[persistence of delusion] and the obsession with maintaining it

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI, on Sanctifying Grace, states:

Among the adherents of the Augsburg Confession the following view was rather generally accepted: The person to be justified seizes, by means of the fiduciary faith, the exterior justice of Christ, and therewith covers his sins; this exterior justice is imputed to him as if it were his own, and he stands before God as having an outward justification, but in his inner self he remains the same sinner as of old.

This strawman of the Catholics, claiming that Protestants say faith alone justifies, justitia Christi extra nos, was negated by the consequent widespread reading of the bible by the population, as distinct from the interventionist medium of the priest who kept the bible chained to the pulpit and only accessible through the adepts, i.e. the priesthood.

Reading the New Testament yourself and reconciling it with what the Old Testament has to say, there is no disagreement between these two of the three major arms of the church, that grace can result from:

… faith to fear to hope to incipient charity to contrition, with purpose of amendment.

Further:

Without charity and the works of charity faith is dead. Faith receives life only from and through charity (James, ii, 26).

And even further:

Sine caritate quippe fides potest quidem esse, sed non et prodesse.

Interestingly, with the severe curtailment of the number of people actually reading the bible during the past two generations of social engineering, society has now reverted to the pre-Reformation state of ignorance, with the only adepts left being the druids of the New Humanistic Age, possessing the arcane knowledge and meting it out, as is their wont.

The hegemony of Science as the final justification is an aspect of this process and only now, cracks are appearing in the old justification, ‘Well, it’s been scientifically proven …’

It’s understandable that the Catholics imputed the strawman of sola fides justificat to the Protestants because, in one fell swoop, the whole corrupt mechanism of selling pardons and relics for lucre, together with the external mechanism of the rosary beads, the intermediary mechanism of the confessional and the justification for the hoarding of temporal riches oculd now be swept away.

Many Protestants would accept that, in the matter of sin and redemption, just as in any other aspect of life, there are the ignorant laymen, the learned laymen, the professionals and the adepts. Of course a Catholic priest is going to know his theology better than you or I but the levelling tendency of Protestantism merely fails to ascribe to the priest the power to redeem.

Does the doctor heal or does he put in place mechanisms, from his knowledge and experience, which facilitate and accelerate the natural healing process of the body?

Similarly, does the teacher create learning or facilitate it?

Surely we can admire and revere without ascribing divine power to all aspects of the process?

There was a lady I worked with on her presentation skills, who went on to get the job she wanted and she ascribed this to me.

No, all I did was bring some logic and knowledge to the process but it was her own ability and revamped CV which did the rest, along with her natural charm, which was now allowed to come out, in the context of her overall package, at the first interview. All I did was get her confidence going again.

There is a place for the adept to bring the ordinary mortal, you or me, up to speed on what is necessary but that’s as far as it goes.

And what is necessary, for us today, is to see the essential flaw in the illusion of the Tower of Babel. In other words, the humanist says that we have the capability of reaching an ascendant state through ourselves alone but this has been shown oh so many times to be not so.

The times we currently live in, more than any others in the past century, are characterized by an obsessive belief that there is no G-d, no maker, no spirit. The G-d of today is Consumerism and the belief that we are complete in ourself, in our ability to find our own way out of the morass.

Oh really? How are we doing on this just now? Is the society we’ve constructed in a good state? Recession, drugs, the prostituting of children, chavs, widespread unemployment, the list goes on and on.

In place of hope, faith and charity is spiritual emptiness and deep cynicism in everything from the people who govern us to things which used to be held in respect, e.g. the mystery of a woman’s charms. Where is there any mystery today, any respect, any concept that the body is the temple of the spirit?

In place of perspective is pride. An article in a folder here from my pre-blogging days says this about pride:

Overweening pride, arrogance, haughtiness: these have been the stuff of tragedy. Vanity, fussiness, delicacy: the stuff of comedy. These are all forms of self-delusion, and paper-thin masks.

Pride and vanity refuse the truth and substitute illusions for reality. While vanity is mostly concerned with appearance, pride is based on a real desire to be God in our own little circle.

The first requirement of pride is spiritual blindness. Just as a well-lit bathroom mirror shows the flaws in our complexion, so we build up myriad illusions about who we are and what we are about, to paper up the cracks.

We can busy ourselves with career and family, thinking we are being driven by a strong work ethic and moral values. In reality, we may be running away from ourselves and from the reality of our state of grace.

A second requirement of pride, indeed a symptom, is that each challenge to our pride drives us harder to prove our illusion of productivity, sanctity or compassion.

It’s been said that the definition of a zealot is "one who has lost sight of his goal, and so redoubles his efforts." We might say the zealot works twice as hard to keep up appearances.

A strong indicator of pride is competitiveness and resentment of the success of others, jealousy and envy. Our politics today are fuelled by envy, the whole sub-prime mortgage debacle was made possible for the greed of the bankers by the envy of the have-nots, which they liked to call ‘aspirations’.

Human beings do things in response to needs or desires and so, if this is happening:

In contrast to Catholicism, which has a very long historic presence in China but whose growth has been slow, charismatic Protestantism has found its natural element in an atmosphere of official suppression. Barred from churches, Chinese began worshipping in homes, and five major "house church" movements and countless smaller ones now minister to as many as 100 million Christians.

Where traditional society remains entrenched in China's most backward regions, Islam also is expanding. At the edge of the Gobi Desert and on China's western border with Central Asia, Islam claims perhaps 30 million adherents. If Christianity is the liquidator of traditional society, Islam is its defender against the encroachments of leveling imperial expansion.

… then what gap, what niche market is it catering for?

What so many in the west do not realize is that the new gods which the youth of today have had presented to them to follow are morally and spiritually bankrupt – they can’t lead anywhere but to a form of cynical hedonism where parodies of human activity like sexuality are taken well before time and the societal consequences have already started to manifest themselves in world-weary alienation and the snuffing out of hope and life goals of any import.

The Who, long ago, sang of the emptiness of man-imposed structures on the human psyche [905]:

Mother was an incubator
Father was the contents of a test tube in the ice box
In the factory of birth

My name is 905,
And I've just become alive
I'm the newest populator
Of the planet we call Earth

In suspended animation
My childhood passed me by
If I speak without emotion
Then you know the reason why

Knowledge of the universe
Was fed into my mind
As my adolescent body
Left its puberty behind

And everything I know is what I need to know
And everything I do's been done before
Every sentence in my head
Someone else has said
At each end of my life is an open door

Automatically defrosted
When manhood came on time
I became a man
I left the "ice school" behind
Now I'm to begin
The life that I'm assigned

A life that's been used before
A thousand times
I have a feeling deep inside
That somethin' is missing
It's a feeling in my soul
And I can't help wishing
That one day I'll discover
That we're living a lie
And I'll tell the whole world
The reason why

Well, until then,
Everything I know is what I need to know
And everything I do's been done before
Every sentence in my head
Someone else has said
At each end of my life is an open door

Not only are we financially bankrupt today, we’re spiritually bankrupt and like the zealots, determined to insist that we have no need of our Maker, whose spirit can still be found down some corridor, in some room, inside some packing case within ourselves.

We prefer to see society disintegrate and our children destroyed rather than admit the remotest possibility that in our own certainty that our humanistic world view is right, lies self-delusion.

Man, in the context of his Maker and his own well-aligned spirituality, can achieve anything. Anyone who has ever had a relationship where the bonding between the two reached almost mystical proportions, knows that the sexual component of a much bigger picture needed no Viagra.

It takes no great perception to recognize that the greatest achievements of man were based on the fervour of a vision and the people who were bonded together in that vision.

Vision is what drives us forward and upwards but a vision where the spiritual aspect is recognized and accorded respect in its rightful place.

In a human machine where all cylinders are firing, including the spiritual, only then can the sky be the limit.