Why I’m Catholic (Reason 34)

Kenneth Hynek • 28th Jan 2010 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Catholicism, Religion, Christianity, Society, Law, Politics, Religion, Protestantism
atheism, Barack Obama, Catholicism, Dave Armstrong, Democratic Underground, God, Guantanamo Bay, Holy Trinity, Karl Marx, Liberal Party of Canada, Massachusetts, Protestant Reformation, Protestantism, recession, television, the Bible, the Church, US, Vancouver

From Dave Armstrong’s list:

The absence of the idea of submission to spiritual authority in Protestantism has leaked over into the civic arena, where the ideas of personal “freedom,” “rights,” and “choice” now dominate to such an extent that civic duty, communitarianism, and discipline are tragically neglected, to the detriment of a healthy society.

It shouldn’t be a controversial thing, at this late stage in our society’s decadence, to assert that we, as a society, have largely set aside the idea that rights possessed are accompanied by responsibilities in turn. We have a right to vote for one of a slate of candidates in an election; we should recognize that having such a right places several responsibilities on us, including:

• the obligation to actually get out and vote, rather than just sit at home bitching about the result
• the obligation to vote only the allowed number of times and, relatedly, the obligation to both not become involved in, and to report, any attempts by any group to taint election results with e.g. false ballots
• the obligation to inform ourselves about the issues relevant to the election and the stances if each candidate thereupon

This is one small example, but it is also a revealing one. Think of a typical election…and at how it is often genuinely surprising to hear, afterward, that fully 34% of eligible voters actually turned out, since that’s almost 2% more than in the last election. Think of any number of people whom you, good reader, may know personally who refuse to vote yet reserve the right to complain, loudly and frequently, about what the government is doing wrong. Probably, they have even worked out compicated reasoning to “explain” why yes, it-is-in-fact-perfectly-fair-thank-you-very-much that they get a say about the state of things even though they abdicated their most direct, meaningful ability to influence that state in the first place!

Vote rigging, meanwhile, is nothing new, of course. And yet while “questionable” ballots were a huge issue in the 2000 US presidential election, various examples of vote fraud (illegal voter registrations, dead people casting ballots, trunkfuls of fake ballots, etc.) in the 2008 presidential election went more or less unreported.

(No, I’m not claiming that Barack Obama stole the election…this isn’t Democratic Underground I’m running here. Obama won by a wide enough margin to leave me with no doubts that his election was anything but legitimate.)

One expects to hear of such things in far-away places, where tin-pot dictators hold “elections” periodically to give evidence to the claim that their despotism is the will of the people. But the same sort of election-rigging happens in a place like Massachusetts, or Vancouver for that matter, and seems to be doing so with increasing frequency. It’s no longer a sensational thing, or not as much as it once was.

And let us only briefly mention how woefully under-informed the average voter is today. Stephen Harper is a competent leader to a certain reasonable degree…but he’s also done some stunningly unpopular things whilst in office, and some stunningly dumb things as well. One suspects, at times. that one key to his remaining in power has to do with the fact that his principal opponents, the Liberal Party of Canada, have lately demonstrated a talent for picking leaders who do not resonate well with the public.

Things arent any better in the US. Barack Obama is president today for three reasons: “hope”, “change”, and his skin colour. And as he has yet to deliver on the first two, it’s not unreasonable to look on the third as being his principal — and ongoing — qualification for holding the office he does.

(And in a way, Obama’s most ardent supporters — in the media and amongst the general public — help to prove this on a stunningly frequent basis. One cannot attempt a criticism of any of Obama’s policies without risking being denounced as a “racist,” which suggests that even Obama’s own supporters see him first as a (half-)black man, and second as a skilled politician/orator/Messiah.)

Any reasonable person — in looking at Obama’s stated political views, and his electoral platform — could probably have predicted that Obama would have flubbed handling the recession, or that he would have gone back on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay, or that his health care bill would have started out poorly and gotten progressively worse as it made its way through the House and the Senate.

But few people actually considered such things when casting their vote, I suspect.

What’s the point to all this, the good reader might now be wondering. Weren’t we talking about Catholicism?

Well, yes, yes we were…and still are. What the above example illustrates is how, with respect to voting, things like “personal ‘freedom,’ ‘rights,’ and ‘choice’” have come to dominate the practice of voting and people’s approach thereto. And it also demonstrates how “civic duty, communitarianism, and discipline” fall by the wayside.

This happens everywhere in society, at all levels and with respect to all things. Rights predominate, but nobody takes responsibility for, or ownership of, anything…except their new 52″ flatscreen television, perhaps.

You can trace this decline back to things like the 1960s and the deconstruction of social norms that the hippies advocated — and agitated — for. That movement, in turn, grew out of, among other things, socialist philosophy, which of course owes much to e.g. Karl Marx. (Yes, I’m simplifying a bit. Bear with me.)

Marx’s philosophy, in turn, grew out of Enlightenment philosophy, including Enlightenment atheism. Indeed, atheist formed a part of the core of Marxist communism. Enlightenment atheism, in turn, was a logical outcome, and in some respects an offshoot, of the Protestant Reformation. It’s not exactly a profound logical leap to note that the rejection of the authority and validity of the Bible flows pretty naturally from a rejection of the authority and validity of the Church, who first promulgated the Biblical canon (Protestant claims of Scripture’s perspicuity and self-authentication are little more than wishful thinking).

Indeed, as was previously noted, what is an atheist if not a Calvinist who, in addition to rejecting everything else the Church teaches, has gone ahead and rejected the Holy Trinity as well?

And it is the Church alone who sets herself against all the destructive ideals that have thus far enabled — if not accelerated and encouraged — the degradation of Western society. Partly, this is because the Church alone understands who it is that has inspired all these destructive things and worked to set them in motion. And partly, this is because the Church alone understands, or grasps to the maximum possible degree, the genuine roles and obligations of men (and women) in their relationship to God, and furthermore understands that those roles and obligations are — or should be — reflected in how men and women inter-relate, both at a personal (one-to-one) level and at a societal level.

Possibly Related Stuff:

• January 26, 2010 -- Why I’m Catholic (Reason 25)
• August 26, 2008 -- The Perpetual Virginity of Mary: Mary’s Uniqueness
• August 22, 2008 -- The Perpetual Virginity of Mary: Why Mary Matters (“Behold your mother”)
• January 25, 2010 -- Why I’m Catholic (Reason 20)
• August 24, 2009 -- Another reason Calvinism is poisonous theology