Homosexuality at war: An overview

Just about every day we get statistics that signal how a morass of depression and anxiety is entrapping our next generations because of the fallacies we have largely accepted under pressure from an elite of academia and mainstream news media, and from our own wishful thinking in which personal desire is the guiding principle.

This is the case for sure from WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic—and the latest example is from the Australian state of Victoria: 

Dr Ken Pang, an associate professor at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, says a sharp increase in the number of people seeking gender support means resources are stretched.

"In Victoria in 2011, there were just over 10 new referrals to the Royal Children's Hospital of young people aged under 18; in 2020, a decade later, that number was just under 500, and last year in 2021 it was over 800," Dr Pang says. 

"It is little wonder that gender clinics are struggling to keep up with demand."  

He adds:  "[...] unfortunately many of these young people struggle with depression and anxiety."

But society presses on down this avenue of political correctness. The headline on the Australian story is telling, as it points to the work being done to cultivate an excitement about the realm of queerness. It says: "Young Australians are exploring gender more than ever before". It's not hard to know why. The media salivate over anything to do with homosexuality and with sexuality in general. Social media pushes this for clickbait and naïve youngsters get entrapped.  

Because academia is aggressively full of it, schools roll out what the elite regards as cool but also as a matter of justice, such is the warped nature of the whole business, especially as parents are shunted aside and teachers and their ilk compete to signal their virtue. For example:

The educator says she will talk to these little kids about trans issues, about condoms, about porn, all kinds of things. As Rod Dreher puts it:

This is us. This is who we are today. The family is being dissolved. Male and female are being dissolved. The individual human personality is being dissolved.

 

The issue goes wider: 

The head of MI6, the CIA of Britain, publicly stated that the most fundamental difference between the West and Putin is over the way we regard LGBT. [...] You can mock the Russian Orthodox patriarch for saying that this war is about LGBT, but the top spy in the UK has done the same thing, in terms of framing the war as a moral crusade.

The central fact of the matter is this:

The LGBT struggle is a civilizational war. This is a war within the West; people like Joe Biden, as well as the educational profession, the media, and nearly all the institutions in Western society, are making war on families and children, and on traditional Christianity (and any religion that doesn’t affirm homosexuality and gender ideology).

In the West, those who hold to an anthropology that directly contradicts what Christianity and natural law teach about the meaning of sexuality, are winning. A recent poll found that 21 percent of Generation Z considers itself to be LGBT or Q. [...] We have an entire generation that American popular culture and institutions have convinced that their sexual identity is fluid, and should be infinitely explored. They are psychologically crippling these people — and in many cases, maiming them for life.

If you haven’t yet, you should read this incredible story by Helena, a detransitioner who writes about how she was convinced that she was trans, but later changed her mind. An excerpt:

My name is Helena, and as of this writing I’m a 23-year-old woman who, as a teenager, believed I was transgender. In the years since detransitioning (stopping testosterone treatment and no longer seeing myself as transgender), I’ve become interested in exploring why, in the last decade, nearly every English-speaking country has seen a meteoric rise in adolescents believing they are transgender and pursuing cosmetic medical and surgical interventions. Here, I’d like to go over how and why I came to see myself as transgender, the process of transitioning, and the events leading up to and following my detransition.

Helena continues:

So-called “gender dysphoria” [...] is now most commonly diagnosed in teenage girls. Activists will argue that these explosive numbers are a result of increased societal acceptance, and that at long last trans people are coming out of hiding and living as their authentic selves. If this were true, one might expect to see comparable rates of transgender identity across all age groups and between both sexes, but its disproportionately adolescent females feeling that warm and fuzzy inclusive acceptance.   

Dreher captures precisely where Western society is at:

[S]o central has LGBT liberation become in the hearts and minds of Westerners that any resistance to it is seen as HATE; we are conditioned to regard any objection at all as an expression of raw bigotry that under no circumstances can be seen as reasonable.

Last year I lived in Budapest for three or four months, and made occasional trips to western Europe — France, Spain, Austria — on book tour business. Each time, it was a shock to me to see how ubiquitous rainbow flags and the like were. Walking down a boulevard in Valencia, one of the biggest cities of Spain, I saw banners hung by the city government proclaiming that “in Valencia, women can have penises, and men can have vaginas.”

That is morally insane — but this kind of thing is everywhere. Even a conservative like me had become numb to it … until I spent time in Hungary, where things are different. Where homosexuality is seen as a fact of life, but not something ideological, and not as a weapon of culture war, as it is regarded in Western societies. 

I have quoted extensively from journalist and author Rod Dreher because I respect him for the clarity of thought he has on this matter, enabled by the width of the views he taps to interpret what is happening—in the US, in the West generally, and around the world. With the valuable resources he has available and the high quality of his sources, he can argue convincingly that it's not a nebulous aggregation of individuals that is being hurt by this culture war, but the families, and young people, and communities he knows. 

There is a metaphysical conflict raging, it is a civilizational war, promoted by an elite that has accepted the philosophical distortions arising from those who have discarded the life source of the Christian religion and of a personal relationship with God. Even with the West's "social fabric increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide", to quote New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it presses on with a depressingly Marxist style of intolerance. 

It's not a happy place to be in. Each person has to find the strength to safeguard themselves and their family from the ravages of this war around us that is just as real as that in Ukraine. 

💢 Read this: The West, still declining  Rod Dreher goes to the heart of society's weakness

Ω  If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Maledom gets in the way of women's rights and respect

Adele wants recognition as maledom takes control of award system

Adele's remarks last month about loving being a woman were attacked—inevitably—by those who do not accept the reality of life.

In accepting an award for Album of the Year at the Brit Awards 2022 in London, and regretting the decision to remove male and female categories, she said: 

“I understand why the name of this award has changed, but I really love being a woman and being a female artist. I do! I’m really, really proud of us. I really, really am.”

For that simple statement she was roundly condemned by transgender activists as a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which is the term of abuse used against women who, in this era of speech control by the woke elite, are brave enough to claim the right to respect for those who acknowledge the binary nature of the sexes.

American newspaper columnist Maureen Callahan makes a good point:

There’s been a push of late to make arts awards gender-neutral. The Brit Awards may have been the only high-profile event to make the leap, but there are calls to erase “Best Actress” at the Oscars and “Best Female Vocal” at the Grammys — part of an overall movement to make gender irrelevant.

For a Gen X-er like me, the pride taken by women in rock — from the 1990s riot grrrl movement to Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, Lauryn Hill, Liz Phair and a generation of women pushing sexual, political and economic boundaries — is not that long ago.

And it’s not like feminism has won. Women still make less money than men. [...] Still we are underrepresented in tech, politics, finance, film, and, according to a 2021 McKinsey report, all sectors of management.

Women have fought for a lot. We’re still fighting. We get to be proud of how far we’ve come.

As should Adele, a vanishingly small kind of global music superstar.

Consider what Courtney Love told Dazed & Confused magazine in 2016:

“There’s maybe 30 [female stars] if you count pop stars,” she said. “Think about that — on the planet. Rock stars, I don’t know — I’ve never really sat down and counted female rock stars. There’s a few, there’s 10, 15 . . . but throw a TV out on the balcony, the same stuff that Keith Richards did, the same stuff that Jim Morrison did, the same things that Bono did — that we all forgot about — yeah, I think I get judged by a double standard a lot, but that’s just the way it is.”

Adele is a grown woman singing about her experiences as a woman. Why should she be expected to defuse or deny what, essentially, is her superpower?

For all the crap she caught on Twitter, others came to her defense — a sign that we are possibly, maybe, beginning to emerge from an understandable state of overcorrection.

“Thank you @Adele,” tweeted author and refugee advocate Onjali Rauf. “For speaking the 2 words being vilified. Woman. Female.”

The way women speaking out about their own situation is policed by a faction in society that has managed to extend the critical race theory agenda into a new world of "transgender rights" was made clear by the experience of a British regional police commissioner. 

The Daily Mail reports the affair with these details:

A male-dominated panel of councillors found Lisa Townsend had not been ‘dignified or respectful’ to trans people when she supported best-selling author [JK Rowling]’s view that biologically male rapists were not female.

Mrs Townsend, who has received anonymous death threats, said last night: ‘These three men who complained, and a panel full of men who investigated it, have decided they must police a woman’s language about an issue of great concern to many women. 

‘That is the issue of the safety and rights of women to go to female-only spaces such as domestic abuse shelters. I will not stop speaking out about these issues.’

Rowling’s original tweet last December highlighted a policy introduced by Scottish police allowing male rapists to self-identify as women. 

Quoting from George Orwell’s 1984, the author wrote: ‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.’

Townsend retweeted this, writing: ‘It’s not a “niche” issue, it’s not hysterical for women to be taking to the streets about it. We will not accept this gaslighting from men who keep telling us they are women, or from those who enable them. #IStandWithJKRowling.' 

Townsend said later: ‘The panel is saying "you should not speak about this, but if you do, we’ll police the language".’

The panel’s ruling came last Tuesday – International Women’s Day. 

To pick up on a word that Townsend uses, and one that we see used a lot these days is "gaslighting". One description of its meaning is this:

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that often occurs in abusive relationships. It is a covert type of emotional abuse where the bully or abuser misleads the target, creating a false narrative and making them question their judgments and reality.

The aggressive but befuddled narrative used by those trying to polish their woke credentials has been highlighted by the tangle British Labour Party leaders get into as they try to keep trans activists on side by evading questions on their definition of "woman". In the latest case:

Yvette Cooper yesterday became the second Labour frontbencher to decline to define what a woman is.

The Shadow Home Secretary refused three times to offer a definition, saying she was not going to go down a 'rabbit hole'. 

It came a day after her colleague Anneliese Dodds, Labour's equalities spokesman, said the meaning of the word depended on 'context'.

Dodds's failure to provide a definition earned the ridicule of JK Rowling, who said she needed a dictionary and a backbone. 

BBC host Emma Barnett asked what Labour's definition of a woman was and she replied: 'There are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is.'

When asked again, Dodds replied: 'It does depend what the context is surely.

'There are people who have decided that they have to make that transition. It's been a very difficult process for many of those people. Understandably, because they live as a woman, they want to be defined as a woman.' 

Labour has often been called out for running scared of activists who know how to turn their self-interested campaign into a matter of personal rights, into the recognition of a minority, or being on the "right side of history". That there is a "culture war" in these dying days of the liberal society, where intolerance screams from the ranks of those who have "weaponized" homosexuality, splitting that community by an unwillingness to consider anything less than capitulation who want sexuality defined on their terms alone, those terms being the extreme forms of self-invention and unreality.

A typical case is that of a Los Angeles woman who transitioned to identify as a man, objecting to nurses calling her a "mom" or using "ma'am" when she gave birth to a son. She wanted the nurses to call her the "dad". See that story here. 

And there is the case of Freddy McConnell in the UK who identifies as a man and who went to the highest court in the land arguing against being stated as mother on her child's birth certificate. The Supreme Court would not accept a challenge to the Appeals Court ruling, which said that motherhood is defined as being pregnant and giving birth regardless of whether the person who does so was considered a man or a woman in law.

This ruling upheld the High Court judge's decision that the status of "mother" was afforded to a person who carries and gives birth to a baby. While McConnell's gender was recognised by law as male, his parental status of "mother" derives from the biological role of giving birth.

In the appeal court, Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett came down in favour of the right of a child born to a transgender parent to know the biological reality of its birth, rather than the parent’s right to be recognised on the birth certificate in their legal gender.

Burnett said that laws passed by parliament had not “decoupled the concept of mother from gender”. He said any interference with McConnell’s rights to family life, caused by birth registration documents describing him as a mother when he lives as his child’s father, could be justified.

The judge said the Children Act 1989 provided that a mother has automatic parental responsibility for a child from the moment of birth, adding: "No-one else has that automatic parental responsibility, including the father."

He said: "From the moment of birth someone must have parental responsibility for a newly-born child, for example, to authorise medical treatment and more generally to become responsible for its care."

McConnell said the ruling upheld the “traditional system that does not account for modern families”.

However, it is essential for society to pay the utmost attention to biological reality, to the protection of the family as the foundation of a healthy society, and to critical scrutiny of fashionable "social justice" issues, These are essential if we are to come through this era of moral breakdown that has flowed from the "sexual revolution", through gay marriage, to the general abandonment of both God-given and natural behavioural norms, and the focus on personal desire rather than service to the community.

The behaviour of those who are unthinkingly sympathetic to the LGBT movement has been characterised this way:

To a left-wing observer, discussing social justice issues incessantly from a progressive perspective signifies moral commitment to justice.

However, talking about these issues from a dissenting point of view is evidence of insane obsession with the topic. For example:

Progressive: "Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay." Conservative: "Gay?" Progressive: "Why are you so obsessed with homosexuality, you bigoted lunatic?!"

💢 See also Trans and Reality Refresher Course 

 Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published. 

Unborn baby's brave parents celebrate

Baby Violet can enjoy life because of the bravery of her mother Mikayla

A couple who had difficulty conceiving took a brave step when their second baby in 10 years was found to have spina bifida, a condition affecting the spinal cord that can lead to a range of disabilities with paralysis a possibility. 

Abortion was one option put to the Australian couple, Mikayla and Peter. 

“Realistically, not a lot of people will keep a baby who has spina bifida — it’s just the reality of it,” Peter says.

“We had two pregnancies in 10 years, and were like … if there is something out there that we can do, we will do that,” he says.

Their appreciation of the gift of new life that they have received comes through in those few words. They  accepted the doctors' offer to use their skill, and they themselves prepared to do whatever was necessary to give their daughter a chance to flourish.

Their story is given in a splendid pictorial account of two cases of in-utero surgery on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website, which can be found here. The account has photos of the surgical effort to deal with the spina bifida.

At 25 weeks’ pregnant, after undergoing a series of health checks, Mikayla and her baby are scheduled for open maternal foetal surgery at Brisbane's Mater Mothers’ Hospital.

On hand to manage the delicate procedure is a specially trained team of 15 staff, which includes a neurosurgeon, plastic surgeon, anaesthetist, sonographer, midwife, theatre nurses, and two maternal foetal medicine surgeons.

Because the spinal repair is performed on the baby while it’s still in the womb, the first part of the operation involves opening Mikayla’s abdomen to access her uterus.

“You are operating on two people virtually at the same time … through the mother, through the uterus and through the membranes,” obstetrician Glenn Gardener says. 

Once inside the womb, neurosurgeon Martin Wood repairs the hole in the baby’s spine.

“Meeting parents taking on this intervention with all of the risks to the mother and the foetus … I don’t know as a parent what I would have done in this situation,” Dr Woods says.

“Every single one of the mothers- and fathers-to-be that we have met and dealt with as part of this team — the decisions they’ve made on behalf of their children are just so brave.”

Their bravery is for the sake of the child, the tiny human they have brought into existence, the person who deserves only the best response from them.

The account ends in an upbeat fashion about the prospects of Mikayla and Peter's daughter:

Twelve weeks after having open maternal foetal surgery, Mikayla gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Violet, via caesarean section.

“They could tell everything was fine and she came straight to me for a breastfeed and didn’t leave me the whole time,” Mikayla says.

Now seven months old, Violet doesn’t need a shunt [procedure], and there are promising signs she will walk. 

What a loss to the world if Violet had been aborted! 

Personal bravery in accepting the consequences of one's actions and in concern for another living being is seen, too, in the case of  women who have an unplanned pregnancy and who shun the easy option of abortion.

Such instances have been highlighted in the account of a British doctor who helps women who start a medical abortion - using drugs only - but decide they have made the wrong decision about destroying their baby and then seek to reverse the treatment.

The doctor, cardiologist Dermot Kearney, suffered himself because of the treatment he offered women who changed their minds during a medical abortion. The Medical Council banned him from offering the treatment and he had to take the Medical Council to court over the matter. But the result was that the council withdrew its ban and cleared the procedure that he offered.

Dr Kearney has helped 32 women to give birth to healthy babies after reversing the effects of the abortion drugs. He said:

“My hope is that woman across the UK will now be told by medical regulators and abortion providers that abortion reversal treatment is safe, that it is available, and that success is possible if they regret their decision to have an abortion and choose to seek help.” 

Mothers, fathers: be brave!

💢 See also why we must protect people with Down Syndrome - A career path for people with a disability   

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Putin's evil and the holiness of God

'The holiness of God is the inaccessible centre of his eternal mystery.' Photo by Monstera

Descriptions of the war in Ukraine are seemingly not complete without a description of Putin as "evil". But does "evil" mean anything more than "bad"? For sure it does, because the term takes us back to the nature of God, the holiness of God, and the original holiness humans were endowed with before their cataclysmic rebellion, shattering their unqualified friendship with God.

So, by preferring themselves over God, and by doing so scorning God, given the gulf between creature and Creator, our first parents chose themselves before God, giving in to the devil's lies. As a result, sin and evil are now part and parcel of human history: 

What Revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when man looks into his own heart he finds he is drawn toward what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good Creator.

Often refusing to acknowledge God as his source, man has also upset the relationship which should link him to his last end; and at the same time, he has broken the right order that should reign within himself as well as between himself and other men and all creatures. 

           — Vatican Council document Gaudium et spes (1965)

What makes evil so wrong, even beyond the harm, the injustice, done to our fellow humans, is that it is an offence against the justice we owe God as our creator. Also, it strikes at the friendship that God established with us when he made us in his own image. Therefore, in the Old and New Testaments, God had to remind us "be holy for I am holy".

It's worth dwelling on what it means to be "holy". About 100 years ago, the German scholar Rudolf Otto published a book, The Idea of the Holy, and this work has remained a staple for those exploring the sphere of human experience that covers the mysterium tremendum.  Awe, awefulness, "overpoweringness", and "urgency", as well as the "wholly other", are terms that relate to the numinous and our "creature-feeling" within the spiritual world we know intimately. These terms express a reality that is apart from the collection of facts about our material world.

The holiness of God is the inaccessible centre of his eternal mystery. What is revealed of it in creation and history, Scripture calls "glory", the radiance of his majesty (Psalm 8; Isaiah 6:3). [Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) paragraph 2809]

 One biblical commentator expresses the idea well:

The most important element of God’s nature is his holiness. Holy means “set apart,” and God is clearly separate from his creation based on his nature and attributes. Holiness is the foundation of all other aspects of God’s character. Revelation 15:4 says of God, “You alone are holy.” Revelation 4:8 describes the four living creatures who sing to God day and night, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.” It is God’s holiness that makes him the “consuming fire” that will judge all sin (Hebrews 12:29). Beautiful doxologies exalting God’s holiness are found throughout Scripture, including Psalm 99:9; Psalm 33:21; Psalm 77:13; Psalm 89:18; Psalm 105:3; and others.

Another goes further: 

Because God is holy, he stands alone, apart from every other person, being or entity. He is not set apart because of arrogance, but because everything about him is higher and greater than all other creation, which puts him in a category all by himself. No one else is revered like he is. No one else is exalted like he is. No one else is holy like he is. He is set apart from all creation and is set apart from all other gods. That’s why he says, “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God” (Isaiah 45:5).

Bringing our thoughts back to how God's holiness the evil in the world around us, another writer makes this point:

Holiness has an ethical connotation as well, a sense in which God is separated from all evil. He cannot sin, He will not tempt anyone else to sin, and He can have no association with sin of any kind. He is untainted with the slightest trace of iniquity. 

More on how offensive sin is before God:

Sin is abominable to God – He hates it (cf. Deuteronomy 12:31). Sin is contrary to His nature (Isaiah 6:3; 1 John 1:5). It stains the soul and degrades humanity's nobility. Scripture calls sin "filthiness" (Proverbs 30:12; Ezekiel 24:13; James 1:21) and likens it to a putrefying corpse. Sinners are the tombs that contain stench and foulness (Matthew 23:27). The ultimate penalty – death – is the consequence of sin (Ezekiel 18:4, 20; Romans 6:3). 

Texts that convey how thoroughly the Hebrews and then the early Christians were imbued with an understanding that God is holy include these:

Job 6:10

 “But it is still my consolation,

And I rejoice in unsparing pain,

That I have not denied the words of the Holy One.”

Psalm 22:3

Yet You are holy,

O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel.

Isaiah 57:15

For thus says the high and exalted One

Who lives forever, whose name is Holy,

“I dwell on a high and holy place,

And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit

In order to revive the spirit of the lowly

And to revive the heart of the contrite.”

Isaiah 6:3

And one called out to another and said,

“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts,

The whole earth is full of His glory.”

Revelation 4:8

And the four living creatures, each one of them having six wings, are full of eyes around and within; and day and night they do not cease to say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty, who was and who is and who is to come.”

Habakkuk 1:13

Your eyes are too pure to approve evil,

And You cannot look on wickedness with favor.

Why do You look with favor

On those who deal treacherously?

Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up

Those more righteous than they?

John 17:11

I am no longer in the world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are.

1 Samuel 2:2

 “There is no one holy like the Lord,

Indeed, there is no one besides You,

Nor is there any rock like our God.”

Exodus 15:11

 “Who is like You among the gods, O Lord?

Who is like You, majestic in holiness,

Awesome in praises, working wonders?”

1 Thessalonians 4:7

For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness.

Romans 3:23

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

Acts 3:14-15 

But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.

These days, to refer to someone as "holy" may convey a negative value to the extent that charity is collocated with "cold", or "righteous" has the connotation of "hypocritical". So let's dig deeper into that term:

When people hear the word “holy,” they often think “devout” or “virtuous,” but qodesh, the word for holiness in the Hebrew Bible, is not a moral or behavioral term. It means “apartness”, conveying an inherent, critical difference between what is holy and what is not.

Unlike other divine attributes like power, justice and love, holiness has no analogue in the everyday life of Israel. It doesn’t refer to a common experience and then say God is like that. Instead, it evokes the one quality of God which is unlike anything we know.

In ancient Judaism, holiness meant the radical otherness of God, the Holy One. The divine presence is not to be approached easily or casually, either by our bodies or by our language. God dwells in a sacred zone which is highly charged, difficult and risky to enter. 

Israel’s worship practices grew up around this strict sense of separation. At the center of cultic life was a holy of holies, a space set apart from contamination by the world. And only priests, who were themselves set apart and highly trained in the intricacies of access, were allowed to have contact with this sacred center. There was a sense that if the sphere of holiness were to be contaminated or carelessly regarded, the presence of the Holy One might withdraw from Israel, and that would be disastrous. 

Leviticus, [...], contains a long section known as the Holiness Code because of its repeated use of holy and holiness, as well as related terms like sanctify, hallow, consecrate, dedicate, and sacred.  

The writer of the above adds a challenge that bears on the theme of this post, the loss of our relationship with the holy, even with the Holy One, because of inattention, even outright rebellion. He continues:

You shall be holy, for I your God am holy (Leviticus 19:2). God is not content to limit holiness to Godself. God’s people are invited to be holy as well. Not just our sanctuaries, but ourselves, are made to be set apart, consecrated, sanctified, hallowed. Biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann has called this the “obligation tradition”, where “the purpose of Israel’s life is to host the holiness of Yahweh”.

As the biblical people gradually figured out, hosting divine holiness means more than maintaining ritual purity or devotional piety. It means embodying justice and peace as well, uncontaminated by the dehumanizing, violent and oppressive practices of the dominant culture. Such holiness requires the consecration and dedication of every aspect of life to the will and purpose of God.

That God is worthy of being named "the Holy One" is brought out in the following excerpt from a series in The Guardian on philosopher-priest Thomas Aquinas's study of the human effort to know God, from ancient Greece, through the era of scholarship among the early Muslims, and into the Christian era:

Aquinas might say that we know no more of God through creation than we know of Mozart through his music. We can only allow our wonder to be awakened by the beauty of what has been created. The being of God is better understood as a verb than a noun. It is the dynamism of being that sustains all beings, so that were God to cease the activity of holding creation in being, "all nature would collapse" (ST I.104.1).

We could say that God's being is what God does, most perfectly expressed for Aquinas in the words "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14). This is what Aquinas means by God as "pure act" (actus purus). It is a simplicity of being beyond all the complexity of matter and form, body and soul, potency and act, which constitutes the universe of created beings.

Evil we know well, in the horrendous actions of world leaders, as well as in our own hearts. The point of this post is to make manifest how the mind-blowing nature of God is as far removed from evil as east is from the west, so to speak. The burden of the message here is also that the evil we perform in thought word or deed, or fail to perform, is an injustice, an offence of extreme magnitude against the God who created us to be friends in eternity.

As we have seen, God hates evil—but not the sinner—because it strikes at his essential nature, and because when we are the perpetrator of evil we commit a grave  offence against our own dignity with which God lovingly created us.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Immortality and the 'mystery of our mortal stardust'

For some, death means the joy of immortality, not "fathomless terror" 

Maria Popova has a notable presence on the internet, especially with her blog which "ferrets out nuggets of intellectual gold from the works of [literary] titans" and celebrates the creative life, including her own. I enjoy her weekly digest of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) and saw in her latest offering a series of comments that suggest that recently she has been made to face up to death.

With reference to some of the artistic figures she lays open for our edification, she speaks of "the mystery of our mortal stardust", of a poet returning "her borrowed stardust to the universe",  and her feature article is titled "The Backdoor to Immortality: Marguerite Duras on What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death". 

In that article, Popova, Bulgaria born but resident in the United States for about two decades, states her own view of death:

On some deep level beyond the reach of reason, we come to believe that the people we love are — must be, for the alternative is a fathomless terror — immortal.

 Popova has been accused of overwriting, but that aside, we go with the flow as she continues:

And so, when a loved one dies, this deepest part of us grows wild with rage at the universe — a rage skinned of sense-making, irrational and raw, unsalved by our knowledge that the entropic destiny of everything alive is to die and of everything that exists to eventually not, even the universe itself; unsalved by the the immense cosmic poetry hidden in this fact; unsalved by the luckiness of having lived at all against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise; unsalved by remembering that only because ancient archaebacteria were capable of dying, as was every organism that evolved in their wake, we and the people we love and the people we lose came to exist at all.

Therefore, there is a "bewildering rage" at death; Popova looks to Duras for insight into "what fills our fragile mortality with meaning".

What a contrast between the view of death of most of humanity and the view that Popova expresses! She draws on the secular few who, lacking the resources to avoid seeing death as anything other than terror-inspiring or as stoking rage, then struggle to find the source of meaning in life.

That is part of the reason why Silicon Valley is central to the search of virtual immortality. There's a lot of pseudoscience involved, but a life of even 1000 years is not immortality. Another question here is, "Can we really engineer away the limitations of our biology without also forfeiting the joys of physical existence?" A further read with useful insights is to be found here.

Author Tim Staples writes:

From ancient Egypt’s Book of the Dead, to Western Civilization’s Bible, every civilization, every culture, in all of human history has attested to the existence of an after-life.

Some will point out the very few exceptions—one being Hinayana (or Theravedic) Buddhism—that deny the existence of “spirit”, or the soul [...].

Actually, the exception tends to prove the rule. And this, I would argue, is certainly the case with Hinayana Buddhism. Not only is this ancient form of Buddhism an anomaly in the world of religion, but the appearance of Mahayana Buddhism (that restored belief in “God” and “the soul”), very early in the history of Buddhism, and the fact that it is today by far the largest of the three main traditions of Buddhism, tends to demonstrate that the human is so ordered to believe in the afterlife that errant thinking here or there over millennia can never keep its truth suppressed for very long.

This belief is different from such beliefs of ancient times as, for example, that the earth is the centre of the circling planets because the belief in immortality is abstract whereas the nature of the universe is a material fact. However, we can prove the natural immortality of the human person by using our reason, in the usual manner of philosophy.

Key to an understanding of immortality, which pertains only to humans, is an understanding of what is known as the soul, which all living things possess. Staples clarifies the matter:

The soul is, by definition, the unifying and vivifying principle that accounts for the life and what philosophers call the “immanent action” of all living things. The word “immanent” comes from two Latin words that mean “to remain” and “in.” “Immanent action” means the multiple parts that comprise a living being are able to act “from within” in a unified way, and in accordance with its given nature, for the good of the whole being. The soul is what accounts for this unified action that is essential for there to be life. 

 There are three categories of souls:

1. Vegetative – This category of soul empowers its host to be able to take in nutrition and hydration, grow, and reproduce others of its kind. A rock can’t do this!

2. Sensitive – An animal with a sensitive soul can also acquire sense knowledge and use locomotion to both ward off danger and to gather goods it needs to survive and thrive.

These first two categories of souls are material in nature. [... T]hey are entirely dependent upon the material body for their existence. When the host dies, the vegetative or sensitive soul ceases to exist.

3. Rational – Capable of all the above, the animal possessing a rational soul is capable of acquiring intellectual, or “spiritual”, knowledge as well, and of choosing to freely act toward chosen ends.

Now we come to death. From a philosophical viewpoint, death is philosophical definition is: “The reduction of a composite being into its component parts.” This means that the material elements of a creature whether vegetative, sensitive or human, separate from each other. For the human, part of the person is rational/spiritual.

Staples makes the necessary point:

A spirit, by definition, has no parts. There is nothing to be “reduced to its component parts”. Thus, that which is purely spiritual cannot die.

But does the death of the human body also mean that the soul dies?

To answer that question we consider that nature of the soul and the nature of the person that continues to exist. Staples elucidates: 

The two principle powers of the soul are its power to know and to will. Why do we say these powers lie in the soul? In simple terms, it is because it is the entire human that comes to “know” or to “love” (love being the highest purpose of the will) not just “part” of him/her. This would seem to indicate that the same “unifying and vivifying principle” that explains a human’s life, would also explain his/her power to know and to will.

But a human is more than just a soul. He/she also directly experiences the “I” that unifies all that he/she is and all that he/she has done down through the decades of his/her life. This “I” represents the individual “person” that constitutes each human being.

Is there a distinction between the soul and the person?  Staples explores this:

There is no doubt that the body contributes to the soul’s ability to come to know. A damaged brain is a clear indicator here. The soul needs a properly functioning brain to be able to come to know anything, ordinarily speaking.

Yet, it is also interesting to note that according to philosopher and theologian, J.P. Moreland, a human is much more than a body as well. Moreland provides this example:

“… neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk or swallow…”

But yet, Moreland says, the “patient would respond by saying, ‘I didn’t do that. You did.”’ Further, no matter how much probing and electrical prodding, Penfield found there is no place in the brain that can “cause a patient to believe or decide” (Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, p. 258.).

Thus, the “I,” or, the person, seems to use the body, or here, the brain, but the “I” is not determined by it.

We can also say with confidence that the “I” is not synonymous with the intellect and will, or the soul, either because “I” can struggle to remember, to know, or to exercise my will. There seems to be more to a person than just a body, or even just a soul. [Each person] seems to be a body/soul composite. Both [the person's] body and soul contribute to the great and mysterious “I”.

With some understanding of the soul, we can follow philosophers' train of though as they describe their seven proofs for the existence of an immortal soul.

1. The Intellect Possesses the Power of Abstraction

We have seen above that whatever is spiritual cannot die because it has no parts. Parts are also known as “accidentals”, the non-essential, or changeable, aspects of  a person, for example size, color, and weight. Humans have the capability to abstract from the conglomeration of accidentals. A person's intellect abstracts the “form” of “man-ness” from that male individual or "woman-ness" from a female individual, or "human-ness" if an observer abstracts from the accidentals of both sexes.

This “form” the intellect abstracts is an immaterial likeness of the object thought about or seen. It is ordinarily derived from a particular object, like [any individual], but it transcends the particular individual. The form gets at the essence of  [the individual]. It is that which is universal concerning individual humans]. That a person is risible (they laugh), they reason, worship, and more. This is that which is changeless and applies not just to any individual, but to all humans. And very importantly for our purpose, we must remember that this essential “form” abstracted by the intellect is a spiritual reality. It transcends the individual.

Dogs, cats, birds, and bats have memory, Staples explains. Non-rational animals do not have the power to abstract the form of “man.” Only human beings can comprehend “man-ness” or “dog-ness”.  There is a philosophical principle that “Action follows being” If the soul has this spiritual power to “abstract” the form of “tree,” or “man,” it must be spiritual. And if the soul is spiritual [so that it cannot be “reduced to its component parts”] it has to be immortal.

If this way of looking at the nature of our existence is not off-putting for you, go to Staples' article that I am using here for a full description of the argument being made. The link was given above, but here it is again. For the sake of completeness I will list the six remaining arguments offered as proof that the person is immortal.

2. The Soul Forms Ideas of Realities That Are Immaterial

3. The Will Strives for Immaterial Goods

4. The Intellect Can Reflect Upon Its Own Act of Knowledge

5. Humans Have a Natural Desire to Live Forever

6. The Testimony of Mankind Over the Centuries and Millenia (given above)

7. The Existence of the Moral Law

To end, some thoughts from a directly Christian perspective:

The reason why many people without faith in God live individualistic and materialistic lives is simply because there is no real motivation to drive them to live their lives for others, since they have only one life to live.  They only live for themselves and for this life, which is simply to enjoy and get as much pleasure out of it as possible, since we are only material beings and we do not have a soul or a spirit that lives on after death. 

This is not to say that all atheists have no moral values because they would still have a conscience, although in many instances because they do not believe in God, they have no moral reference point, and so their conscience tends to be uninformed, misinformed and sometimes warped.  When we do not have faith in an after-life, it is more difficult to tell someone to make sacrifices, deny himself, and suffer for the greater good of others.

Skeptics have often accused believers of projecting the present life to the future life, whether in terms of marriage, or pleasures, abundance of food and drink, etc.  These images have been used in scriptures but they are not literal portrayals of heaven.  Rather, like the Lord, we must be reticent about what heaven is like except the fact that life will be complete. 

There will be eternal joy and communion of life and love.  What kind of bodily existence we will have, St Paul said, “These are stupid questions” (1 Cor 15:35 JB) The resurrected life is beyond conception as Paul wrote: “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.”  (1 Cor 2:9)

In talking about mortality and immortality, whether it is of the "literary titans" of our age or previous ages or not, it is incumbent upon us to be rational rather than succumbing to enthusing over death as a tragedy in the fashion of the "archetypical Romantic" Dylan Thomas or as the dead appearing as butterflies to cheer our existence. The dead are too busy celebrating the fact of reaching their homeland and meeting the only one who can fill their hearts and minds. 

 Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Mindfulness gets poor scientific rating

At least 25% of regular meditators experienced adverse events. Photo by Shvets

David Robson is a science writer and author based in London. He has just published a book in which he explored the science delving into what affects our thinking. The book is called The Expectation Effect. In the process of his research he kept finding studies that cast doubt on much of what the mindfulness industry claims as benefits of the practice.

A key finding is that mindfulness can make life darker for the participant, rather than leading to less stress, to more energy, and to an improvement in your personality. Robson, who has been a mindfulness devotee, discusses the discrepancy between the claim and the science:

When you learn to live in the moment, the proponents say, you will find hidden reserves of empathy and compassion for those around you. That’s certainly an attractive bonus for an organisation hoping to increase co-operation in its teams. 

The scientific research, however, paints a more complicated picture of mindfulness’s effects on our behaviour, with emerging evidence that it can sometimes increase people’s selfish tendencies. According to a new paper, mindfulness may be especially harmful when we have wronged other people. By quelling our feelings of guilt, it seems, the common meditation technique discourages us from making amends for our mistakes.  

Already, there was evidence from "one study from 2019 showing that at least 25% of regular meditators have experienced adverse events, from panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of 'dissociation'.”

A study reported on in 2017 in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science is titled "Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation". In it the team of authors state: "Misinformation and poor methodology associated with past studies of mindfulness may lead public consumers to be harmed, misled, and disappointed."

They also say that their article's goals are to "inform interested scientists, the news media, and the public, to minimize harm, curb poor research practices, and staunch the flow of misinformation about the benefits, costs, and future prospects of mindfulness meditation".

Robson examines the new study which confirms these earlier doubts about the lack of scientific credentials for much of what mindfulness promises: 

[M]indfulness may be especially harmful when we have wronged other people. By quelling our feelings of guilt, it seems, the common meditation technique discourages us from making amends for our mistakes.  

"Cultivating mindfulness can distract people from their own transgressions and interpersonal obligations, occasionally relaxing one’s moral compass,” says Andrew Hafenbrack, assistant professor of management and organisation at the University of Washington, US, who led the new study.

Last year, for example, researchers from the State University of New York showed that mindfulness can exaggerate people’s selfish tendencies. If a person is already individualist, then they become even less likely to help others after meditation. 

Hafenbrack’s new study examined whether our state of mind at the time of meditating, and our social context, might influence its effects on our behaviour. 

But many negative emotions can serve a useful purpose, particularly when it comes to moral decision making. Guilt, for example, can motivate us to apologise when we have hurt someone else, or to take reparative action that might undo some of the damage we’ve done. If mindful meditation leads us to ignore that emotion, it could therefore prevent us from righting our wrongs, suspected Hafenbrack. 

To find out, he designed a series of eight experiments involving a total sample of 1,400 people using a variety of methods. In one, the participants were asked to remember and write about a situation that had made them feel guilty. Half were then asked to practice a mindfulness exercise which directed their focus to their breathing, while others were told to allow their minds to wander freely. 

Afterwards, the participants were asked to take a questionnaire that measured their feelings of guilt. They also had to imagine that they had been given $100. Their task was to estimate how much they would be willing to donate to the person they had wronged for a birthday surprise. 

As Hafenbrack had suspected, the participants who had done the mindfulness meditation reported less remorse – and they were substantially less generous towards the person they had wronged. On average, they were willing to donate just $33.39, while those who had simply let their minds wander were willing to give $40.70 – a nearly 20% difference.

Hafenbrack's further experiments comparing those who had practised mindfulness techniques and those who had not, showed negative results as to benefits of the technique. In one they offered less sincere apologies than was warranted in the context, and in another, they were less likely to support measures to reduce air pollution.

The reason why mindfulness can be oversold, and have negative impacts in fact, are given some attention in Robson's overview. He notes that the Buddhist scaffolding that makes mindfulness effective in personal growth is often absent in Western presentations:

Miguel Farias, an associate professor in experimental psychology at Coventry University, UK, says that he welcomes any studies that carefully and precisely detail the effects of mindfulness. “I certainly think that we need to start looking at the nuances.” In his book The Buddha Pill, co-written with Catherine Wikholm, he describes how mindfulness interventions in the West are often presented as a “quick fix”, while ignoring much of the ethical guidance that was part of the original religious tradition – which may be important for ensuring that the practice brings about the desired changes to people’s behaviour.

Working with Ute Kreplin at Massey University in New Zealand, Farias recently examined the available studies on meditation’s consequences for altruism and compassion, but found limited evidence for meaningful positive changes across individuals. “The effects are much weaker than had been proposed.” Like Hafenbrack, he suspects the practice can still be useful – but whether you see the desired benefits may depend on many factors, including the meditators’ personality, motivation and beliefs, he says. “Context is really important.” 

In his study on guilt, Hafenbrack found that – unlike mindful breathing – [Buddhist] loving-kindness meditation increased people’s intentions to make amends for their wrongs. “It can help people feel less bad and focus on the present moment, without having the risk of reducing the desire to repair relationships,” he says. 

Given the difficulties people are facing as they turn to alternatives to prayer, alternatives that range from the outlandish to the mainstream fashionable, it's not surprising that treatment teams have been established. Robson has information about one such group:

One researcher has even founded a non-profit organisation, Cheetah House, that offers support to ‘meditators in distress’. “We had more that 20,000 people contact us in the year 2020,” says Willoughby Britton, who is an assistant professor in psychiatry and human behaviour at [Rhode Island's] Brown University. “This is a big problem.” 

Another researcher is also wary. Julieta Galante at the University of Cambridge, recently conducted a meta-analysis reviewing the evidence to date of the benefits and difficulties arising. Robson reports her as saying:

“We really haven’t even started to unpack this.” [...] She notes that most of the studies have only looked at the effects over relatively short time periods, whereas some of the adverse effects may not emerge until much later – which is important to understand, since she points out that the standard advice is to continue meditating every day for the rest of your life. “My concern is that more and more people are practising meditation every day. And maybe it’s all fine during an eight-week course, but what happens then?”

Mindfulness trainers need to tell participants about the dark side of the practice, says Robson. Then they may have more agency in dealing with problems:

 And as I discovered myself with my own ill-fated attempts to gain mindfulness, this may sometimes include the decision that enough is enough.

One can read such articles as "McMindfulness: Buddhism as sold to you by neoliberals" to learn more about the packaging of mindfulness by leaders in the movement to make it seem less Buddhist and more scientific. On that account, for all its massive popularity, it is a mishmash of religious concepts, and principles weakly linked to science. It appears to be a secular pursuit of a goal we all have as part of our nature - "You have made us and drawn us to yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you", as Augustine put it. 

Prayer, lectio divina, and a willingness to surrender to God our Creator in seeking to follow His plan for our life, incorporate much of the elements of mindfulness, but these also involve the movement from self to An Other, and from that point to others. This is a more healthy practice than focusing on oneself fully and entirely. 

Therefore, I urge you to take seriously the warning from experienced observers, one being Masoumeh Sara Rahmani, Research Associate in Anthropology of Religion, at the UK's Coventry University. She has written this:  

Although mindfulness claims to offer a staggering collection of possible health benefits – and aligns itself with science and academia to be seen as credible – as yet there is remarkably little scientific evidence backing it up.

Ω  See also: 

        Wellness industry defiles our worthy emotions 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

For Ukraine: A prayer for peace

For Ukraine

              Prayer for Peace

O God, hear our voices

   and grant our world your peace.

Hear our voices,

   these are the voices

   of the victims of all wars and violence. 

Hear our voices,

   these are the voices of all children

   who suffer

   when we put our faith

   in weapons and war.

Hear our voices,

   for we speak for those in every country

   and in every period of history

   who do not want war

   and are ready to walk the road of peace.

O God, hear our voices

   and grant our world your peace.

Send us your Holy Spirit,

   instill into the hearts of all people

   the wisdom of peace,

   the strength of justice,

   and the joy of fellowship.

So that we may respond

   to hatred with courage and love,

   to injustice with dedication to truth,

   to suffering and need

   by the compassionate sharing

   of ourselves,

   to war with the non-violence of Jesus,

   who brings hope and peace.

Our God, hear my voice

    and grant our world your peace. Amen.