Libra
After heading to school the way most 15-year-old boys do - turning off my Mom’s Shania Twain CD and blaring the radio - I walked into St. Thomas Aquinas High School runway-style with an over-confident smile full of braces. There was nothing worse than a class clown and my class had at least 20 act-now-think-later young men.
These were the good old days, the days where drawing a penis on the board was not only hilarious, but worthy of admiration. Ah, memories. I can still hear the fake fart sounds and see the spit balls flying. High school was a blast.
While the voices cracked and the growing pains continued, these were also the days where I was formally introduced to the modern-day teachings of Catholicism. Unaware of its influences at the time, I found myself in a philosophical tug-of-war with these teachings when I entered college and then university.
In a lot of ways, schools are a child’s surrogate mother...well, without the whole breastfeeding thing. While they teach young people not only about history, arithmetic and science, they also teach social skills and the community’s shared values. But in a Catholic high school, they toss in one more subject - religion.
At St. Thomas Aquinas, grade 10 was the year I learned about the Catholic perspective on the big four - homosexuality, sex, euthanasia and abortion.
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Re: The Grey Philosophy Of A Recovering Catholic
By Melkor, February 12, 2008 at 13:06I find it quite amusing that someone can 'defeat' a value judgement merely by replacing it with another - the epistemological processes are identical and would both be 'invalid' (not 'illogical' - this is a very important distiction in the analytic world).
A good article none the less. You do seem to ignore a few of the Catholic messages which would (perhaps?) seem less pejorative: feeding the poor, healing the sick etc.
I think it is unfair to blame religion for humanities wars. Sure, such things have happened and are happening - this is a shortcoming of the species me thinks and I feel it is a shortcoming to blame it on God per say (after all, if 'god' is mere convention, than are we not to blame in the final analysis?). I don't think you are saying that sans God there would be no war - that would be crazy. The wars waged in the 20th century, killing more people than all other previous wars combined, was the result of the turn toward atheism. See Europe, Asia and Africa.
However, I enjoyed reading the work, and look forward to more. A very heartfelt, balanced aproach to a difficult subject.
Re: The Grey Philosophy Of A Recovering Catholic
By Brandon, February 13, 2008 at 15:27Respectfully Melkor, I think your critique fails to go far enough. Please allow me to begin by saying that I resisted commenting on this article because of the emotional context which predicates it. It was written from a very personal and heartfelt genesis and one with which I do not wish to argue. Nevertheless, your comment seems to be one more philosophical than emotional and so I feel more comfortable engaging in this debate.
Replacing one value judgement with another accomplishes nothing short of a semantic swap. No difference is made by calling a thing "justice" rather than calling it "God". Moreover, the Catholic metaphysic states that "justice includes this behaviour and that this other behaviour is against nature or against justice". To say that the behaviours villified by the Catholic metaphysic, those that are described as against nature (kataphusia) are not wrong is merely a feeling response. What inaccuracy exists within the Catholic metaphysic itself? It is one thing to say, "all the precepts of Catholicism are bad", but how has this been proven?
Despite the feeling responses of people in the modern day, there is no inconsistency within the metaphysics which govern Catholic dogma. They are, irrespective of any value judgments or any modern moral considerations, entirely self-consistent.
Just because someone now disagrees with the resultant villification of certain behaviours (tantamount to "oh, really, I can't do that?! That's bullshit! I really really want to do that!"), doesn't mean that Catholicism is wrong prima facie.
What's really going on here is that it's easier to put the blame on the religion than on the sinner. If I want to perform a behaviour that is villified in religious dogma, I'll simply villify the religion.
Why don't I simply say this: "all of my behaviours are right, and all of the morals and values that contradict me are wrong." So, for instance, if I want to eat babies and your religion says that's wrong, then the problem is with your religion, certainly not with me and my inalieanable right to eat babies.
I've not read anywhere, here, or elsewhere, any metaphysical argument against the Catholic universe. Only whining about how difficult the rules are for a hedonist to follow. Admittedly, many of the things that modern society now accepts are villified by Catholicism. There's a choice to be made. Accept the Catholic metaphysic and admonish the behaviours it denounces in yourself, or reject the metaphysic and adopt a new one. But be warned... if your new metaphysic - your ontology lacks consistency or stability then your morality will be confused and will not help you in times of dilemma and vexation. The Catholic ontology which necessarily predicates the conclusions it allows is based on Aristotelian metaphysics, for my money this is the greatest metaphysical explanation in human history - and one without any perceivable flaw. No other ontological description comes close to the precision, consistency and flawlessness of Aristotle's ontological work, which is precisely why Aquinas chose it as his foundation for the Catholic ethos.
Show me its flaw, and I will admit that the conclusions that flow from it, flow from a broken source. Do not however, point to the conclusions themselves and say they disagree with what you want to see, with what you'd prefer to believe. That is a backward way of understanding the universe and of what it is made.
Re: The Grey Philosophy Of A Recovering Catholic
By Melkor, February 13, 2008 at 15:33I think you are confusing ontology with axiology, but I see your point. It in no way contradicts mine.
Re: The Grey Philosophy Of A Recovering Catholic
By luyen, February 11, 2008 at 19:22That's an amazing story, not so much the context of it, but the critical thinking that you went through - i know i've got my bomb shelters, and I think whether you're religious or not, you've got your bomb shelters, but religion is just so 100% absolute and dogmatic, it's the safest place you can feel, without ever challenging your own beliefs.
I'm not a Christian, but I think Jesus led an incredible life, and was a phenomenal teacher - i don't think he ever set down these absolute rules, but recognized the greys, otherwise how could he have compassion for rich, poor, sick, elderly, prostitutes, criminals alike...
Anyhow, i wish you the best on your journey of discovery, just like you've refused to believe blindly, i hope you also never reject anything outright blindly, we should avoid the two extremes!