Everyone has heard of the Ten Commandments.  They have been lauded, mocked, and ignored.  They are the bedrock of Christian morality and a subset of now-orthodox Jewish morality.  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they most likely inform a decent chunk of your morality too (or at least of the society in which you live).

“Thou shalt not kill” is a pretty important one, and just about everyone agrees that killing is wrong except in cases like abortion or euthanasia, but I digress.  “Thou shalt not bear false witness” at least still applies in our cultures in terms of court proceedings and the oath taken therein to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you God.”  “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt honor thy father and mother” are both pretty much universally accepted as well.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery” is basically ignored and derided as the result of—to us forward thinking and open-minded moderns—tiny-mindedness, jealousy, and general primitiveness of the ancient Israelites who were only concerned with keeping women as property and with no rights and on and on and on.  It is clear we no longer respect this very simple commandment when the Internet is littered with sites set up for the express purpose of facilitating adulterous affairs among married folk.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods” are probably largely ignored and superseded in today’s day-and-age by the fifth commandment (adultery) and the seventh commandment (stealing).  The word “covet” is largely lost on modern-day society, and is indeed different from the actual acts themselves.  But this distinction—subtle though it may be—is lost on modern man, who is most definitely not in the habit of censoring his thoughts when they turn out to be evil or ill intentioned.

We now come to worst treated of the lot: the first three commandments.  All of these have to do with our relationship to God.  And guess what?  Today’s typical educated, liberal Westerner does not believe in God as Catholics understand Him.  Sure, they might believe in some kind of vague “Force” pulsating with vitality throughout the universe.

Analogous to God, who supposedly tweaked the universe into
existence--like this watchmaker.

Maybe they even believe in a Deistic conception of God, a kind of cosmic Watchmaker; a God who, after the universe was made, just let it all run like a human watchmaker does with his watches.  More likely, however, is that this typical Westerner disbelieves in anything beyond the natural realm, by definition, what we would call the supernatural—and this would surely include God.

Unless it can be empirically proven, they say, it is not real; therefore, God is not real: plain and simple.

We Catholics, however, do not have this problem.  We have a healthy dose of respect for the supernatural, and we see it at work in our lives (at least when we are paying sufficient attention).  I would like to propose a way that we can consolidate all Ten Commandments; that with this one conception of God’s Law, we will be in right standing with Him, the world, our neighbor, and ourselves.

The commandment is simple.  In fact, it is the First Commandment: “I AM the LORD your GOD… you shall have no other gods before me.”

Guess what fellow Catholics (and Christians)?!  This is it!  This is the mother lode that you were all waiting for!

This commandment is the “skeleton key” unlocking all that we need ever do in order to follow God’s Law and be in as good a standing as we ever can as creatures now predisposed to sin.

Think about it: God is the sovereign Author of life, death, the universe, the angels, morality, roses, coffee, sunlight, everything.  Sin is the free rejection of this fact.  All sin is a rebellion of our wills against the reality that we owe God our will, lives, thoughts, bodies, everything, because everything that we have—all that we are, even—is a free gift from Him who IS perfect Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

Imagine it.  If we all were acutely aware at all times of the fact that this is who God is and what we are to Him, creatures full of sin (though now adopted sons of the Father and joint-heirs with Christ by His Passion, death, and Resurrection), we would never sin.  The idea of sinning would never be heeded with any seriousness, let alone acted upon.  We would recognize that to steal, snap at our mothers, rape, or whatever, are all affronts to God: He who is offended by all sins.

All sin is disorder.  When we are in order, we are doing the will of God.  Sin is a disordering of our persons; it is putting the creature or created thing before the Creator, He who should be praised above all, for He gave all things being. Sin is, simply put, an “idolization” of that-which-is-not-God; and what could be worse than to adore, venerate, and worship a mere created thing in lieu of the Creator Himself?

Essentially, all sin is, in some way or another, a placing of ourselves above and ahead of God, He who deserves all of our very selves because it is Him alone who is worthy of any adoration as the sovereign Creator of everything.  He holds all things in being; without His constant willing of all things to have their being there would be nothing.  As St. Augustine wrote, “These things [created things] kept me far from thee; even though they were not at all unless they were in thee.”

St. Augustine thoroughly bossin' it up with his heart on fire for God.
He tried the zeal!

Pornography is the elevation of the naked form of human persons and their consequent sexual activity above God, who designed sex and the human person.  It removes love and goodness from the sexual act, divorcing it to invested third parties which seek to profit from the enslavement of men and women and the perversion of their sexuality; it is thus an affront to the Creator.

The Rape of Lucretia

Rape is the objectification of another person, placing one’s own selfish desires for sensual and carnal pleasures, as well as a disordered sense of power, ahead of the dignity of the raped.  S/He has this immutable dignity first and foremost because it is in God’s image and likeness that s/he is made.  Rape elevates power and sensuality above God and is thus an affront to the Creator.

Stealing deprives another of his right to have whatever it was that was stolen from him.  It is a lessening of another man’s dignity in his legitimate right to maintain his possession for the selfish furthering of our own ends.  It treats the person stolen from as less than a person made in God’s image and likeness and is thus an affront to the Creator.

To practice the illicit use of contraception is to place the pleasure of sexual intercourse ahead of one of the dual purposes of the act itself: bearing and rearing children.  It places selfish desires ahead of the God who designed sex to be selfless and is thus an affront to the Creator.

Abortion is a terrible evil because it robs a child of the right to life, a life given him by His Creator.  It makes man out to be a god, deciding if this or that person should live or not.  We have, at the time of an abortion, forgotten that we are mere stewards of the earth and our own lives, not the master of them.  Abortion taints Man’s purpose, elevating him above God on issues of life and death, and is thus an affront to the Creator.

Euthanasia is likewise an affront on the matter of life and death.  We have made ourselves out to be God, misusing our wills and rational natures in the pursuit of a perverted sense of the good.  We seek death for an elderly person and deprive them of the legitimate right to suffer and die with dignity.  Contrary to popular belief, suffering is not inherently wrong.  To suffer is to redeem, to sanctify, and to make whole once again.  Our own Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was not Himself above suffering; why should we be?  Euthanasia is an affront to the natural process of God’s Law for a person to suffer and atone in some way for the sins of mankind by uniting his/her suffering with the Cross of Christ and is thus an affront to the Creator.

Homosexual acts place sex above God, who created sex and the human person.  It is an elevation of a created good to the point of perversion and vileness—for it has been elevated far beyond its proper place.  We must never forget that sex is a created good, subordinate to God.  Homosexual acts are closed to the gift of life and do not proceed from genuine affective and sexual complementarity between the actors; they are a misuse of our sexual powers and are thus an affront to the Creator.

This movie was rife with fornicating teens.

Fornication is likewise offensive to the Most High because it disassociates the unitive, or lifelong, dimension of the sexual union from the procreative (because it is more often than not corrupted further by contraceptive agents and barriers).  Fornication treats the sexual act as that-which-is-to-be-desired for its own sake, or that which is good in itself.  Only God fulfills this desire in our lives.  Fornication places illicit, pre-marital sex before God who made the institution of marriage, sex, and the human person and is thus an affront to the Creator.

The list goes on forever and is as long as the possible sins that Man could ever commit. What is the underlying mechanism and commonality among the multitude, however?  It is that they all elevate Man or a created good above God, Him who deserves ALL of our attention, worship, and obedience.  Each and every sin is an affront to God because when we sin we mistake ourselves or a created good for God.  We confuse our relationship to the world and with God each and every time we sin.

St. Ignatius of Loyola (one of my personal favorites), at the outset of his Spiritual Exercises, also wrote on this principle.  (Just an aside, I probably love him more than is healthy for someone addressing the perils of placing something that is not God above God.)

First Principle and Foundation

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul,

The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created.

Hence, man is to make use of them as far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far they prove a hindrance to him.

Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, as far as we are allowed free choice and are not under any prohibition.  Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life.  The same holds true for all other things.

Our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we are created.

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This is a follow-up post.  Read Part 1 here.

To start, I just want to state for the record that it’s nice to know that there are actually people reading what I write out there on the Internet.  It’s heartening to know that I am not simply mumbling to myself in a proverbial empty room!

Despite the fact that I received vehement—and apparently widespread—disagreement with the positions that I took in the last post (which, again, you can read here, in case you haven’t already), I am thoroughly convinced that it was for the wrong reasons.  I am of the mind that I received such intense backlash not for any legitimate disagreement with my position, which was indeed contrary to Jaclyn’s, but simply because I held a position contrary to Jaclyn’s.  I am also convinced that I was targeted so viciously because I defended, in some form or fashion, orthodox Christianity: Catholicism.

None of the well over four dozen negative comments that I received actually addressed the purpose of my argument, which was to simply cast doubt upon Jaclyn’s argument.  In short, essentially all dissenting comments raised straw men and proceeded to tear them down.  This, as you all know, is an illegitimate form of argumentative strategy.

For starters, let’s begin with the over-arching, central idea of the Part 1 post.  This commenter encapsulates the general misunderstanding and ill will toward my argument:

I was in no way putting forth my own argument.  Putting forth one’s own argument involves developing premises that most can mostly agree with, stringing them together, and demonstrating that a conclusion follows from them.  If you reread the last post, you will see that the content therein created a negative argument.  I was simply trying to show that Jaclyn’s argument had some major flaws.  I did not put forward my own positive argument that would also stand on its own merits.

With that out of the way, let’s continue with the main sticking points.

Use of the Bible

I get that you all don’t respect the Bible as serious scholarship, and that you also think that to use the Bible is to be automatically guilty of circular logic.  This is not always the case.  Regardless, I was never arguing for the reliability of the Bible in Part 1; that was not the point of the post.

Similarly, if you all detest the use of the Bible so much, then why, pray tell, are so many of the comments riddled with Bible references combatting my supposed “use of the Bible” to build my counterargument?  Don’t use the Bible in any way to combat my alleged “use” of the Bible if you think that the book cannot ever be used in any credible way in any situation.  That’s just inconsistent and poor argument strategy.

Case-in-point:

You have to wonder why this person calls the Bible an “outdated holy book” to shame my using it, but then turns around and quotes from it (“My God, [My God,] why hath thou forsaken me?”) to attack what he perceives to be my argument.

Also, that quotation comes from Psalm 22, which ends triumphantly, not in despair as you claim it does.

Another commenter had this to say:

Again, this person claims that the Bible has no legitimacy, yet he uses an idea from Jesus’ encounter with Pilate, present in the Bible itself, to somehow “take-down” my argument.  He is only attacking a straw man; however, since I never claimed to try and demonstrate Jesus’ divinity.

Reliability of the Bible

If we were to subject other historical documents to the same level of scrutiny that skeptics demand we subject the New Testament to, the fact of the matter is that we would know almost nothing about history.  We have more evidence for Jesus than we do for Alexander the Great or for Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon.  We have more copies of the New Testament than we do Homer’s Iliad, yet no one doubts that Homer wrote the Iliad or that we know what it says.

My theory is that people so resent the authenticity of the Bible and Jesus’ existence because this book, the Bible, and that person, Jesus, demand things of us that we are uncomfortable complying with.  From prohibitions on homosexuality to demands to love one’s enemies and to be perfect, Jesus and the Bible, one of His mouthpieces, demand much from us; Caesar, Alexander the Great, and the Iliad do no such thing.  We are comfortable with the latter because they demand nothing from us, no change at all; but we are uneasy with the former because they require much effort and discomfort from us.

Historicity of Jesus

I find it appalling and utterly anti-intellectual that Jaclyn could make the insinuation that Jesus might not have existed and that most of the commenters felt even surer than she that He did not exist.  It is a well-established fact that Jesus THE MAN existed.  This has nothing to do with His divine identity.  I was merely concerned with THE MAN in the last post when I said that He existed.

Now, on a somewhat lighter note, I get that clicking on in-text links is a burden and disrupts the flow of the post for the reader.  I’m totally on your guys’ side on this one.  I am guilty of it myself.  I often do not click in-text links—no doubt provided for my own enrichment on the current topic at hand—to my detriment, I’m sure.  However, if you are going to comment on a blogger’s post, and the specific place within the post that you are referencing has these links, perhaps they should be clicked on?

From the last post, I offered these two sources of evidence for the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth here and here.  If you need more, here are two more: here and here.

In short, just because you did not click on the evidential links that I provided in the Part 1 post for the existence of the historical Jesus does not mean that there is no such evidence. I am likewise guilty of not clicking on internal blog post links, but don’t not click on them and then act like I didn’t provide any evidence.

Identity of Jesus

Again, I never put forward my own argument concerning Jesus’ identity as the Son of God.  That was not the purpose of the post.  I was responding to Jaclyn, weaving a negative argument, not a positive one (where I defend premises that ultimately lead to a conclusion that we can either accept or reject).  I never wrote, and then subsequently defended the notion, that Jesus was the Son of God!  I made the assertion that even if Jesus was the Son of God—which Jaclyn was willing to concede in her video—what she ends up saying does not make Him look any worse for wear.  She tried to demean His ordeal—again, she is willing to concede this in her video (watch it again if you don’t remember)—and I simply demonstrated why she failed in the attempt.

Un-scientific Neanderthal?!

I also am very unsure why I was blasted for apparently knowing nothing about science.  That has nothing to do with the ideas I presented in the Part 1 post!  Stick to the topic at hand, and keep the ad hominem attacks to a zero, please.

In conclusion

There are four final commenters that I would like to address directly in this section of the post.  The first, Perseus, because he had a well-thought objection; the second, Karl Denton, because I am absolutely sure that he had mistaken me for someone else; the third, Chris Morris, because his point is so egregiously wrong that I felt obligated to correct it; and the fourth, a group of posters, for their illogical claim that the Holocaust is off-limits.

Perseus

I am actually a philosophy major so I know quite a bit about Descartes, Perseus.  His famous quote, “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think; therefore, I am”) is famous because it “proved” (insofar as something like this can be proved) that we do actually exist. Descartes demonstrated in a short sentence the profundity of the reality of our existence.  He demonstrated that to doubt one’s existence is not very logical.

Essentially, Descartes was of the opinion that one could not consistently doubt his own existence because doubting implies thinking, and thinking implies a thinker.  Here is where the issue many scholars have with his position.  What you leave out (either out of ignorance or on purpose, I do not know) is that his premise/famous line relied on a belief in God, whom he believed could be perceived clearly and distinctly—a priori—or without the benefit of experience or by a purely mental and logical effort.  He believed that things that could be perceived clearly and distinctly were true because God was not a deceiver and would not allow such clear and distinct perceptions to be inaccurate.  So your “champion” of premises actually believed something you do not (he was Jesuit educated), and therefore, advances your point nowhere.

Finally, I am not sure where I added the “God exists…” part to Descartes’ premise in my post.  I gave no premises, and you will see this clearly from what you should have read previously in this current post.

Karl Denton

You most definitely have me confused with someone else, and this is my attempt to set the record straight.  I have never been on YouTube, and I have most definitely never been kicked off the site!

Chris Morris

The growing number of atheists and non-theistic Christians, while surely interesting from a sociological and societal/cultural perspective, is immaterial to the truth of the matter at hand.  Basically, your point is that because a bunch of people believe something isn’t true, it just… isn’t.  I’m confused; since when was Truth up for a vote?

I’m sure that you would reject the idea that, because there are lots and lots of Creationists out there, evolution is false?  You would likely say that these people are wrong.  What about before it was scientifically verified that the Earth is not flat?  A bunch of people before that moment believed that it was.  Did that strongly held belief make the Earth flat?  In the same way, these peoples’ subjective feelings about the evidence and reality of Jesus’ existence has absolutely no bearing on whether or not Jesus existed.  A belief in something does not equate to that something’s truth, as I’ve said previously.

Finally, Jesus did in fact trash others’ beliefs.  (See all His interactions with the hypocritical and hard-of-heart Jewish leaders for more on this.)  I am also surprised that you would claim that He never forced His own beliefs onto others.  Wouldn’t you say that the notion that all who do not believe in Him will go to Hell is pretty forceful and pushy?  What about, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to Father except through me.”  That’s pretty forceful and exclusive, wouldn’t’cha say?

Others

You will see how silly this shared sentiment is with this example: so the Holocaust can never be used in any way to promote any kind of recruiting for anything whatsoever, huh?  Okay.  Well, what about U.S. military recruiting to stop the Holocaust?  Would the U.S. have been permitted to run ads displaying the cruelty of the Nazi Germany in order to marshal support to put a stop to the barbarism and blatant evil?  Your demand to keep the Holocaust separate from all conflicts or causes is disingenuous, illogical, and, most importantly, dangerous.

Well, I hope this cleared things up!  Stay tuned for the next post!


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