thomistic
tradition, proved to be the two great influences on the philosophical development
of Karol Wojtyla.
From the latter, he learned to be a philosophical realist.
From the former, he learned to develop of rich sense of the moral life of the human person.
It is worth considering these two influences in a little detail.
(Encyclopedia Britannica)

And so thus we know that Pope John Paul II understood the importance of science,
and that he worked to rewrite the previous wrong with his “pardon” of Galileo.

I find the quotes by renowned scientists regarding their studies along with their deep
faith to be so refreshingly uplifting.

There are so many who are rabidly anti-church and who claim that atheists
cannot abide by the Chruch’s lack of acceptance of science…
and yet we have so many notable scientists who are deeply committed Christians…
so perhaps that arugument simply doesn’t hold water.

I find much of their arguments actually mute.

Thus after reading my post yesterday, our dear freind Oneta offered such a wonderful
reflection—a reflection that actually reminded me of something Albert Einstein had once
noted about his belief in God…

The more I study science, the more I believe in God.”
Albert Einstein
(The Wall Street Journal, Dec 24, 1997, article by Jim Holt, “Science Resurrects God.”)

My response to Oneta was that her comment to my post was quite the quote—
as she then resonded with the idea that I could then “run with it”…
and so run I have…

If the universe were a product of chance,
we would not expect to find such order and intelligibility and laws.
We would find chaos. Anyone who has studied the second law of thermodynamics
knows that any system, like the molecules of air and gases in this room,
by their natural state are in the maximum of disorder.
The molecules don’t line themselves up; they’re just bouncing around.
That’s what we would expect to find in the whole universe—absolute chaos.
This led Albert Einstein to make this famous statement:
‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible.’
Fr. John Flader
from God and Science