Thursday, December 30, 2004

Why I am a Catholic (Part 1)

The short answer is that I am convinced that Catholicism is TRUE.

I am, of course, aware that many people dispute this (even many who call themselves Catholics). (I hope everyone who does dispute it leaves a comment so I can address each one--there is an answer for every question.)

Let's explore some of the claims of the Catholic Church.

First of all, one must remember that Catholicism is NOT just another Christian denomination. Denominationalism started when groups started breaking away from the Catholic Church. This is not mere opinion, but historical fact. Anyone who accepts the New Testament and believes that Jesus was the Son of God ought to recognize that He intended to, and indeed DID, found a church, the one true church. He founded it on the 12 Apostles with Peter ("Rock") as their head (Matt 16:16-19).


A thumbnail sketch of Christian history

Originally, and for a few generations after the first Christian Pentecost (Acts ch. 2), those who believed in Jesus remained a sect within Judaism. (Gradually over many years, they grew more and more distinct from other Jewish sects, and eventually the "official" Jewish leadership expelled them from the synagogue and they became a separate religion.) Over the years this one group of Jesus' followers (or disciples) spread outward from Jerusalem, and in various places came to be known by various names. Some people called them Nazarenes because they followed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In Antioch (in present day southern Turkey), they were first called Christians (Acts 11:26).

The Apostles traveled from city to city and taught the people about Christ and many converted from Judaism and paganism by their oral preaching, and were baptized. The Apostles would frequently train and ordain men to lead these local congregations. (These men were called episcopoi (bishops, or overseers) and presbyteroi (priests, or elders).)

Here and there, a number of errors began to be taught by some of these local leaders. The first big error was taught by the Judaizers, who held that all Christians had to keep observing all the minutiae of the Law of Moses. The Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1-35) was called to deal with this question, and many of the letters in the New Testament deal with it extensively.

For the first couple of decades, all teaching was in the form of oral preaching. Nothing that appears in what we today call the New Testament was penned for at least 10 years after the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. No one followed Jesus or the Apostles around taking notes (their memories were much better in those days than ours are today because they didn't have the luxury of cheap books and common literacy--they HAD to remember what they heard). And, as I said, the Apostles would appoint leaders in the towns and cities wherever they went (1 Tim 4:14; 5:22; 2 Tim 1:6) and instructed them to pass this same apostolic teaching and authority on to other men, faithfully and in its entirety (2 Tim 2:2; Titus 1:5).

Eventually all the Apostles died, but their teaching and authority lived on in the persons of the bishops they appointed (Catholics today refer to this as "apostolic succession"). Whenever doctrinal disputes arose, the bishops within the affected area would come together in synods or councils and discuss the matter and sift through the issue to separate what the Apostles actually taught from the novel and erroneous teaching. (This wasn't always easy, since often the dispute wasn't necessarily one of outright error, but might have been just new ways of expressing true apostolic teaching. The bishops' job was to figure this out, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit according to the promise of Christ (John 15:13) and to declare the truth.)

Some errors refused to go away, however. People frequently decided they knew better than the bishops, forgetting that only the bishops (as a body or "college," not individually) had the apostolic authority to declare the true apostolic doctrine. So they went off in their own groups, and their false teachings were known as "heresies," many of which persist in one form or another to this day.

By the end of the First Century (certainly by A.D. 107 or 110 when Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote his letter to the Smyrnaeans) it was apparently common to distinguish between the Christians that followed the bishops' (i.e. apostolic) teaching, and the various groups of "heretics" (those who "take out") by the word "catholic" ("of the whole," or universal). This same apostolic teaching is preserved to our own day in the one Catholic Church.


Next installment: The Bible


Some "lost" comments have been found!

Someone saved a copy of 14 of the comments that were posted on the old template (before they were deleted) and sent them to me. They were comments on the November 20th post (on same-sex "marriage"). I have now reproduced them in the comment box under that post [with a few minor editorial changes--order of some comments, corrected typos, etc.].


If anyone has similar records of any of the other comments (or can remember any of them) please e-mail them to me and I will restore them (or you can just post them yourself). Or post new ones.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

"You call that an argument?"

(...or a funny thing happened on the way to the conclusion)

"...That's not a real argument! Why, the source of your premise that the sky is blue also said the earth is flat and the stars revolve on glass spheres! Hubble proved Socrates was wrong and Darwin was right long ago, and there's no turning back the clock, you idiot. And I happen to know that the source of your claim that light refracts through a prism ate over 16 eggs and smoked 5 cigars a week (and you can't deny it), so you know his cholesterol was way out of whack! And besides, your tie clashes with your suit! Who dressed you this morning? What you should do is go to this little shop down in Greenwich Village, called Straight Lines for Crossed Eyes--they make the sweetest little things that could make even you look good. And besides, my car is much faster than your's, and I'll bet you don't even donate to Planned Parenthood. (What kind of a snob are you!?) And if your people in Congress really cared about 'the little people,' money wouldn't be a problem and Greenspan would be out on the street! It's those selfish, greedy fat-cats in big hotels who think everybody else is worthless just because their idea of fun is a little different! And you're the same way! It's NOT MY FAULT!! You have no idea how much it hurt when my dad took away the keys when I was seventeen. He had NO RIGHT! And neither do you! You pompous ass! You can't possibly know what you're talking about!! Case closed ... I WIN! (You know, you really should have done your homework before you tried to tangle with the likes of me.)"

(Any resemblence between this diatribe and a REAL rebuttal is purely coincidental.)

Monday, December 13, 2004

Logical Fallacies (non sequiturs) (partial list)

I. Fallacies of Ambiguity

1. Begging the question (petitio principii): to employ circular reasoning by using one's conclusion (in a disguised form) as a premise.

2. Complex or Leading Question: a question that is phrased in such a way that it cannot be answered without granting some particular answer to some point at issue. (E.g. "Are you still beating your wife?")

3. Accident (fallacia accidentis): improperly applying a generalization or general principle to a particular instance. This is the opposite of the hasty or sweeping generalization (see II., 3, below).

4. Continuum or "Argument of the Beard" (as in, "exactly how many whiskers must a man have before he can be said to have a beard?"): an attempt to establish that the existence of a gradual continuum between extremes is proof against any real difference between them, because there is no absolute dividing line.

5. Bad Analogy: an attempt to equate two things when only a superficial similarity exists. This is refutable by reductio ad absurdum (reducing the analogy to a patent absurdity merely by extending the line of reasoning).

6. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this): to infer causality from mere temporal priority. (Just because one event happened before another does not mean that the first event caused the second one.)

7. Composition: an argument that a property which is affirmed or denied of every part of some whole must also be affirmed or denied of the whole. (E.g. the affirmation that since all members of the Catholic Church (on earth) are sinners, therefore the Catholic Church is sinful is a fallacy of composition. The truth is that the Church, being the Bride of Christ and the Mystical Body of Christ, is a sinless society by the promise of Christ and the agency of the Holy Spirit, despite the fact that all her members remain sinners.)

8. Division: the opposite of composition; an argument that a property which is affirmed or denied of a whole must also be affirmed or denied of each of its constituent parts. (E.g. it is fallacious to affirm that, since the Church is infallible in matters of faith and morals, each one of Her members must also be likewise personally infallible. This fallacy is employed by the "We Are Church" crowd.)

9. Equivocation (equivocatio or homonymia): playing upon the double meaning of a term in a misleading or erroneous fashion.

10. Amphiboly: A sentence with a built-in ambiguity due to its peculiar structure is said to be amphibolous. The fallacy of amphiboly is committed when the amphibolous structure of a sentence is played upon in a misleading or erroneous fashion.

11. Accent: Sometimes a sentence takes on different meanings as it is accented in different ways. The fallacy of accent is committed when a false or misleading inference is made from a sentence which is improperly accented (i.e. some of its terms are unnecessarily stressed) when the same sentence, when properly accented, is perfectly true and clear.


II. Irrelevant Appeals

Aristotle identified fallacies that were committed by people who were ignorant of the question at issue. These fallacies are classified in general as ignorantio elenchi, ignorant refutations, that is to say, the person committing them either proves the wrong point or he arrives at his conclusion by a set of premises irrelevant to the point at issue, or both. With the exception of the hasty generalization, these are informal fallacies, i.e. they do not necessarily involve a formal mistake in logic, they are merely irrelevant.

1. Abusing the Man (argumentum ad hominem, arguing to the man; as opposed to arguing ad rem, to the point): there are at least four basic types:
a. Name-calling
b. "Let's-play-amateur-psychoanalyst" (calling into question the opponent's mental health)
c. Casting aspersions on the opponent's moral character
d. Poisoning the wells (an attempt to discredit the opponent absolutely, to destroy his reliability for anything in the eyes of the audience).

2. Argumentum ad populum (appeal to the people or popular sentiments): there are three main types:
a. Argumentum ad captandum vulgas (appeal to the emotions of the crowd)
b. Argumentum ad invidium (appeal to the prejudices of one's audience)
c. Argumentum ad misericordiam (appeal to the pity or sympathy of one's audience)

3. Hasty (or Sweeping) Generalization: This is committed when, after observing that a small number or a special sort of the members of some group have some property, it is then inferred that the whole group has this property. One must not draw unnecessary conclusions or make a judgment about a large population on the basis of an observation of certain members of that population who have very special positions or functions or who happen to be in extraordinary or atypical situations.

4. Shifting the Burden of Proof: The burden of proof properly rests on the proponent, the one making the assertion; the opponent has no obligation to disprove the assertion or to prove the contrary. The proponent commits a logical error if he tries to force the opponent to prove the assertion to be false when he has not adequately proven it to be true.

5. Special Pleading: citing only those facts which seem to support one's position while avoiding those which seem to undermine it. Logic requires a proponent to consider all of the pertinent facts. Special pleading misrepresents the proponent's case by excluding any facts which might damage it.

6. Red Herring: an attempt to divert attention away from the topic at hand by bringing up side-issues or subtly changing the subject altogether.

7. Straw Man: This is a misrepresentation--a caricature--of one's opponent's position, which the proponent sets up so as to easily knock it down. Since a straw man is not an accurate statement of the opponent's position, what the proponent is actually attacking is not the true position at all, but a figment of his own imagination.

8. False Antithesis, Faulty Dilemma or False Dichotomy: assuming two options to be opposite and/or mutually exclusive when such might not actually be the case. There may be more than two options and/or they may not be opposed to each other, but rather complementary aspects of a unified truth. This fallacy is the flip-side of the "argument of the beard" (continuum). Both demand an absolute division between positions which may not in fact exist.

9. Argumentum ad ignorantiam (appealing to the ignorance of the opponent or audience): basing one's argument on some field of expertise of which one presumes the opponent or audience is ignorant--very dangerous if the proponent is himself ignorant of it.

10. Misuse of Authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam (argument to modesty or bashfulness-because the proponent is attempting to hide behind some authority rather than letting his own reasoning or evidence stand subject to evaluation or scrutiny): This fallacy is related to the argumentum ad ignorantiam. One must first understand the nature and use of authority and its overall context, as well as the limitations of any single authority, or the attempt to use it may backfire in fallacy.

11. Appeal to Force (Argumentum ad baculum): This is committed when a proponent attempts to sway an opponent to accept his view by applying some real or imagined threat of force or violence. Although the appeal to force is, logically speaking, irrelevant, it is often persuasive nonetheless.

12. Cliché Thinking: "the lazy man's guide to truth;" clichés and truisms, however convenient and appropriate in casual discourse, cannot substitute for sound reasoning and must not be the basis of one's argument or point of view.

13. Chronological Snobbery: to imply in one's argument that an idea that is old is therefore no longer true; a basis for the heresy called "Modernism."

14. Hypothesis Contrary to Fact: to base one's argument on a hypothetical situation, "what might have been." "If only…" and "what if…" statements cannot serve as valid premises.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Why would I want to read Gödel?

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was a brilliant logician/mathemetician, no question about it. But unless I was a mathematics graduate student, engineer or professor (which I'm not), I can't see myself being absorbed in his writings. My occupation, hobbies, personal interests, none of these are related to the field of mathematics. I nevertheless understand logic and how to use it. Logic is basically the rules for clear reasoning. I appreciate Gödel's contributions in the area of logic. I can follow a logical argument and can recognize a number of logical fallacies. My fundamental interests however are mainly directed toward getting myself to heaven (i.e., eternal life with God) and helping my family (and as many other people as I can) to get there too.

Some people (of self-described atheist, agnostic or pagan persuasion) have recently posted comments on other blogs (e.g., bloghogger) contrasting Gödel with Thomas Aquinas, saying "I'd take Gödel over Aquinas any day." True, they both deal in "proofs," but their subject matter is of an entirely different order. It's like comparing apples with oranges (or apples with angels). Is that logical? I can understand someone preferring Gödel's theorems and proofs over Aquinas'. The objects of Gödel's proofs (impersonal propositions and equations) make no claims on our lives as persons. They don't tell us how we are to behave. However the object of Aquinas' proofs (God) certainly does make such claims, claims that require a committed response on our part. We can choose to avoid this commitment (in this life), but it becomes unavoidable in the afterlife. (For now, I have no intention to attempt to "prove" that there is an afterlife. Let's save that for another time, shall we?)

Unfortunately, the place where we will be "committed" in eternity must be freely decided (by us) in the time we have on earth. Those people who avoid making the choice in this life (i.e., those who choose not to commit themselves to the love of God), ipso facto choose eternity without Him. That's what Christians mean by "hell"--eternity without God. God does not force Himself on us, requiring us to choose Him instead, and these are our only alternatives: God or no-God.

Of course, God cannot be "proven" logically (in a mathematical sense). He cannot be reduced to an equation, nor is He an experiment that can be viewed under a microscope. He is in no way material and cannot be analyzed by material creatures throught material means. Since He is pure spirit, in order to know Him you have to accept His invitation and open yourself up to Him spiritually.

It should be equally obvious that God's mercy and action are beyond any of us to observe, much less understand. That's why the Church is competent to declare someone to be in heaven with God, but never pronounces that anyone is in hell. Not Judas, not Hitler, not Stalin, not Mao, no one. And Christians must always resist the temptation to presume to judge the condition or status of any other soul but our own. But this in no way exempts us from the responsibility (or commission) to preach the gospel to every creature (always with our actions, sometimes with our words).

Gödel no doubt said many brilliant things about how a logical argument is technically constructed, but that, by itself, won't help me get to heaven. I feel my time would be better spent in other pursuits.

Saturday, December 04, 2004

The New Look

Here it is. What do you think?
Sorry about wiping out all those interesting comments posted on the old template, but saving them would have been more trouble than it was worth (in my opinion).
New commenting system too, courtesy of Haloscan.com.

Monday, November 29, 2004

New Template

I'm thinking of changing my template in the near future. Unfortunately, I think this will wipe out all of the posted comments. (Or maybe I can find some way to preserve them. I'll see what I can do...) This won't happen for several days, maybe a week or so, but it is coming. I love these colors, but the body format is too narrow for my tastes, and I don't care much for this commenting system. I hope the new look will be easier to navigate. I'm a novice at this blogging jazz, but I know a teenager who can help the old geezer out.

Note: What you see now is the new template. Sorry, you'll never know what the old one looked like unless you have (or set up) your own Blogger account and view the ready-to-use template called "Son of Moto."

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Why "gay marriage" is an oxymoron

There can be no such thing as homosexual (same-sex) "marriage." For someone (especially the state) to call a domestic arrangement between two practicing homosexuals a "marriage" is to obscure and distort the English language. It would be as if the state attempted to modify the meaning of the word "blue." We use the English word "blue" to describe a certain reality, i.e. light within a certain frequency range and certain shades of pigmentation. Some objects are blue, and other objects are not. Suppose for a moment that the Iowa legislature, for example, were to pass a resolution, and the governor were foolish enough to sign it, that several shades of pink and other shades of yellow were now to be considered "blue." Would that actually change what blue is? Of course not. Blue would still be blue, pink would still be pink and yellow would still be yellow, regardless of the legal fiction created by the new "law." If lawyers, legislators and judges started referring to pink and yellow objects as "blue" the only result would be confusion. It is in the interest of everyone that the courts and other institutions of the state to simply recognize the reality that is BLUE and not attempt to be "more inclusive" by expanding its definition to include other hues that are NOT blue.

Likewise, a marriage is a permanent committed relationship (recognized in contractual form, but not the same thing as the contract) between one man and one woman. Permanent means that it lasts as long as both parties are alive, whether or not they actually live together in the same household. Certain conditions must be present for a marriage to occur in fact, such as both parties must be mature enough to understand what they are getting into, have complete freedom of will (not being coerced in any way), and must be free from other situations which by their nature invalidate the attempted marriage bond (called impediments--e.g., a solemn vow to the Catholic priesthood or a prior marriage).

Marriage is not a social construct., but rather flows from human nature itself. It should be obvious (but it seems it is not obvious to some) that sex is about reproduction. That's what it's for in animals, and that's what it's for in humans. The fact that it is pleasurable merely provides motivation to engage in it, and thus to propagate our species.

Sex is about babies. Babies are absolutely helpless and require an enormous amount of care and attention and a long time to grow to maturity. It's a full-time job, more than one person can handle alone, requiring an intense commitment of many years. If there are several children, the necessary commitment is prolonged.

Raising children is a multi-decade task that requires the involvement of both parents in a stable union. (This in no way denigrates the heroic efforts of those who of necessity shoulder the task alone.) Once the children are grown, the parents will be in their declining years and will have to be taking care of each other (hopefully also receiving help from their grown children).

So here is the logical progression in a nutshell: human nature leads to sex, which leads to offspring, which leads to childrearing, which leads to marriage--an institution found in every human culture and understood in the way just described.

Given that marriage is a reality of human nature, we cannot change it because we cannot change human nature. Making "laws" that coerce people to treat homosexual couples as if they were married, that would not give them the reality of what marriage is. All society would be doing is playing a word game.

The reason societies recognize the natural law institution of marriage and treat it differently than other unions is that doing so is to society's benefit. Marriage alone is capable of both producing and bringing to maturity new members for society, thus ensuring its survival. Society wants to encourage this, so it extends to the institution that provides this unique service special recognition and benefits. The more stable and successful marriages that exist in society, the stronger the society will be.

The effect of extending similar recognition and benefits to homosexual unions would be to encourage them. This would result in more people engaging in this dangerous and destructive behavior that is a net cost to society. The lifespan of homosexuals is shorter than that of heterosexuals (and always was, even before AIDS). The lifestyle results in more diseases, psychological problems, suicides, and general misery than heterosexuals. Increasing social acceptance of homosexuality hase not changed this--it is intrinsic to the behavior. Homosexual unions are also notoriously unstable. The cost society already bears through divorce would increase as the courts are flooded with cases of homosexual divorce.

Like other self-destructive behaviors, such as alcoholism or drug addiction, homosexuality places a greater burden on the community, without returning a tangible benefit in the form of new members. Obvious are the burdens on society due to the devaluation of marriage that has already ocurred by the wave of single-parent families, unwed mothers, economic hardships, abortions, divorces, juvenile delinquencies, and misery for many. Adding recognition to homosexual unions would only further these trends.

Social policy needs to be in line with reality. Treating homosexual unions as something they are not will only defeat that goal.

[Most of these points are made by Jimmy Akin, director of apologetics and evangelization at Catholic Answers in San Diego, California, in the November 2004 issue of This Rock magazine, pg.32-35.]

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Sorry it's been so long ...

...since my last post. I've been real busy. But I have many more planned and hope to get them posted real soon. So stay tuned...

And God Bless you all!

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Answering an atheist

How does one go about answering the objections to religious faith raised by atheists? (It unfortunately takes much more time to frame a cogent argument than to merely spew invective and ad hominem attacks, such as my friends and I have experienced lately.) Well, for what it’s worth, here are a few ideas to consider.

It should be apparent that everyone, even the atheist, takes some things on faith. No one has personal experience of everything, and there are some things that no one can experience directly. For example, no one has seen air or an electron, but we all (or at least most of us) believe that they exist. We can see their effects (e.g., trees moving in the wind or “tracks” made by subatomic particles under certain conditions), but cannot actually see those things directly. No one now living has seen a live dinosaur or a dodo bird. Most have never seen a Tasmanian tiger (the last known specimen died in a zoo in 1936). No one has direct experience of the Roman Empire. How do we know they ever existed? Well, because people we choose to trust for one reason or another tell us about them and we take what they say as true. We accept their authority. That’s faith. Could they be mistaken, or even lying? Yes, they frequently are. Sometimes their hypotheses, theories and explanations about the natures of some things don’t hold up under deep scrutiny. Very often they do (at least so far). But it would be irrational to reject what they say without first testing to see if it might be valid. Is it also possible that lots and lots of people say the same thing, and are still wrong? (Think of the institution of slavery.)

Some atheists hold the opinion that religion is just wishful thinking. Now, is religion wishful thinking, or is atheism lazy believing? Sometimes we reject (or more precisely, ignore) some things simply because we don’t care. Or we may have a hidden motive for rejecting certain things (oh-oh! if X is true, it might spoil my fun), so we choose to “deny” them rather than change our behavior.

It is irrational to say, “I don’t believe in anything I can’t see, touch, smell or taste. (Even if I hear it I might not believe it.)” Why? No one can see justice. You can’t touch love. You can’t taste courage (although some claim they have tasted fear). But these are things that (nearly) everyone understands and accepts as real. They exist.

Do people born blind accept the existence of color? I’m sure most do, although perhaps some do not. The mere fact that someone has no direct experience of a thing is no real argument that that thing does not (or did not) exist. It’s true of the Roman Empire. It’s true of color. It’s true of God. (Granted, this in no way proves that God does exist, but merely demonstrates the irrationality of denying His existence simply because one cannot see Him.)

A believer is someone who has seen (recognized) the effects of God (sometimes called “grace”), otherwise he wouldn’t believe. Those who deny God’s existence generally make that claim because they haven’t seen the effects He has on other people or the world around them (or they don’t accept what they do see as being effects of God).

What about the soul? Is the soul the same thing as brain activity? If a man has brain activity, we accept that he is alive (that he has a soul). When the brain activity stops, he’s dead (his soul has either departed or ceased to exist). Well, I’ll grant that brain activity is one indication of the presence of a soul. But are they actually identical, or is the brain activity merely an effect of the soul (as wind is an effect of air)? What about someone in a coma and on life-support? No apparent brain activity. Does he still have a soul? Who’s to say he doesn’t. Sometimes people recover from that condition, sometimes they don’t. It is possible to measure brain activity (or at least we think that’s what those blips are), but who can measure the soul? How would we know that the thing we were "measuring" was indeed the soul and not something else?

In the end, everyone wants to be happy. Most people will do just about anything to secure happiness, even choosing at times to deny themselves a present good (e.g., physical comfort or pleasure) for a greater good later on. Sometimes that choice itself makes them happy, often to the amazement of some other people around them. Are they being rational? If they have deliberated the matter and have good reasons for their choice (whether or not they are able to articulate them), they probably are. What is happiness anyway? Who can define it comprehensively? How does one explain the fact that so many poor and suffering Christians are happy, while so many rich and powerful atheists are miserable?

Do you like to gamble? How much are you willing to risk to “ride” your particular choice all the way to the end? Have you ever heard of Pascal’s Wager? It goes something like this: If the Christian is wrong and the atheist is right (that there is nothing after this present life, the soul simply “winks out” at death like a blown-out candle flame), then the Christian isn’t out anything except a few fleeting pleasures now and then. If he was satisfied with the choices he made during life, so what? BUT, if the Christian is right and the atheist is wrong (about the existence of an eternal heaven and hell), then the Christian has much more to gain and the atheist has so much more to lose, don’t you think? How much are you willing to risk on your choice? (As the bumper sticker says, “Those who live like there’s no hell better be right!” Or better yet, "Those who do not believe in God are going to be VERY SURPRISED when they meet Him!")

Why "the Green Flash"?

Anyone who knows anything about anything knows that the "green flash" has nothing to do with religion. It's an optical phenomenon that occurs in certain parts of the world (places like San Diego and Hawaii) at sunset (sometimes at sunrise, in places like South Carolina) when the light from the sun is refracted by the atmosphere. The "red" rays are absorbed into the disk of the sun, and the "blue" rays are scattered by the atmosphere. In between the red and the blue in the spectrum is green, and when the air is clear and clean, sometimes it is possible to see a distinct green rim above the sun as it sets (or rises) on the ocean (or on the prairie--you need a low, flat horizon). This usually lasts only for a second or so, hence the green flash. (Less common is the blue flash, and very rarely, a violet flash has been observed)

I first heard about the green flash in a college physics class (we were studying the properties of light), and I thought that sounded really cool. You can't see it in Washington State where I live--you have to be at a lower latitude. I have visited California, but I have never personally seen this phenomenon (although I have seen pictures of it). Now, I realize that pictures can be "doctored" and it could be a great hoax, but I have decided to trust what others have told me about it. I accept their authority on the subject and have no need to actually experience it for myself to believe that such a thing exists in reality.

We all believe some things we haven't directly experienced ourselves, taking their existence/truth "on faith," beliving the testimony of others. We can't experience everything ourselves, so if we refuse to take the short-cut of believing what we are told by others, we'll go though life ignorant. Sometimes we encounter hard evidence that something we had been told was false, and we have to revise our view of reality, but this doesn't happen so often that we decide that we can't ever trust anything we are told.

Blah, blah, blah! Well anyway, GREEN has always been my favorite color (it's like camping in the woods). As a kid, my favorite comicbook hero was Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), but not The Flash (I don't like red very much). As an adult leader in a Boy Scout troop, I adopted the Green Flash as a "camp name," drawing it from what I'd heard in physics class.

So I chose "the Green Flash" as my on-line persona just because I like the way it sounds, okay?

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Welcome one and all ...

It's a brand-new blog!

I am a Catholic Christian (Roman Rite) and I love discussing religion and everything that pertains to it. After all, nothing else is nearly as important as how you relate to God. You can go through life and pile up all kinds of wealth and worldly fame and acomplishments, but in the end your're going to die and leave it all behind.

How you will spend eternity all depends on how you lived your life on earth. When you die, you'll go to either heaven (usually via purgatory) or hell, and when you get there, nobody will care what kind of car you drove, what your favorite football team was (or how it finished its 1993 season) or even what you did for a living, how popular you were or what your "net worth" was (in fact, "he who dies with the most toys" usually loses!).

And eternity isn't just "a long, long time." It's "time" without time. Time in the material world is like a huge mural, and we're stuck in it. But eternity is like standing on the outside and seeing the whole mural all at once. This is too hard for us to really understand fully, since we have no experience outside time. But eventually all of us will.

Eternity is the real life. This life on earth is just the "entrance exam" to see where we'll get placed. It all depends on what we do here and now. Do we search after Truth, Goodness and Beauty, or do we chase after self-love and pleasure? If the former, we will find God and fall in love with Him, desiring to do His will, which includes especially loving and working for the welfare of our fellow man. If the latter, we will always want more but never find it, always feel a hole on the inside that we can never fill (because it is a hole God created for Himself, and only He is big enough to fill it). If our choice is self-love, then our life on earth will be a hell, and that's where we'll end up in eternity.

But as long as we're alive, we can choose which way we want to go: the path of life, or the path of death.