The YouTube Heresies Pt 2

Heresy 3: Scientism –

This third heresy is consistently encountered on you tube. As I also may add I see this to. This scientism is the reduction of knowledge to the scientific way of knowing. Through the roots of Descartes and Bacon European academics were urged to turn their academic energy away from theology and abstract metaphysics. People have understandably come to see the scientific way of knowing as the only true way.

Time and again it is said the only forum of truth is that which is a result of the scientific method is.  Fr. Barons retort is that it is good for empirical phenomena , but useless when it comes to questions of  a more philosophical nature such as determining the morally right and wrong.  Also scientism in itself hold a contradictory element; For the claim that all knowledge is reducible to scientific knowledge is not itself a claim that can be justified scientifically.

A few things to keep in mind the instigator of modern genetics was a friar, and the formulator of the Big Bang Theory of cosmic origins was a priest.  Also, unless the universe was understood as fundamentally intelligible, no scientist could get his work under way. You couldn’t test for gravity or anything involving gravity unless the constant of gravity was there. You couldn’t drop an apple to see how it falls because if there was no order then the apple could turn into Elvis. All schools of science basically need to take for granted the assumption that the aspect of the world they go out to meet is endowed with intelligible structure. 

Heresy 4: Religion and Violence-

This is really deep seated. We remember September 11^th. It stirred up the enlightenment era that religion is invariably violent precisely because it is irrational. Fr.Baron sees that condemners of the faith are only too acquainted with the example of violence and misbehavior in the history of the Church, like the Crusades, the inquisition, the Witch hunts, the persecution of Jews, and most recent the Clergy abuse scandal.

In it’s sacraments, it’s liturgy, it’s apostolic governance, it’s scripture and essential teachings, and in the lives of the saints the Church is the font o f living water and the untainted bride of Christ, but this does not preclude the possibility of Church people doing stupid and violent things.

Also be reminded, and Catholics and Christians and other folk of good will should not fail to remind secularist critics that the worst violence with the highest amount of casualties in human history, perpetuated by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, pol pot in the last century was not the fruit of religion but of fierce secularist and anti-religious ideologies.  

Christ slain on the cross is the whole key to the entire scope of salvation history. If you don’t look at it through that lens, It’s the fundamental logic. When Christians survey the bible they do so through the lens of the lamb any other way counter to that central logic is illegitimate.

Another way to approach the text is that God is slowly and gradually educating the human race, and adapts himself to the times to the current modes of human understanding. One of the most important ways to read it is that violent passages in the bible ought to be read as spiritual metaphors. We can see this in practice in 1 Samuel 15:33 the line “hewed agag in pieces”. If you just take this literally it sounds brutal, but when you look at it metaphorically and spiritually its depths open up.  Literalness is a real killer of getting the rue message, and it’s something even our detractors seem unable to get. It’s one of the nicest responses as Christians we can have toward the sting of secularism. Let kindness prevail. That we may shine a new window for those who have yet to see.