Contending For The Faith---Part 18

 

In St. Jude 1:3, we read, "Dearly beloved, taking all care to write unto you concerning your common salvation, I was under a necessity to write unto you: to beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints." [Emphasis mine]. Contending For The Faith is a series of posts dedicated to apologetics (i.e.,  the intellectual defense of the truth of the Traditional Catholic Faith) to be published the first Monday of each month.  This is the next installment.

Sadly, in this time of Great Apostasy, the faith is under attack like never before, and many Traditionalists don't know their faith well enough to defend it. Remember the words of our first pope, "But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect..." (1Peter 3:16). There are five (5) categories of attacks that will be dealt with in these posts. Attacks against:

• The existence and attributes of God
• The truth of the One True Church established by Christ for the salvation of all 
• The truth of a particular dogma or doctrine of the Church
• The truth of Catholic moral teaching
• The truth of the sedevacantist position as the only Catholic solution to what has happened since Vatican II 

In addition, controversial topics touching on the Faith will sometimes be featured, so that the problem and possible solutions may be better understood. If anyone has suggestions for topics that would fall into any of these categories, you may post them in the comments. I cannot guarantee a post on each one, but each will be carefully considered.

Worlds Apart

In the next couple of posts in this series, I'm going to be explaining various worldviews.  What is a worldview? In the simplest terms, a worldview may be defined as how one sees life and the world at large. In this manner it can be compared to a pair of glasses. How a person makes sense of the world depends upon that person’s vision, so to speak.  The interpretive lens helps people make sense of life and comprehend the world around them. Worldviews also shape people’s understanding of their unique place on Earth.

By examining different worldviews, you can understand better why people who adopt a certain worldview act the way they do. It also brings the worldview of Traditionalist Catholicism into sharper focus and allows us to try and make converts when we understand the other perspectives and their weaknesses. The first worldview to be examined will be pantheism--which undergirds almost all Eastern pagan religions and most of the occult practitioners. This post is my compilation from various sources, the most important of which will be referenced at the end of the post.

Getting Glasses--Answering Big Questions

As stated previously, worldviews function in much the same way as a pair of glasses through which a person sees the world. Rather than a disconnected or disparate group of unrelated beliefs, a carefully examined and reflective worldview consists of a network of interconnected ideas that form a unified whole. This system of beliefs then responds to the big questions of life, focusing particularly upon issues central to human concern. These issues especially include thoughts about the human predicament (why man is the way he is and why he faces the challenges he does). A person’s worldview supplies a general context for life, providing a vision of what one considers authentically real.

More than just an interpretive lens, a worldview perspective shapes, influences, and generally directs a person’s entire life. Since people behave as they believe, their worldviews guide their thoughts, attitudes, values, interpretations, perspectives, decisions, and actions. Living a well-balanced life based on realistic values requires thinking about basic and critical questions. When a worldview attempts to answer them, it functions like a chart or plan used to navigate through the journey of life.

Therefore, a well-thought-out course, or worldview, needs to answer seven ultimate concerns that philosophers identify as “the big questions of life:"

 1. Ultimate Reality: What kind of God, if any, actually exists? 

2. External Reality: Is there anything beyond the cosmos, or is what we perceive all there is?

3. Knowledge: What can be known and how can anyone know it? 

4. Origin: Where did humanity come from? 

5. Morals and Values: How should I live, and what things are important in life? 

6. Problem of Life and Resolution: What is wrong with the world? How can humanity’s problem be solved? 

7. Destiny: Will I survive the death of my body and, if so, in what state? 

When a worldview elucidates reasonable answers to these ultimate questions, life (and death) issues become much more comprehensible and easier to get through.

Are Worldviews for Everyone?

Every person thinks about the big questions of life to some degree. People who grasp the worldview concept and seriously reflect on the subjects involved undoubtedly develop more functional and coherent belief systems than those who do not. Unfortunately, many people consider philosophical reflection in general— and worldview consideration in particular—a waste of time. Ironically, however, even this position of apathy reveals a philosophical viewpoint (in that the sentiment “philosophy is a waste of time” is itself a philosophical position). Philosophy is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid. A generally unexamined or scarcely examined approach to life may explain why so many people hold underdeveloped, disjointed, and poorly understood worldviews. Though such incomplete positions may be difficult to articulate, they do exist.

A person’s worldview orientation begins very early in life and is formed by multiple factors. These influences coalesce and have a cumulative effect in developing an individual’s broad outlook on life. Some of these elements are more important than others. For example, religious training (or the lack thereof) has a much greater impact on shaping a basic worldview than language, gender, or economic status. In fact, throughout much of history in both the East and West, a person’s religious framework has established the very core of his broader worldview.

Many people, as they mature, retain the same worldview they inherited, but do so only after examining it to decide if they want to continue living according to its principles and values. Upon approaching adulthood, most young people begin to examine what they’ve been taught and then decide whether the beliefs of their upbringing are really their own or just a system "on loan" from their parents. While worldview orientation is usually inherited or adopted from one’s family and culture, it can also be deliberately chosen through reflection and analysis. 

Thus, people may challenge their childhood influences and make a change. This alteration can obviously be significant and is referred to in philosophy as a paradigm shift. To modify the classic reflective statement by the Greek philosopher Socrates, there comes a time for some when the unexamined worldview is not worth believing and living out.

Pantheism: God and the Universe are One

Here are the tenets that comprise the worldview of pantheism:

1. Ultimate Reality: What kind of God, if any, actually exists? 

Pantheism is “the doctrine that . . . nature . . . is identical with God.” This means that nature, like electrons, rocks, animals, humans, is Divine, because “all is God, and God is all.” Since pantheism makes no distinction between God and the universe, the miracle of Genesis 1:1 that states “God created” the cosmos would be impossible, because there is no God outside of the cosmos to create it. Church teaching and pantheism are contradictory ideas. The Vatican Council of 1870 condemned pantheism:

CANON 3. If anyone saith that the substance or essence of God and that of all things are one and the same: let him be anathema.

Some form of pantheism is found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and occultism, to name but three applications of pantheism. "God" is not really personal; He is really an "it" comprised of all there is. 

2. External Reality: Is there anything beyond the cosmos, or is what we perceive all there is?

Ultimate Reality is viewed as purely spiritual in nature, and not physical. This solely spiritual reality is also considered totally impersonal (or transpersonal—beyond personal and impersonal) and therefore non-rational and amoral. The Ultimate One is said to have no boundaries or divisions. It is the all-pervasive being. This singular entity reflects and encompasses all of reality and is considered wholly interrelated and interpenetrating. All divisions and distinctions are viewed as being only apparent, not real, and therefore ultimately illusory.

Some forms of pantheism proclaim that the physical universe only appears to be real but is in actuality an illusion. Other forms of pantheism declare that the universe somehow emanates from God or is created out of God (ex Deo, as opposed to the Church teaching of ex nihilo--"out of nothing"). 

3. Knowledge: What can be known and how can anyone know it?

Pantheism asserts that human beings suffer from a type of metaphysical amnesia—an ignorance of their divine nature. While one in essence with God or Ultimate Reality, human beings erroneously perceive themselves as separate, distinct, and particular entities. This striking error in identity results in maya (the Hindu term for illusion). Understood as a type of false knowledge or dream state, this condition deceives man in terms of his ultimate self-perception. The illusion about one’s true identity must be overcome to, in a sense, “reunite” with Ultimate Reality.

The key to knowledge, then, is to transcend the world of experience, which is only maya, and to uncover one’s identity as part of the divine. This is done through such practices as "mindfulness meditation," yoga, etc. 

4. Origin: Where did humanity come from?

"God" or the universe, always existed. Humans are merely part of  "god," deceived in believing each person is a particular instead of part of the All.  Humans are "god" but don't yet realize it. Once "god-realization" is achieved, it remains to "awaken" as many others as possible, thereby ending the "universal amnesia."

5. Morals and Values: How should I live, and what things are important in life? 

Pantheism subscribes to moral relativism. Moral Relativism is not one doctrine, but rather can be classified into two (2) distinct and broad theses, both of which deny an external, unchanging Moral Norm. Cultural/Normative Relativism is the teaching which holds that a person must behave in accordance with the accepted norms that have evolved in his/her society. Conceptual Relativism holds there is no such property as good or evil; rather goodness is a function or relation between an action and society. The very meaning of "right and wrong" is relative to any given society. Pantheism holds to both tenets. 

6. Problem of Life and Resolution: What is wrong with the world? How can humanity’s problem be solved? 

People are plagued by not realizing they are part of the divine and must awaken to that realization.

7. Destiny: Will I survive the death of my body and, if so, in what state? 

Reincarnation is the belief among many pantheists (esp. Hindus and Buddhists) that you will be "incarnated" (given a body) again ("re-") in order to progress and work out your karma (good and bad deeds) and ultimately escape the cycle of rebirths by attaining moksha or nirvana (a state of perfection which usually, but not always, involves the extinction of the self into "Oneness"). 

Why Pantheism is a False Worldview

Four basic criticisms:

1. The universal amnesia regarding our "divinity" cannot be satisfactorily explained.

If humanity is really "part of the divine," how is it that we are unaware of it? Wouldn't "god" know he is divine? Why does it take some guru, or yoga, or pagan meditation for "god" to realize who he is? How do we account for this "universal amnesia"?

2. How does the pantheist know that HE is not the one mis-perceiving reality?

The pantheists claim that Christians who believe in a world external to their senses are caught in the grip of an illusion, because "all is one." How does the pantheist know it is we who are deceived by our common sense experience and not himself for thinking that "all is one;" contrary to what reason and sense experience tells us?

3. If pantheism is true, we can never distinguish between fantasy and reality. 

The burden of proof is clearly on the pantheist to tell us why we should abandon our common ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy. We should believe what our experience tells us is true unless or until we have good reason to think otherwise. The pantheist reverses this and would have us believe what is counter-intuitive is true despite the lack of evidence. This is absurd.

4. If pantheism is true, there is no good or evil. 

If all is "God," then God allowed the mass murders committed by Joseph Stalin, and God allowed the altruism of St. Francis of Assisi. How can they be morally equivalent? Inanimate objects are divine on the pantheistic worldview. They have "spiritual energy." Does that mean they are self-aware? If not, how can they be equally divine with rational creatures? If so, do we harm them by throwing them or breaking them up? Don't they then have rights of some sort?

As to reincarnation in particular, here are but two reasons (apart from Church teaching) that reincarnation is both false, and the very idea of cycles of rebirth is not "giving people more chances," but actually quite evil:

1. One lifetime is enough to decide your eternal fate. What difference does it make if a person lives 7,000 years in various incarnations or 70 years in one lifetime when compared to eternity? Are not both infinitesimal when compared to eternity? Everyone is given ample opportunity to get to Heaven, and no one goes there unless they choose it! Not all experiences admit of second chances. The Hindus are fond of comparing life to a test that a kind teacher lets you retake if you fail. I could just as easily analogize to someone committing suicide by shooting himself in the head. There is no "do over," and the result is permanent. Provided that the person was of sound mind, the choice was freely made.

2. Reincarnation does nothing to explain evil and is unjust unlike Hell. Children can be baptized because they did nothing wrong in contracting Original Sin. It is simply the deprivation of sanctifying grace caused by the Fall of Adam. In a similar way, if a wealthy couple squanders millions of dollars, their children will be born into a poor state through no fault of their own but those children can work their way to wealth. Children who die without baptism are generally thought to enjoy some natural happiness (Limbo) because of no personal fault. Contrast this with reincarnation. In what sense does your self continue? If you have no memory of what you did in a past life (and you may not even exist as the same gender or on the same planet/dimension), in what sense do you survive death? If there is no bodily continuity, memory, or intellectual awareness, it seems like you're suffering for what someone else did, which is unjust.

Reincarnation also offers no solution to the problem of evil. For example, if someone is born with no arms because they assaulted people in a prior life, and they assaulted people in a prior life because before that life they couldn't control their temper, whence did evil originate? It's an infinite regress of past lives with no explanation. How did suffering begin in the first place if each life of suffering was caused by past bad karma? Moreover, there would be no free will in the view of reincarnation. Eventually, everyone will come to the same state of nirvana. So it doesn't matter if you're Hitler or St. Francis of Assisi, you both get to the same place regardless of what you do. Morality is relative. For one person bad karma may involve beating his wife, but not for another in a different society. On the other hand, Heaven and Hell are freely chosen with the wicked punished and the good rewarded.

Conclusion

Pantheism has been infallibly condemned as heretical by the One True Church, and with plenty of good reasons. It is a worldview rife with self-contradiction. Take the claim that one can only know "god" and that you are part of "god" by "emptying the mind in mediation" and the like. Pantheists say that "god" is unknowable in an intellectual way. Yet, the very claim, “God is unknowable in an intel­lectual way,” is self-defeating. For what is being affirmed is that nothing can be understood about "god" in an intellectual way. However, the pantheist expects us to intellectually know this truth that "god" cannot be understood in an intellectual way. In other words, the pantheist appears to be making a statement about God to the effect that no such statements can be made about God. 

Thus, the worldview of most pagans and occultists, resting on pantheism, is illogical, evil, and false. 

(Sources were many, and of special mention:

Dooyeweerd, Herman. Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options.Trans. John Kraay. [2003]; Harris, Robert A. The Integration of Faith and Learning: A Worldview Approach. [2004]; Sire, James W. Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, [2004]).