Friday, September 19th, 2008
Daily Archive
Atheism and Superstition
Posted by Fr. Aquinas on 19 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Miscellaneous
Mollie Zeigler Hemingway has an excellent piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal commenting on the long noticed fact that the decrease of a people’s belief in God often leads to an increase in their superstition.
On the “Saturday Night Live” season debut last week, homeschooling families were portrayed as fundamentalists with bad haircuts who fear biology. Actor Matt Damon recently disparaged Sarah Palin by referring to a transparently fake email that claimed she believed that dinosaurs were Satan’s lizards. And according to prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, traditional religious belief is “dangerously irrational.” From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.
“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
St. John Vianney summarized the point nicely when he said: “Leave a parish for twenty years without a priest, and beasts will be worshipped there.”
For the full text, click here.
Word to Life - September 19, 2008
Posted by Fr. Aquinas on 19 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Word to Life
On today’s show I spoke with Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, OP, and Fr. James Moore, OP. Both are newly-ordained priests. Fr. Pius has been assigned to the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas in Zanesville, OH, and Fr. James just arrived at the St. Thomas More Newman Center for the University of Arizona in Tuscon, where Fr. James informs us they engage in a little “street preaching.”
The readings for this weekend prompted us to discuss how God’s forgiveness and generosity sometimes lead us to experience envy, or at least of sense of injustice. How is it that the deathbed convert and Mother Teresa both go to heaven? The First Reading from Isaiah tells us: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” But what does this mean? Tune in to see.
Life of St. Paul
Posted by Fr. Aquinas on 19 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Dominicans, Lectures
A parishioner alerted me to this video of Fr. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, OP, a professor of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, giving a lecture on the life of St. Paul. About an hour in length, the lecture unfolds the biography of St. Paul, highlighting the key dates and events of the Apostle’s extraordinary life.
Fr. Murphy-O’Connor is a Pauline expert, as the titles of his many books reveal: Paul: His Story; Paul: A Critical Life; Jesus and Paul: Parallel Lives; and Paul the Letter Writer: His World, His Options, His Skills.