My Music

If your interested in hearing some of my composed a cappella music performed live (I did it for a competition), ask me here for the password, and why you would like to hear it. The link is here.

Paradoxical Truth

For me, one of the proofs for the Truths of Christianity is its paradoxical nature. What I mean is that what seems to be apparent is actually not true. For example, in order to gain happiness for ourselves, we must deliver happiness to others and deny ourselves. If we try to make ourselves happy by indulging ourselves, we can never grasp happiness. It is only in giving that we receive. In order to live, we must die, etc.

This makes most sense to me for two reasons. Since no one had fully known the truth about God, the origin of our happiness, until the revelation and incarnation of Christ, paradoxes must have existed that keep humanity from the full Truth. Buddha said that escaping from physical reality was necessary to reach nirvana, but he was not correct. We must be redeemed in our bodies to be connected to the Communion of Saints at the resurrection.

Second, intellectuals have a great difficulty in grasping the Truth of the gospel because of their logical hang-ups. Why would someone become lowly to be exalted? It is the unwanted and destitute that see the illogicalness of life and embrace the paradoxical Truth of the Gospel for hope.

“He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.”

Living In Sin

Today is the Memorial of the Martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist. Saint John told King Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your (Mark 6:17-29) brother’s wife.” King Herod knew that he was sinning, but he kept on doing it. His unlawful wife Herodias wanted to kill John, and she finally had her way by her daughter’s seductive dance.

John knew that he would eventually be killed, but he told the truth about Herod living in sin.

I personally know people, some very well, that personally used the phrase “living in sin” regarding living together before marriage. At least one of their parents, usually the mother, told them that it was wrong to live together before marriage since it was almost inevitable that there would be sexual relations between the couple. While the other parent, usually the father, did not really have an opinion on the matter. Yet, they did it anyway.

Just the other day, in my own car, someone acknowledged that they were “living in sin”, but it was the practical thing to do. About a year before that, someone jokingly said that, “Yup, I’m living in sin!” In fact, most couples that I know lived together before getting married. (I also know many that did not.)

What did I say? Nothing. Am I afraid to tell them that they’re wrong? I guess so.

When you get down to it, we’re all living in sin. However, what’s the main difference? One set acknowledges their sin and repents, the other set perhaps – if at all – acknowledges their sin and does not repent. Am I being holier than thou? I think I'm not holy and need God's forgiveness, not brush off my sin as nothing.

There is difference, though, between King Herod and those “living in sin” nowadays. King Herod knew God’s law and directly disobeyed it. Today, people do not really know right and wrong. In saying or joking that they “live in sin”, they really do not acknowledge that it is a sin to live together before marriage (or take another wife/concubine while still being married to another; I know these people too). The moral standard they use is similar to Obama’s: it’s a sin to be “out of alignment with [their own personal] values”. Therefore, if they think living together does not cause a moral dilemma, go for it. If religious, old-fashioned people say living together is a sin, they’re not in line with my values, and I can ignore them while still mocking them for their impropriety towards my feelings and disregard for my values.

In the end they’ll realize that old-fashioned people are right. More people than not divorce if they lived together beforehand. More abusive relationships develop after marriage if they lived together before. If contraceptives are used, the wife is seen more as an object than one that is to be loved and cherished. Families fall apart and society suffers from lack of foundation.

I will try to say something in the future if “living in sin” comes up. I guess I just fear getting my head put on a platter. I must try to “be not afraid”.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us!
John Paul the Great, pray for us!

Self-Control in the USA

Last week on Bill Moyers Journal, Andrew Bacevich talked some sense about why the United States is no longer the world leader it once was. Our overspending into dept and our oil dependence - including that of the government and individual citizens - will sink this ship ever more deeper.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I would be one of the first to confess that - I think that we have misunderstood and underestimated President Carter. He was the one President of our time who recognized, I think, the challenges awaiting us if we refused to get our house in order.

BILL MOYERS: You're the only author I have read, since I read Jimmy Carter, who gives so much time to the President's speech on July 15th, 1979. Why does that speech speak to you so strongly?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word "malaise" in the text to the address. It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don't act now, we're headed down a path in which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. And what the President was saying at the time was, we need to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom which is anchored in truth, and the way to manifest that choice, is by addressing our energy problem.

He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded.

BILL MOYERS: And he lost the election. You in fact say-

ANDREW BACEVICH: Exactly.

BILL MOYERS: -this speech killed any chance he had of winning reelection. Why? Because the American people didn't want to settle for less?

ANDREW BACEVICH: They absolutely did not. And indeed, the election of 1980 was the great expression of that, because in 1980, we have a candidate, perhaps the most skillful politician of our time, Ronald Reagan, who says that, "Doom-sayers, gloom-sayers, don't listen to them. The country's best days are ahead of us."

BILL MOYERS: Morning in America.

ANDREW BACEVICH: It's Morning in America. And you don't have to sacrifice, you can have more, all we need to do is get government out of the way, and drill more holes for oil, because the President led us to believe the supply of oil was infinite.

BILL MOYERS: You describe Ronald Reagan as the "modern prophet of profligacy. The politician who gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption."

The above quote made me think of someone who died this month: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He had some real insight into this question.

Below is my comment on Moyers' blog.

Mr. Bacevich is absolutely right on mostly everything he said.

I wonder if looking at Alexander Solzhenitsyn would help the discussion.

From two journals:

"Obviously, the demands of freedom and higher obligation are paradoxical. They seem as different as pride and humility, and there is no political solution in the real world which can reconcile them. They can be reconciled only in a world where freedom is used solely for self-limitation in service to the highest good—a condition that Solzhenitsyn sometimes compares wishfully to a new historical stage that would be as different from today as the change that occurred from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Enlightenment."
First Things

"For example, describing the Western worldview as “rationalistic humanism,” Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of “our concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.” Man has become “the master of this world . . . who bears no evil within himself,” he announced. “So all the defects of life” are attributed to “wrong social systems.”"
CE

I would be interested in how Mr. Bacevich would relate religion to the current state of US affairs.

Note that both President Carter and Solzhenitsyn came to their conclusions by Way of Christianity, by faith and reason. Without the guidance of Almighty God for self control, we'll all end up in a sunken ship in a stormy sea. As we forget about God, deny His existence and Divine Providence, and ignore His Will in our lives, we will sink deeper and deeper into the Enemy's grip.

Everyone bless God, no exceptions.

Dawkins Dreaming

The next arguments that Dawkins refutes are that God must exist because he created Beethoven (pp. 86-87) and Mozart and that God must exit because one has a personal experience with the divine (pp. 87-92). The former argument is one that seems to be out of place. Why should one argue that God exists because He created historical figures? Why shouldn’t they say that God exists because I am standing here (or writing here) because God made me in some sort of fashion (natural selection is only an intermediary explanation as will be argued later) rather than not at all? Nevertheless, why not thank God that He created Shakespeare and Haydn?

Furthermore, it is notable that we should time-remotely thank the historical figures that had the initiative to become such figures. These famous people came on the scene because they had the free will to take their opportunities or to perhaps leave them to someone else in another place and time.

According to Dawkins, “personal ‘experience’” of the divine must be delusional. However, what is his basis for judgment? Perhaps Dawkins is delusional in that he either does not have personal experiences with the divine or that he does not recognize the divine he encounters? Even if no one has encounters with the divine, how can we encounter each other if something did not create matter from nothing?

On pages 91-92, he sites the apparition at Fatima, Portugal in 1917 to 70,000 pilgrims in which it is reported that they saw the “sun ‘tear itself from the heavens and come crashing down upon the multitude’.” He says that this couldn’t have happened because there was no physical destruction of anything, including the Earth at Fatima.

He sites David Hume as saying, “’No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.’” Doesn’t Dawkins understand that this miracle is not about the physical regeneration of a removed lung, or the changing of the Eucharistic host into physical flesh? It’s a vision that tens of thousands of people witnessed at the same time. One cannot logically refute a vision with an intact planet.

Dawkins Is Not Omniscient

I actually finished The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, the pope of contemporary Militant Atheists. I agree with other Atheists that his logic in the book is embarrassing regarding the disbelief in God. If anything, the tone and rhetoric of the book will charge up Atheists to form into a political force and turn ungrounded Theists away from Theism.

I think I’ll continue wading through the book and commenting on some points that Dawkins made. However, I won’t write a post about each chapter like I have done before. Instead, I’ll break it up into small, perhaps arbitrary, book-chronological chunks.

In Chapter three, in very few pages (pp. 77-79), some of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ proofs of God’s existence are addressed. He said that God couldn’t be both omniscient and omnipotent; they are “mutually incompatible”. Why not both? Why couldn’t God act or not act (omnipotence) because He is omniscient? Why shouldn’t God know best when and when not to act, even if we think He should or shouldn’t. Who are Dawkins or myself to say that the omnipotent actions by God are not directed by his omniscience?

“To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big bang singularity’, or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading.” (p. 78) He then goes on to say the smallest piece of gold is an atom of gold.

This goes back to my Modified Toddler Theory that is really just a philosophical infinite regress instead of a positivist infinite regress. Dawkins insists that we talk physical and that only physical explanations are able to satisfy him. Without physical proof, nothing would seem to satisfy him. To this end, what would going back to the ‘big bang singularity’ prove to him? Even if it were physically explained, which is really and truly impossible without traveling back in time, one would have to explain from where the singularity originated and so on.

In order to escape from the trap of positivist infinite regress, one must invoke the less physically provable philosophical infinite regress that posits that the physicality of the universe was derived from the non-physical reality of what is called God. Nothing made God because He is not physical. He is existence itself. This existence has a persona that created physicality – in whatever way – as an act of His will.

Of course the question arrives about the current state of His being. Just because physicality is now a reality does not mean that the non-physical reality does not exist. In fact, without the non-physical reality, God, the physical reality that exists as you are reading couldn’t exist.

What about the gold atom? Looking deeper and deeper into it, the term “gold” it too cumbersome. The term “gold” describes, when observing at a near infinitesimal level, a structure that is too general to be relevant at the infinitely small scale. At the limit of the terminal regress, one can only speak of the non-physical derivation of the structure. In fact, all matter has this non-physical derivation. Therefore, God, who is existence itself, created all physical matter.

Since God has a hand in maintaining all physical reality, God is at work with all physical reality. God knows what should become reality since he created all matter in all time.

Dawkins’ problem is that he insists that a physical phenomenon, including natural selection, must explain a question. If we take his approach, we will, in reality, get nowhere. In fact, I will later posit that even using non-physical explanations will get us nowhere unless there is some kind of revelation from the non-physical reality, or there is a revelation from God.

Prayer Request

Please pray for Fr. Joe Link (formerly of the Pittsburgh Oratory) and his family.

Mary, Our Lady of Consolation, pray for us.

It’s a Wonderful Tahn

The article below was my first ever article published in any paper. It was published in The Pitt News on Tuesday, 29 February 2000. In my byline, the editor said I was never pessimistic. They didn’t know me very well.


It’s a wonderful tahn [“town” in Pittsburghese]

When’s the last time you heard, “Man, Pittsburgh sucks. There’s nothing to do ‘round here. I can’t wait to graduate and get out of this place”?

Whenever these words hit my ears, I cringe. I love this place enough to stay after graduation. How can there be such extreme perspectives on the boredom scale?

The bored among us can’t seem to find Pittsburgh’s plethora of cures. But as an independent who doesn’t just go out and drink, some small amount of creativity was bound to creep into my little ol’ head. I’ll mention some things here that came to mind.

The most obvious cure for boredom is to join a club or group. After determining things I liked to do, it was very easy to discover what groups were available to quench my active thirst. You can find out about student groups from Pitt’s home page, the student handbook or friends. The main advantage to groups is that they find activities that focus on individual’ interests.

As a Roman Catholic, I found that I wanted to learn more about Christianity. I searched for a deeper understanding and discovered many Christian fellowships on campus that met during the week, along with finding a group to learn more about Catholicism. In addition, there were also many other religious groups to study Judaism, Islam and others.

Pittsburgh is such a source of diverse cultural events that there are so many things to try – you just have to look a little. On Fridays, I go to an event called “What’s Cooking” at the Catholic Newman Center on campus. I met someone there who recently moved here to dance in the Pittsburgh Ballet Company. When I talked to her, she mentioned that she didn’t think that Pittsburgh, of all places, would be the center of so much art and culture. When I first came here from the Trenton-Philadelphia area, I shared the same sentiments, but I have since changed my mind.

While you’re here as a Pitt student, why not take advantage of free or very cheap student tickets to many cultural events ‘round the ‘Burch? If you think you hate ballet or opera, this is a great chance to actually see if you do. If you find you don’t like them, you would only lose the time spent at the event and maybe a little money. If you do like these events, you’ll be able to go back either with Pitt Arts or on your own. You’d have that many more opportunities to enjoy your newfound love.

There are many free weekly or daily resources that list happenings to suit your taste. In Pittsburgh and the City Paper list weekly events such as music performances, movies, concerts and just about anything that moves you.

You might be tempted to say, “But I don’t have a car to go anywhere.” That may be true, but there is an obvious solution: the infamous Port Authority bus. Pitt students have free bus passes on every Port Authority route. You can get a sightseeing tour of the countryside and the people of Pittsburgh (a cultural experience in itself). Even if you have nowhere to go, why not take an adventure? Take a day trip to the North Side, the South Side or Station Square. Travel to the far reaches of the Pittsburgh universe.

If all else fails, remember to keep your friends in mind. Do you know everything about your friends? Instead of going to a party where loud music is distracting, try just talking or hanging out with you friends, or play some party games such as Pictionary. Ask more serious questions to grow closer to your buddies. If you feel so inspired, break out the “Book of Questions” to get a discussion going.

Don’t put Pittsburgh down as being dead. Those who believe this aren’t asking the right questions. Pittsburgh is a mystery; therefore, there’s always chance to discover [sic]. It’s like people not pursuing their spirituality or being content in their ruts. If you do the same thing all the time and don’t try to expand your understanding or knowledge, of course you will get bored. As a result, you will become complacent about your situation or basically become disinterested in the pursuit and fall away.

Nobody ever accused Gutter Ball Master of being pessimistic.