An excellently reasoned 5 minute video that’s well worth watching.
Kreeft: “Catholic” theologians showed politicians how they could get away with murder.
Kreeft said these Catholic advisers “told the Kennedys how they could get away with murder.” Kreeft then made one of his boldest comments of the evening, suggesting the theologians who first convinced Democratic politicians they could support abortion rights and remain Catholic did more damage to the Catholic Church than pedophile priests.
“These were wicked people. These were dishonest people. These were people who, frankly, loved power more than they loved God,” Kreeft said.
“Sorry, that’s just the way it is. In fact, I’d say these were even worse than the child molesters — though the immediate damage they did was not as obvious — because they did it deliberately, it wasn’t a sin of weakness. Sins of power are worse than sins of weakness. Cold, calculating sins — that’s straight from the devil.”
Editor’s note: And the vast majority of bishops remained silent. Some things never change!
Kreeft: The theme of spiritual warfare is never absent in scripture, and never absent in the life and writings of a single saint. But it is never present in the religious education of any of my “Catholic” students at Boston College.
But is not God a lover rather than a warrior?
No, God is a lover who is a warrior. The question fails to understand what love is, what the love that God is, is. Love is at war with hate, betrayal, selfishness, and all love’s enemies. Love fights. Ask any parent. Yuppie-love, like puppy-love, may be merely “compassion” (the fashionable word today), but father-love and mother-love are war.
In fact, every page of the Bible bristles with spears, from Genesis 3 through Revelation 20. The road from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained is soaked in blood. At the very center of the story is a cross, a symbol of conflict if there ever was one. The theme of spiritual warfare is never absent in scripture, and never absent in the life and writings of a single saint. But it is never present in the religious education of any of my “Catholic” students at Boston College. Whenever I speak of it, they are stunned and silent, as if they have suddenly entered another world. They have.
They have gone past the warm fuzzies, the fur coats of psychology-disguised-as-religion, into a world where they meet Christ the King, not Christ the Kitten.
Welcome back from the moon, kids.
I was never taught to hate Catholics, but to pity them and to fear their errors.
Hauled Aboard the Ark
A true story by Peter Kreeft
I was never taught to hate Catholics, but to pity them and to fear their errors. I learned a serious concern for truth that to this day I find sadly missing in many Catholic circles. The typical Calvinist anti-Catholic attitude I knew was not so much prejudice, judgment with no concern for evidence, but judgment based on apparent and false evidence: sincere mistakes rather than dishonest rationalizations.
Saint Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the Existence of God
Ontology: The philosophical inquiry into the nature of being. A branch of metaphysics.
The ontological argument was devised by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who wanted to produce a single, simple demonstration which would show that God is and what God is. Single it may be, but far from simple. It is, perhaps, the most controversial proof for the existence of God. Most people who first hear it are tempted to dismiss it immediately as an interesting riddle, but distinguished thinkers of every age, including our own, have risen to defend it. For this very reason it is the most intensely philosophical proof for God’s existence; its place of honor is not within popular piety, but rather textbooks and professional journals. We include it, with a minimum of discussion, not because we think it conclusive or irrefutable, but for the sake of completeness.
Anselm’s Version
1) It is greater for a thing to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone.
2) “God” means “that than which a greater cannot be thought.”
3) Suppose that God exists in the mind but not in reality.
4) Then a greater than God could be thought (namely, a being that has all the qualities our thought of God has plus real existence).
5) But this is impossible, for God is “that than which a greater cannot be thought.”
6) Therefore God exists in the mind and in reality.
Question 1: Suppose I deny that God exists in the mind?
Reply: In that case the argument could not conclude that God exists in the mind and in reality. But note: the denial commits you to the view that there is no concept of God. And very few would wish to go that far.
Question 2: Is it really greater for something to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone?
Reply: The first premise of this argument is often misunderstood. People sometimes say: “Isn’t an imaginary disease better than a real one?” Well it certainly is better—and so a greater thing—for you that the disease is not real. But that strengthens Anselm’s side of the argument. Real bacteria are greater than imaginary ones, just because they have something that imaginary ones lack: real being. They have an independence, and therefore an ability to harm, that nothing can have whose existence is wholly dependent on your thought. It is this greater level of independence that makes them greater as beings. And that line of thinking does not seem elusive or farfetched.
Question 3: But is real being just another “thought” or “concept”? Is “real being” just one more concept or characteristic (like “omniscience” or “omnipotence”) that could make a difference to the kind of being God is?
Reply: Real being does make a real difference. The question is: Does it make a conceptual difference? Critics of the argument say that it does not. They say that just because real being makes all the difference it cannot be one more quality among others. Rather it is the condition of there being something there to have any qualities at all. When the proof says that God is the greatest being that can be “thought,” it means that there are various perfections or qualities that God has to a degree no creature possibly could, qualities that are supremely admirable. But to say that such a being exists is to say that there really is something which is supremely admirable. And that is not one more admirable quality among others.
Is it greater to exist in reality as well as in the mind? Of course, incomparably greater. But the difference is not a conceptual one. And yet the argument seems to treat it as if it were—as if the believer and the nonbeliever could not share the same concept of God. Clearly they do. They disagree not about the content of this concept, but about whether the kind of being it describes really exists. And that seems beyond the power of merely conceptual analysis, as used in this argument, to answer. So question 3, we think, really does invalidate this form of the ontological argument.
Modal Version
Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm developed this version of the ontological argument. Both find it implicitly contained in the third chapter of Anselm’s Proslogion.
1) The expression “that being than which a greater cannot be thought” (GCB, for short) expresses a consistent concept.
2) GCB cannot be thought of as: a. necessarily nonexistent; or as b. contingently existing but only as c. necessarily existing.
3) So GCB can only be thought of as the kind of being that cannot not exist, that must exist.
4) But what must be so is so.
5) Therefore, GCB (i.e., God) exists.
Question: Just because GCB must be thought of as existing, does that mean that GCB really exists?
Reply: If you must think of something as existing, you cannot think of it as not existing. But then you cannot deny that GCB exists; for then you are thinking what you say cannot be thought—namely, that GCB does not exist.
Possible Worlds Version
This variation on the modal version has been worked out in great detail by Alvin Plantinga. We have done our best to simplify it.
Definitions:
Maximal excellence: To have omnipotence, omniscience and moral perfection in some world.
Maximal greatness: To have maximal excellence in every possible world.
1) There is a possible world 
in which there is a being (X) with maximal greatness.
2) But X is maximally great only if X has maximal excellence in every possible world.
3) Therefore X is maximally great only if X has omnipotence, omniscience and moral perfection in every possible world.
4) In W, the proposition “There is no omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being” would be impossible—that is, necessarily false.
5) But what is impossible does not vary from world to world.
6) Therefore, the proposition, “There is no omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being” is necessarily false in this actual world, too.
7) Therefore, there actually exists in this world, and must exist in every possible world, an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being.
Peter Kreeft: What Is God’s Answer to Human Suffering?
The answer is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a person. Clues are abstract, persons are concrete. Clues are signs; they signify something beyond themselves, something real. Our solution cannot be a mere idea, however true, profound, or useful, because that would be only another sign, another finger, another clue—like fingers pointing to other fingers, like having faith in faith, or hope in hope, or being in love with love. A hall of mirrors.
Besides being here, he is now. Besides being concretely real in our world, he, our answer, is also in our story, our history. Our story is also his-story. The answer is not a timeless truth but a once-for-all catastrophic event, as real as the stories in today’s newspapers.
It is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at. And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs. We needed a surgeon, and he came and reached into our wounds with bloody hands. He didn’t give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us himself.
Peter Kreeft on the Liberal Arts and Sexual Morality
Are the liberal arts and sexual morality connected? There is strong evidence that they are, for if we graph their development over the last half-century, we will see an almost identical curve of accelerating decline. Although this proves nothing, it certainly suggests something worth exploring more deeply.
Spectacular proof of the decline of the liberal arts is the simple fact that the only places in America where you can be sure you will get a liberal education, in the authentic sense of the term, are a few tiny little upstart crackpot islands of sanity like St. John’s, St. Thomas More, Magdalene, Christendom, Corpus Christi, St. Thomas Aquinas, Ave Maria University, Kings College, and Campion College. Whenever major secular universities like Kansas or USF relax the vigilance of their animus against Great Books programs and tolerate the creation of a classical liberal arts program (like the St. Ignatius Institute), two things always happen: It is spectacularly successful, and the university demands to murder it. That is why I called these universities “secular,” not “Catholic.”
Whereas liberal education has declined so much that the term has become nearly unintelligible, sexual morality has declined so much that it has become nearly extinct. We do not need to define it, only to find it. Like liberal education, it can be found mainly in enclaves of eccentricity: mainly families (often unfashionably large ones) that believe the orthodoxy and live the orthopraxy of six religious traditions: Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, Evangelical, Mormon, and Islamic. But its definition is not hard to find, unless you have a Ph.D. As a very simple, earthy neighbor of mine said when complaining about the elaborate “sex education” program in our local, very liberal high school, “They teach them everything except to keep their pants on.”
The Official National Anthem of Hell
“The national anthem of hell is, ‘I Did It My Way’ ”
— attributed to Peter Kreeft, Catholic philosopher and author
Are you a Mary, a Joseph, a Wise Man, or a Shepherd?
Let’s try to recapture the riches of this lost worldview by applying the spiritual sense of the Christmas story to our lives. For that story happens not only once, in history, but also many times in each individual’s soul. Christ comes to the world — but He also comes to each of us. Advent happens over and over again.
There are two ways to connecting the historical and the spiritual senses. The Jesuit method, from St. Ignatius’ “Spiritual Exercises,” tells us to imaginatively place ourselves into the Gospel stories. The older Augustinian method tells us to look for elements of the story in our lives. We shall be using this latter method as we survey the scene in Bethlehem for the next four weeks.
Look at your Nativity set. Around the Christ Child you see four people or groups: Mary, Joseph, the wise men and the shepherds. We are all around the Christ Child, defined by our relationship to Him; we are all Marys, Josephs, wise men or shepherds.
Doug Lawrence's Catholic Site
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