Catholic and Loving it!

A Serious Religious Question

It cannot have escaped the notice of our regular readers that blogging on this blog has been sparse to say the least. It's partly because we've been busy moving house but also because it has become hard to blog without upsetting people. Fr Massie has convinced me that I might do more good by giving the "proper channels" a fair chance. That means disagreeing with people in private instead of publicly on a blog. I wrote one email... one... before Fr Massie I had caused upset and that he wanted me to talk things through with him before sending any more. I foolishly gave my word that I would talk with him before sending any more emails. That was weeks ago. The "proper channels" are slow...

Anyway, it occurs to me that many readers of this blog are probably wondering why on earth I even give a toss. You people out there in the real world already know that church is crap. That's why most of you don't go. This is not news. Here is a more interesting question:

Why does a chap like James waste his time with these losers?

It seems about time I take a stab at answering that question. I will certainly benefit from the exercise. Thinking about what I think and why I think it is a very good way to spot problems with what I think and a good first step towards thinking something better. I hope you will maybe benefit, perhaps I will think something you have never thought of before. That doesn't make me cleverer, though perhaps I am luckier than you. Finally, I hope it will benefit the losers. Perhaps if the losers who run the Diocese of Middlesbrough can understand why somebody like me would choose to go against his entire generation and actually think the losers were important, maybe they could be winners after all. I certainly hope they can be winners, for we are on the same team: As long as they are losers, I am a loser myself.

A Self-evident truth...

There is a question about Science and Religion and the question is simply this... can they get along? I will not try to answer that question now, but I will borrow something from Science that I could just as easily have borrowed from Religion. Both agree on this: The need to start all explanations with a fact. Once we have a fact (e.g. It is a long way to France) we can, through reason, agree on other facts (e.g. It will take a long time to walk there).

If I am going to be a Catholic then I am going to have to have reasons and those reasons are going to have to be based on facts. Not dodgy facts either but rock solid, no-nonsense, everybody agrees, in your face facts. A famous phrase from the United States Declaration of Independence reads "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". Self-evident means they are their own evidence. You don't have to defend it because it speaks for itself.

The early Christians began with the fact of sin: "Everybody can see" they would say "that the world is screwed up" (or something like that). These days not everybody believes in sin. "Sure, bad things happen - but the world is generally a good place" they say... "get out of my face you gloomy Christians". Some people begins with the Natural Law. "Everybody can see" he says "that there is a natural law of right and wrong in the world". The sceptics disagree. "Right and wrong is just whatever your parents tell you it is" they say.

So what self-evident truth shall I start with? What truth can I present to you that we can all agree on?

The truth of Awesomeness

Humour me a while, and watch this youtube video...

"Hew Kenndy is an interesting sort of chap..."

"We didn't really make any great effort to follow medieval construction we just cut trees down and strapped them together"

"It's difficult to get hold of dead horses, people are very sentimental about horses in England"

"We didn't have a lot of problems with the design really because we must have been just lucky because as I say we didn't use any science did we we just guessed it."

"I want to get rid of this machine and, um, build a bigger one."

I hold this truth to be self-evident: Trebuchets are awesome. I do not understand how anybody could think otherwise. A trebuchet hurling a piano is pretty awesome in itself but a trebuchet hurling a piano that is on fire. Fire is awesome.

I am going to do a little logic now. If trebuchets and fire are awesome, then it must be true that there are awesome things. However, it may shock some of you to hear that there are things in the world that are not trebuchets. There are things that are not on fire. There are things that are not awesome. There are things in the world that are the very opposite of awesome. What do we call a thing that is the opposite of awesome? I call it crap, though if you wanted to be polite you could call it rubbish.

This is where I will begin. With the property of awesomeness. Whatever you think is awesome, be it trebuchets or fire or sunsets or elephants or fast cars. We can surely all agree that there are awesome things. Even if you are so negative that you think everything is rubbish, we can at least agree that some things are less rubbish than others.

In fact, let's make our opening fact as broad as possible:

Some things are better than others.

If anybody disagrees, kindly say so in the comments so we can laugh at you.

Update: Part two is now online here.