I’m told that heaven is the state of supreme, definitive happiness, but I must confess that the ideas of a sad God and sadness as part of heavenly experience appeal to me.  Perhaps this appeal is due to the meaningfully rich sadness I’ve experienced in my own life, sadness that I cannot help but believe and hope will define who I am for all time and beyond.

Way I see it, the insistence that eternal union with God will wash away all sadness plays into the notion that religion functions as a fictitious comfort and hope of escape from the harsher aspects of the human condition.  It’s akin to the nonsense people spout that some tragedy or sorrow is all part of God’s plan.

God weeps, folks.  God suffers with us.

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What is that way?  The CDF document Mysterium Ecclesiae spells out the philosophy of language underlying the doctrine of papal infallibility.  In its insistence that the church’s infallibility not be falsified, the document distinguishes between the dogmatic formulas, whose meaning is determinate and unalterable, and the changeable conceptions of a given epoch, which may be but needn’t be used by the church to enunciate the truths expressed by the dogmatic formulas.  In making this distinction, the church indicates that there are two types of language: the determinate and unalterable on the one hand, and the approximate and changeable on the other.

Dogmatic formulations may bear traces of the latter kind of language, but these traces do not fundamentally change the meaning of the formulation, even though “the meaning of the pronouncements of faith depends partly upon the expressive power of the language used at a certain point in time and in particular circumstances.”  However imperfectly it may express some dogmatic truth, the dogmatic formula remains forever suitable for communication.  The CDF insists that the faithful shun the opinion that dogmatic formulas cannot signify truth in a determinate way, but can do so only by means of approximations.

Infallibility only makes sense if the infallible authority is capable of signifying truth and meaning in a determinate, unalterable way.  Approximations leave room for fallibility, skepticism, suspicion, and for distance from the truth.  We need to ask, however, if the understanding of language sketched in Mysterium Ecclesiae is tenable.

I’m not sure it is, at least not exactly as expressed.  I’ve long held the positions that meaning is both produced and disclosed by language and that the boundaries of meaning (definitions) are the result of choice.  I’ve shunned the view that truth can be possessed, arguing instead that it can only be pursued.  It would seem that I’m decidedly in the camp that says truth can be signified only by approximations.  And I am.  And yet I do not deny magisterial infallibility.

Where Mysterium Ecclesiae separates determinate language and approximate language, I see them as potentially the same.  Specifically, language can be determinate in terms of reference—that outside of language to which language points—but at best approximate in terms of sense—that which is contained in the linguistic expression.  Therefore, the church’s dogmatic formulas are both determinate and approximate: determinate because there is a disclosure of a reality beyond the formula, and approximate because the formula, however clear and concise, involves the subjective creation of meaning.  The Catechism buttresses this notion when it says that we don’t believe in formulas, but in the realities they express, which faith allows us to touch.

A question lingers: is the difference between my philosophy of language and the one implied in Mysterium Ecclesiae sufficient enough that I should be led to a different conception of infallibility?  I’m inclined to say yes, but I hasten to add that my doing so is in keeping with the route proposed by the CDF: a dogmatic truth may be expressed at first incompletely, but receive a fuller and more perfect expression in light of a broader context of faith and human knowledge.

Alternatively, my philosophy of language may be bogus.

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I understand why he went ahead with the ruling as is. He thought it was the right thing to do. Contra the statements of celibate religious authorities, most people value the widespread availability of contraceptives as a much-needed social good. Obama met opposition from a vocal minority that, let’s face it, doesn’t represent the majority of Catholics, who use contraceptives without a second thought. My guess is that Obama, if he considered the reaction from Catholics at all, figured only a tiny minority would be bothered by the mandate. If the majority of Catholics don’t follow their faith’s teachings to the letter, why should Obama be expected to take those teachings seriously?

When making decisions about social policy, especially policies that will have major ramifications for voters, any skilled politician will make a cost-benefit analysis. In this case, Obama had very little to lose and much to gain by making contraceptives more readily available. The official teachings of the church wouldn’t interest him so much as the actual opinions of voting Catholics, who for the most part either don’t care or probably think expanded access to contraceptives is a good thing.

Nevertheless, President Obama should have expanded the conscious exemptions. First, while the state shares responsibility for the healthcare of the people within it, the state has the primary responsibility of protecting the rights and freedoms of its people. Helping people bear the burden of healthcare costs, noble as it is, is no excuse to violate religious freedoms. Second, by not expanding the exemptions, Obama betrayed his promises to Catholic supporters of his policies, notably the Affordable Care Act. Obama earned their support in part by promising to uphold conscience protections. They took the move as a slap in the face. Third, the ruling may prove counter-productive. Catholic institutions—some of them anyway— participate in healthcare on the condition that they are free to follow Catholic ethical norms. Forcing these institutions to materially cooperate with what they deem contrary to their faith incentivizes them to cease such participation.

Catholics have every right to fight this ruling tooth and nail.

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Let me get this out of the way: I don’t for a minute think that the U.S. is a terrorist state, run by a regime enthused by malicious and hateful intent.  I wouldn’t equate it morally with worst abusers of human rights around the globe.  Having said this, however, it pains me to say that the U.S. and those supportive of its aggressions are gravely negligent and careless about the real human costs of those aggressions.  As a result of negligence and carelessness–and, for the record, murders–the U.S. has spilt a lot of blood and piled up a lot of bodies.  The truth is this: the U.S. is at least as great a mortal threat as most dictatorial and terrorist regimes are.

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Last night, while listening to the latest debate, I heard the audience boo the suggestion that we ought to apply the Golden Rule to our dealings and relations with foreign powers and people. Ares forbid we treat strangers the way we want to be treated. Woe to those who put themselves in another’s place and consider the world from his or her perspective.

Enter Robert Wright: “I’ve long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the failure of “moral imagination”–the inability or unwillingness of people to see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination across national, religious, or ethnic borders.” When I reflect upon the gravest of social ills, I realize he’s correct: a failure of moral imagination underlies all of them. And what’s scary is that, while I cannot picture myself committing horrid deeds along the lines of terrorism, genocide, or butchery, I’m guilty of the disposition that gives these evils birth. For all my talk of hospitality and alterity and all that jazz, I’m a selfish, self-centered lout who all too often cares little to nothing for my fellow strangers, their walks of life, and their perspectives on the world.

How do we nurture a moral imagination? Freddie DeBoer gives us a clue. When he was thirteen, he took a trip with his father to Indonesia:

One night, he woke me gently and led me outside, where one of his Balinese friends waited for him. We were in the village, inland, where few tourists ventured, at least at that time. We got in a bemo and drove for awhile, and when we got out, my father led me by hand in the moonlight to a mass grave.

We met an old man there. If you know the right people and know how to ask, you can still find them, I’m sure, older Indonesians who will tell you the stories. He walked us over to the roadside– I have no idea where we were, geographically– and showed us a shaded ditch. It was dark, and anyway, there was nothing to see. Just dirt, just earth. You would never have known that bodies were piled underneath, just a few feet down. The older man started speaking and my father spoke to him. (He spoke such wonderful Indonesian, and serviceable Balinese, I envy it even now.) He translated for me, briefly. I bent over and put my hand on the dirt. I tried to imagine my own family, what was left of it then, crammed down underground, with dozens of others. I tried to do whatever I could to make it real. The dirt made it corporeal. It was something I could touch, lay my hand on. I have never been the same, never.

We have to find ways to make the lives and deaths of others real to us, because, if we don’t, then not only will we not care when bodies are piled in graves, being inclined instead to cheer the killing, but also we may be the very ones getting our hands bloody.

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On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly. I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe.

Santorum expressed his hope that the United States has been involved in these deaths, and justified the past and future assassinations on the basis that the U.S. has already assassinated an American citizen, so why not?  None of these killings qualify as murder or terrorism, of course, because the United States by definition doesn’t do those sorts of things.  Sure, it may appear to do so, but substantially the actions must be different because of who’s doing them.

This, folks, is the myth of the United States.  It’s one thing that won’t change in 2012.  No hope.

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I stand by everything I wrote in that post, but some qualification may help. It is not my position that everyone’s beliefs and ideas are equal. People who pursue the truth do so to varying degrees. Some get closer than others. Some people don’t give two pellets of newt poop for the truth; they’re devoted to something else. Rest assured I harbor no respect for journeys in selfish self-gratification. I may be a pluralist, but I’m no relativist.

Now to qualify my qualification: it matters what we believe and what think, but it matters more that we’re habitually disposed to the truth and its pursuit. I’m a parent of children whom I am raising in my faith. However well or poorly they are catechized, they may in life stray from my beliefs. That possibility worries me, a little, but I’m more concerned that they maintain an interest in the truth. I’d rather they be passionate about true knowledge and unflinchingly seek it out than they have no care for what’s real while going through the motions of their religion. The former allows for movement toward God; the latter is really only the illusion of the soul’s ascent.

I dare say that faith doesn’t always look like faith. It isn’t only manifested in recited creeds, liturgical celebrations, and having one’s doctrinal propositions in order. If faith is a response to God, then it’s a response to the truth, in which case those who strive after true knowledge by definition have faith. And that gives me hope.

I sympathize. The convergence of postmodern pluralism and instant global communication technology has revealed a world of countless creeds, doctrines, myths, and rituals. The notion of there being one God or one reality to which only one faith gives true testimony seems especially ludicrous today, and not merely on the surface. Each faith points back to an origin that can no more be demonstrated empirically than proven theologically.

Considering faith from the perspective of others leads one to the realization that, functionally, the world’s confessional faiths are all doing basically the same thing. They all claim to give voice to a deeper truth—sometimes called God, sometimes called something else; sometimes through sacred texts, sometimes through ritual action. How can an outsider decide between them?

Choices are made, of course. People commit themselves to a religion or faith-based way of life. People convert. They fall away and forsake one faith for another or for no faith at all. People have their reasons for choosing one faith over another, but none of these reasons is a direct line to God. We tend to go with what makes the most sense to us given our situation, circumstances, and life experiences. Christianity no longer makes sense to Andrew, and so he no longer considers himself a Christian. Catholicism makes more sense than the alternatives to me, and so here I am.

Admittedly, the appeal the Catholic faith has for me more to do with the ways in which its myths and sacramental rituals enthuse my imagination than with the impression its teachings have upon my reason. I remain committed to living according to its teachings, even the ones secular society deems silly, but I find myself more inspired to live according to its stories. I may be one of those types who would remain Catholic even if it could be shown that there was no literal truth to its account of the universe. If Catholicism is just a fiction, well then to heaven with it!

Anyhow, I wish Andrew the best in his faith journey, a journey that for everyone means a passage through the cloud of unknowing, an unknowing that ends only in death. Sorry folks: even the best of creeds and dogmas cannot capture God: the best they can do is point us to what is wholly other. Andrew tells us that Christians he knows fear he’ll burn in hell for his abandonment of the name “Christian.” I do not share their presumptuous and despairing concern. It makes no sense to me given the image of the Crucified Christ: God goes to all that trouble only to deny those whose honest and hopeful search for the truth leads them to places that make pastors nervous? Get real.

Yes, truth matters. It matters a lot, which is why I have to respect the journey towards it, even when the journey differs in direction and manner from my own. If my saying this makes you nervous, all I can say in response is, “Be not afraid. God goes before us always.”

Dar Williams – The Christians and the Pagans

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One reason for this stands out: the state has a monopoly on the use of violence. It can legitimately kill—even kill innocent people—where you and I cannot. When state violence results in what for you or me would constitute mass murder, the deaths are called mistakes but not crimes, unfortunate but not negligent, collateral damage but not murder. Case in point: the president has at his disposal weapons of mass destruction, but not weapons of mass murder.

While the state’s monopoly on the use of violence pretty well explains why we don’t consider the Commander-in-Chief a murderer, there may be another reason: we hold officials of the state to a different moral standard, at least when they’re conducting official state business like killing people. After all, having a monopoly on the use of violence doesn’t mean all one’s violence is legitimate and justified. No, some other mode of thought is at work here.

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The narrative serves as a reminder that what I call God will always be ahead of my expectations, notions, and conceptions. The liturgy of Christmas brings the birth of Jesus Christ to life, ushering in an end to the Season of Advent, and yet does so while maintaining Advent’s central meaning: God is always to come. God eludes my pathetic attempts to make “him” present. My words fail. All of them. Even my most lofty and seemingly precise words, like “Trinity” and “omnipotence,” focus my mind by way of analogies that could easily become idols.

The Nativity is an apophatic myth: in saying something about the divine, it shows us that we can eventually say nothing. We do not know what we are saying when we speak of the sacred. All of our creeds and theologies, our doctrines and dogmas, in attempting to give the infinite finite expression, say what cannot be said. They are infinitely distant from that to which they refer. Even words I simply adore, like “alterity” and “otherwise,” prove inadequate when used to approximate the meaning of what I call God.

Christmas is a season for celebration, yes; but it is also a call to silence.

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Ron Paul never does the hard, right thing. He always does the easy, opportunistic thing. In the 80s and 90s, that meant publishing paranoid, racist tracts to make money. In the 00s and 10s, that’s been grandiose pontificating, pandering to a liberal crowd desperate for an anti-Bush Republican and grabbing all the pork he can – all the while posing as a statesman that the “system” can’t handle.

Principled politicians, in Knapp’s view, would “do the hard work of enacting their favored principles into law,” recognize that democratic politics involves the long, hard work of process, and deal with the “small steps and the occasional setback in order to play the long game,” none of which, according to Knapp, Paul does.

Contra Knapp, I wouldn’t say that a politician’s failure or refusal to play the game means that the politician isn’t principled.  A politician who limits himself to grandstanding, oppositional votes, and rigid adherence to ideology could still be principled, though he would undoubtedly make an ineffective champion of the principles he espouses.

Is Paul principled?  I don’t know.  I agree with a few of his pontifications, but disagree with most of them.  His newsletters are a mark against his character; that’s for sure.  He’s not what I’d call a model politician, not even a good one, really.  Perhaps he’d do better as a talk radio host.

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Newman begins his essay by distinguishing between three forms of propositions (interrogative, conditional, and categorical) and between the corresponding three ways of holding propositions (doubt, inference, and assent).  For example, take the proposition of which I am as certain as I can be: “I love my wife and children.”  I can shape this proposition as a question (“Do I love my wife and children?”), as a conclusion (“I therefore love my wife and children”), or, in the way I introduced it, as an assertion.  While I can at the same moment both assent to and infer from premises that I love my family, I cannot at the same moment both assent to and doubt the love I have for my family.  If I doubt it, then I am by definition not assenting to it, and my wife and children have cause for concern.  Fortunately for them and for me, I do not doubt my love (nor, for the record, their love for me).  So where is there room for a passive uncertainty or active suspicion of the proposition, “I love my wife and children”?

While an assent is in itself the absolute acceptance of a proposition without any condition, the act of assent is never made in a vacuum.  It presupposes, if not full understanding of the proposition, at a minimum some degree of apprehension of the proposition’s meaning.  I have to know, to some degree, what it is to which I assent in order to give assent.  Without this knowledge, I can only assert the proposition, but I cannot assent to it.  It is here at the level of apprehension that I remain forever uncertain and open to being suspicious.

Why? Because any apprehension of meaning may have gone awry due to false consciousness or to the distancing and concealing aspects of language.  In one sense, I know what I mean when I assert “I love my wife and children.”  I say it every day and there’s no confusion on my part or on theirs.  Sure, love is a mystery that no philosopher or poet can completely fathom or explain, but it’s still intelligible.  I’m pretty sure even my baby daughter knows what I mean.  However, in another sense, I don’t really know what I mean when I profess my love because I am not certain about the true meaning of the pronoun “I” and the verb “love.”  I use the latter term in a spiritual and sacramental sense, a sense I believe accurately reflects the reality of my love, and yet I must concede that my beliefs here could conceivably be mistaken (or I may be deluded about my beliefs).  My love may have merely material causes.  The “I” that I associate with an essential selfhood may be only a fiction, a notional construct of the brain.

My assent, then, is suspect because the apprehension of meaning that my assent presupposes is suspect: I may be wrong about the meaning I think I apprehend.  The meaning and/or the truth may be otherwise than what apprehension shows me.  Given this possibility, I may fall back on reasons why it’s clear that I love my wife and children (I desire the good for them, etc.) , but in so doing I’m no longer assenting to the proposition, but inferring it.

I maintain that assent is possible: I may, after all, be right about what I mean by the proposition, “I love my wife and children.”  I hope that I am.  I don’t doubt that I love my wife and children, but nor can I say with certainty that I adequately know what I mean when I say this.  I choose to assent to this proposition because, speaking epistemologically, I may sufficiently apprehend its meaning, but I am uncertain about my assent because I am uncertain (though hopeful) that I’ve apprehended accurately.

I trust I make myself obscure.  All this is rather heady, abstract stuff that, rest assured, never explicitly enters into may day-to-day family life.  I raise this example not to question my love, but to explain why the reality of assent doesn’t demolish my epistemology of suspicion.  Having said this, I admit that I deserved the light slap in the face my wife gave me when I told her about this post.  As she says, “Some people think too much.”  Yes. Yes we do.

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