{"id":34,"date":"2014-08-26T02:07:02","date_gmt":"2014-08-26T06:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=34"},"modified":"2015-08-19T11:56:34","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T15:56:34","slug":"can-religion-be-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=34","title":{"rendered":"Can Religion be Evil?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"isis<\/a>Richard Dawkins, like his intellectual ancestors David Hume, Feurbach, Emile Zola and countless others, claims not to be religious. In saying so, more times than I care to count, he is not being entirely honest, for whether Dr. Dawkins realizes it or not, Man by his very nature<\/em> is a religious being. \u00a0Aristotle claimed that Man was a rational and, therefore, a political, animal (and therefore one could not escape thinking and,alas, politics).\u00a0 The Church goes further, and declares that Man also cannot avoid the fact that he is religious.<\/p>\n

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Religion<\/em>, derived from the Latin verb ligare<\/em>, to bind or to fasten, may be defined in a broad sense as those a priori<\/em> principles, whether explicitly declared or not, to which we are bound, that guide our actions.\u00a0 Dawkins would not admit that he is religious, by which he would presumably mean that he is not bound to a revealed (particularly Christian) religion, requiring adherence to a divine being.\u00a0 He would call his principles a \u2018set of values\u2019 or a \u2018hierarchy of goods\u2019.\u00a0 But, call it what he may, he still has a \u2018religion\u2019, all those things he believes that guide what he does, how he thinks, what he teaches, and what he writes.<\/p>\n

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Take, for example, Professor Dawkins\u2019 recent tweet that it is immoral to bring a Down\u2019s Syndrome baby into the world; rather, he said, the only moral thing to do when a mother receives such a diagnosis is to abort her child.\u00a0 Dawkins has received much backlash for his post, but he is simply acting on his religious principles (and reiterating in a more dogmatic way what most people already do in practice).<\/p>\n

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Although not always the strongest impulse in Man (our passions are often more powerful!), religion is the most fundamental (excuse the pun), in the sense that everything we do is ultimately guided by our religion.\u00a0 One\u2019s religion need not be explicit:\u00a0 One can adopt hedonism, wherein the pursuit of pleasure becomes the guiding principle, or self-worship, or Communism, or Christianity, Buddhism or Islam.<\/p>\n

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As the source of all that Men do, religion is a force of the greatest good, or the greatest evil.\u00a0 As the Roman poet Juvenal wrote, corruptio optimi pessima<\/em>, the corruption of the best is the worst.\u00a0 Since evil is nothing more than a privation of good, that is, something \u2018missing\u2019 in an already existing good, the more good something has, the more capacity it has for evil.\u00a0 After all, in tribute to fellow sci-fi geeks, Darth Vader would not be menacing if he were three feet tall dressed in pink.\u00a0 \u00a0And, on a more realistic note, Satan is only so evil because he is, or was, so good.<\/p>\n

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That is also why our choice of which religion to adopt and follow is the most important decision we can make in this life. \u00a0We should keep in mind, for those inclined to an agnostic insousiance, that not to choose is itself a choice, for even indifferentism, the philosophy of \u2018who gives a rat\u2019s behind about anything at all\u2019, is a kind of religion.\u00a0 So it is incumbent on us to choose our religion wisely.<\/p>\n

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Most of us make this choice at some point in our journey to adulthood.\u00a0 Will we adopt religion\u00a0(the principles)\u00a0of our parents?\u00a0 Or go off on our own, for good or ill?<\/p>\n

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It makes sense that if God does exist, and exist He must, then He would reveal the religion that is most conducive to our own good as human beings. This we call the \u2018true religion\u2019, for, by the nature of truth (specifically, the principle of non-contradiction, to which even God Himself is \u2018bound\u2019), religions cannot contradict one another, and still both be true.\u00a0 Either Christ came in the flesh, or He did not; either the priesthood and Eucharist are real, or they are not; abortion is either murder, or it is not, and so on.<\/p>\n

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Of course, most faith groups on this planet claim that God revealed their religion but, ultimately, only one of them can be true.\u00a0 The rest will be, to a greater or lesser extent, either missing some truths, or outright false.<\/p>\n

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The more false principles the religion contains, or the more truths missing from the religion, the more evil it can be.\u00a0 The ancient Canaanites believed in sacrificing children as part of their religions ceremonies.\u00a0 Reason tells us that this is evil, and cannot be tolerated in a society; in fact, such practices are, to put it mildly, counter-productive to any society.\u00a0 Hence, their religion, at least to that extent, was evil. In fact, it was so evil that God decreeds its eradication.<\/p>\n

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Pope Leo XIII wrote in his landmark encyclical Immoratale Dei<\/em> in 1885 that there are many signs which point to the true religion, insofar as it accords with human nature, our own happiness, peace, concord, the moral law and so on.\u00a0 Of course, the Holy Father believes, as do I, that Catholicism is the true religion.\u00a0 A hundred or so years later, Dignitatis Humanae<\/em> taught that this one true religion subsists in the Catholic Church, and that other religions are true insofar as they share the truth of the Church.<\/p>\n

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What we are witnessing now in the world is the corruptio religionis<\/em>, the corruption of religion itself, which leads to great evil, for no evil is done more willingly than that done in the name of religion.\u00a0 But this is not entirely new. Under Henry VIII\u2019s Tudor reign, those deviating from his understanding of religion would be put to death by hanging, drawing and quartering, the gruesome details of which probably could not be described in this post (well, I suppose I am my own censor, but you, dear reader, can look it up).\u00a0 \u00a0There was also death by \u2018pressing\u2019, wherein a heavy door was placed on top of the prone victim, with a sharp stone under his back, and bigger stones placed gradually on top of the door until suffocation ensued; sometimes onlookers were permitted to jump on top for a quicker, more mericful death.\u00a0 See the martyrdom of Saint Margaret Clitherow, a mother and wife, for details.<\/p>\n

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Of course, in Tudor England, and in current varieties of Islam, violating the religion of the State was seen also as an act of treason, but the point is still taken.\u00a0 For then the State becomes, to some degree, one\u2019s religion.\u00a0 We see the culmination of the \u2018State as religion\u2019, ironically, in the atheistic and purpotedly non-religious Communist regimes, the mountain of whose evils are nigh-indescribable.<\/p>\n

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So, great evil can be done in the name of the religion, but religion is also the source of the greatest good. \u00a0Most of the good principles that our individual and societal conduct are from the Judeo-Christian religion. \u00a0But, alas, we are losing our own conviction in the truths of these principles, and it is generally when we are acting contrary to our principles that we act half-heartedly.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t really think that Dawkins and company really, deep down, believe some of the things they say. \u00a0I really do hope they have elements of Christianity at heart, or at least someday will so have. \u00a0In his ravings, Dawkins seems in particular to ‘protest too much methinks’. \u00a0Perhaps he is trying to convince himself most of all of the ‘God delusion’…<\/p>\n

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The fanatics with ISIS are another story, for the scary thing is that they not only believe infidels should be\u00a0mercilessly\u00a0killed, but are quite willing to carry out the deed.\u00a0 That is why Chesterton said that religion really is the only<\/em> thing worth fighting for.\u00a0 Religion decides not only the course of the world, but, more importantly, the fate of each individual soul, for good, or for evil.<\/p>\n

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August 25, 2014<\/p>\n

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King St. Louis IX, St. Joseph Calasanz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Dawkins, like his intellectual ancestors David Hume, Feurbach, Emile Zola and countless others, claims not to be religious. In saying so, more times than I care to count, he is not being entirely honest, for whether Dr. Dawkins realizes it or not, Man by his very nature is a religious being. \u00a0Aristotle claimed that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}