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shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods” are probably largely ignored and superseded in today’s day-and-age by the fifth commandment (adultery) and the seventh commandment (stealing).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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I would just like to start out by stating that I have much respect for the likes of Jaclyn Glenn, T.J. Kincaid (The Amazing Atheist), Hemant Mehta (The Friendly Atheist), and all the rest.  I am inspired by your commitment to spread what you believe to be the truth about God and religion based upon the evidence available to you and your perception of that same evidence’s value.  It takes a lot to put yourself and your ideas out there, and you guys do it fearlessly and with unique styles.

I would also like to apologize in advance because you guys are all fundamentally wrong about a crucial piece of the Christian worldview—and it concerns the nature and reality of Heaven.  (Did you really expect anything different from me?  I didn't think so.)  So, following is a brief list of common misconceptions/mental farts concerning Heaven (which y’all willingly—and eagerly, I might add—perpetuate).  I will be clarifying exactly what Christians believe concerning this portion of the afterlife and those misconceptions.  So let’s get to it, shall we?

Let’s start here.  I must make a desperate plea to all atheist, agnostic, and non-theistic persons out there on the Internet, in print media, wherever: stop listening to the Fundamentalists and Protestants (but especially the Fundamentalists)!  Fundamentalists give all Christians a bad name.  Pretty much no serious Christian takes them seriously, or even particularly likes them (at least, I don’t).

Fact of the matter is that it’s easy to rip on the Fundies for their views on Heaven (and just about everything else)!  (And you’ve all figured this out, and that’s why you do what you do: easy prey.)  It’s like taking candy from a baby!  They are not intellectually prepared for the hard scrutiny to which you all mercilessly subject them, and I applaud you for your bluntness.  Good on all of you for calling them out!

Now the bad news: I challenge you all to take on a real Christian intellectual.  Try John Lennox (professor of mathematics at Oxford), Peter Kreeft, (philosopher at Boston College), or Trent Horn (Catholic apologist), then tell me you think Heaven is a bunch of B.S.  Until then, let’s stick to what the true Christian church—the Catholic Church—says about Heaven, shall we?

1.  Faith Alone?

Your typical Fundamentalist Christian will claim that it is his faith in God that will get him to Heaven, and that it is your (the unbeliever’s) lack of faith which will invoke His ire and get you sent to Hell where “you’re going to burn in eternal hell-fire for ever and ever and torture and pain and misery” as I believe Jaclyn Glenn once said.

Fact of the matter is that they are just plain wrong.  It is not just faith that will get you into Heaven.  Furthermore, what really befuddles me is why atheists do not simply reference the Bible to shut the Fundies up. (Because—and I hear this constantly—atheists, agnostics, and skeptics have read that thing cover-to-cover, found every conceivable flaw and inconsistency therein, and know so much more about the Christians’ holy book than even the Christians themselves do!)

Point-in-fact: even a cursory reading of the Bible  will show, very clearly, that the only place the phrase “faith alone” appears in Scripture is in the Book of James, and it there that it is explicitly condemned!  Therefore, it is evident at least that our salvation comes *drum roll, please!* not by faith alone!  It does, however, come principally through the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and secondarily by faith and works, which are only made possible by God’s grace.  So yeah.  Catholics: 1, Fundies, Protestants, and atheists/agnostics/skeptics/non-theists: 0

2.  God is a dick who is going to send me to Hell against my will!

Again, wrong.  God is a just judge, yes.  A just judge gives us what we deserve, right?  Well, we merit what we have desired our entire lives.  Lives centered on pride, hatred, lust, disobedience—ourselves—merit us Hell; lives centered on humility, kindness, love, obedience—God—merit us Heaven.  The upright life merits Heaven; the dissolute life merits Hell.  We reap what we sow; it’s really that simple.  The basic fact of the matter is that God will not give us what we do not deserve, and what we deserve is what we’ve been telling God we’ve wanted our whole lives, by how we’ve lived our lives.  Unbelievers have been telling God all their lives that they reject Him by their thoughts, words, and deeds in this life.  They will separation from God.  In Eternity, we simply get what we have ultimately willed our whole lives.  The atheist merits eternal separation from God—Hell—while the Fundamentalist, no matter how misguided his Christian worldview, merits eternal communion with God—Heaven.  God, terrifyingly enough, will give us what we want.  How's that for a great dad?

3.  Yeah… I’m pretty sure I’d rather be in Hell.  It sounds like waaaaay more fun.

This is always an amusing one.  I’ve heard the argument made that Hell would be preferable to Heaven because there would be lots of cool people down there (e.g., famous atheists like Darwin).  In Heaven, it would just be a bunch of whack-job Christians with no brains praising a God that’s pretty much THE definitional standard of THE ultimate douchebag.  I have also heard some atheists say that in Heaven, your mind would simply break down; because for real though: how long until you ran out of things to do up there?  For how long can you really play board games, if you’re being honest with yourself?  100 years?  1,000 years?  How long, the atheist demands to know, before you degenerate into a pile of mush and your very self just gives out from the mental strain of simply existing for so long?

At least in Hell, the atheist argues, I can chat with all the God-hating intellectuals.  I just have to fight through the agonizing pain long enough to strike up a conversation with Bill Nye, maybe, and hope that he takes a fancy to me and agrees to chat about such-and-such.  In Hell, they argue, we would only last a week—if that.  They point to real-life scenarios where people break down from torture, and they extrapolate that out to the far more severe pains of Hell and draw the conclusion that we would somehow “get out of” the torture and misery of Hell, simply because we would not be able to handle it after a certain point.

Again, sorry to disappoint, but let’s just think this through briefly.  The atheist is willing to concede (for argument's sake) that Hell exists.  He then demands that all the same old Earthly rules apply there.  He is willing to believe that his mind will just “give out” after some finite period of time in Hell because it will have been too much for him to handle by Earth’s standards.  This makes absolutely no sense!  There is no such place as “Hell” on Earth, right?  Yet, the atheist is willing to believe that all the same rules of torture and breaking points must apply in Hell as they do on Earth, even though Hell is perhaps the most otherworldy thing that we can imagine!  What part of “eternal torture” are they not grasping?  The very fact that we even posit a Hell (a place of which there literally is no compare and which, by definition, flies in the face of all that we currently know is possible, or even likely, about the natures of pain and time itself) presupposes that things probably don't work quite the same way there; but hey, I've been wrong before.

4.  You are all just robots in Heaven!

Nice try, but again, false, as are all the rest.  This seems perhaps the most plausible, however; I will grant them that.  I mean really: who would want to spend Eternity worshipping God?  He sounds like a narcissistic asshole, right?

Wrong.  In Heaven, we will worship God, first, because that is what we have willed to do our whole time on Earth—our lives were a prayer to and kind of active worship of Him—and second, because He is worthy of worship—in fact, the only thing worthy of praise and adoration.  He is every perfection desirable.  He is Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.  What better thing to worship than the Being who literally is Perfection Itself?

I do not lose my will in Heaven.  The choice to sin, odd enough as it seems to us now, is not a choice: not really anyway.  If only we knew, really knew, what we were rejecting when we sinned (our Ultimate end and joy), the suffering we caused Christ, and the damage we do to ourselves, we would never do it.  Sinning is a denial of our very selves, who we were made to be.  We reject the Designer's plan for His design when we sin.  In Heaven, this is made plain to us.  We will not sin for utter love and adoration and rapture of God.  Our choice to sin will be as stark to us now as our choice between eating our favorite meal in the company of our oldest and best friends... or getting mugged.  Or to have sex with the person of our heart’s deepest longing (our spouse)... or to step on a rusty nail on a cold November night.  It will be a no-brainer!  The deck is so stacked against sin and so in favor of God (infinitely more in his favor, actually) that sin loses every time—as it should.

Furthermore, we retain our freedom of will for sure, but we will also gain a new kind of freedom: freedom from sin.  The heavy rod of our taskmaster (Satan) will have been shattered, and we will no longer be subject to the various pressures and weaknesses and failings of Earth and our previous mode of existence.  We will have gained true freedom: freedom to be ourselves, the people God has called us to be from the consummation of the world, a place where God's will is done perfectly 1. because we all yearn and ache to do it (because we had prepared ourselves on earth) and 2. because we are truly free now to to do it always.  We will have gained interior freedom, a freedom that eliminates a divided mind, will, and heart. Doing the will of God will be what is always done because it is the only thing worth doing—or even possible.  (Selfishness and disobedience seem like options, but in the Face of God, they melt away to nothing.)

I hope my atheist friends will reconsider their stances on the afterlife and consider seriously what I’ve written here.  I hope they will look into some solid Catholic literature and live up to their call to intellectual honesty that they so strictly impose on all the rest of us.  I await their replies!

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