Preface to Questions & Answers
·
What is the ‘Questions & Answers’ section all
about? (1)
Since the scope of the Triune Catholic God & His Roman Catholic
Church --- the former the Source of All Truth & thus the latter in this created
world of ours His Foundation for a real epistemology --- is most literally universal
(the meaning of the word ‘catholic’), this in turn being the whole
purpose of the website, then the answer is:
Everything.
To be a little more exact, though, I will use the Questions &
Answers (Q&A) section to address those questions that people may ask (or
ought to think to ask) and for which a Catholic thinker has answers. And, given
we are in the midst of the Great Apostasy, during which almost no one else is
truly Catholic and when, against the Church, practically everyone bears
ignorance, prejudice, slander, violence & animosity, then I will comment on
those things about which people nowadays are either very ignorant, very
prejudiced, very slanderous, very violent or very belligerent --- and about
which the Perpetual & Unchanging Faith of Rome can enlighten them.
In short, Q&A is a lens to focus the Light of Catholicism upon
a wide range of long-neglected truths, whereby the darkness of
deeply-entrenched lies & ignorance can be washed away. In doing so, I will
pose questions and proffer answers of roughly 10 to 1500 words in length each.
I will arrange these questions & answers in sequences, every sequence
assigned a page within a larger array of web pages that will grow
hierarchically in a systematic way as the website expands. In addition to
making tables of contents to access the Q&A sequences by topic, I will also
craft a comprehensive index of links for all of the web pages and their
individually numbered questions & answers as time permits.
·
Wouldn’t it be better to write an article for each topic
instead? (2)
Perhaps. And I may do that for most or all of the topics
eventually. In the meantime, it’s easier for me to approach the job in
this way, getting the information out quicker. I hope Q&A will be very
simple for most people to grasp, especially those who don’t have the
time, patience or wherewithal to grapple with the subjects otherwise.
·
So Q&A is really just another way of saying FAQ, right? (3)
Yes, although I make no pretense of these being ‘frequently
asked’ questions. They are simply questions that someone may ask or ought
to think to ask, at least. By asking them on behalf of the reader --- as it
were --- I make things extremely easy. You needn’t lift a finger to ask
me yourself or even trouble your mind to think the questions up to begin with,
albeit I trust many, if not most, of the questions will be things that
you’re thinking or would really want to say were it possible for you to
do so with me in person.
Which leads me to observe that at least some of the questions
won’t even be ‘questions’. Sometimes they’ll be
exclamations, criticisms, assertions, observations or attacks. Nor do I pretend
to follow a consistent ‘voice’ in posing these questions or
statements. I.e., I’m not writing a story where the imaginary person
doing the asking is always consistently the same person with the same views and
same opinions all the way through, or who will develop steadily through the
course of a Q&A section from start to finish. Sometimes the question
proffered will be the imaginary voice of a person who hates Catholicism with a
vehement passion, who was brought up to distrust the Catholic Church. Often the
voice will take the role of someone who is more friendly & cooperative.
Sometimes the voice will be of a person who is quite clever; at other times of
someone who is either pretty slow on the uptake or else very prejudiced &
angry.
Whatever the case, I aim to make the voice represent at least some
of the readers who may recognize their own questions, exclamations, criticisms,
assertions, observations or attacks in the Q&A sections that will be
posted. And where a particular reader’s view is not represented, I still
expect the intelligent reader, who is at least slightly curious, to be
interested in what he learns. To wit, to find out why someone like me would dare
to say what I say about the Catholic Faith and the modern world, and to
entertain the best questions of them all:
What if this guy is right? What if the Roman Catholic Church
really is God’s infallible means to communicate to the human race
His One & Only Way to Salvation, and what if our modern world really is
very badly astray both from the ultimate truth about things & from
compliance with God’s purposeful design for our existence?
·
How come you’re so vague in Question 1 regarding what Q&A
will address? (4)
I certainly don’t mean to be. However, I didn’t want to
get tedious making an endless list. To give you a more precise idea of what I intend
to speak of, though, here’s a very incomplete roster in no particular
order:
The Roman Catholic Church, its status presently, the only way to
find Salvation, Sedevacantism, the Spanish Inquisition, early Christianity, the
veracity of the Gospel writings, St. Paul’s teachings on Faith &
Works, the General Councils of the Church, the nature of Sin, the Catholic
Church’s natural enemy, the Eastern Schism, the Humanistic Remort (Renaissance), the Protestant Rebellion
(Reformation), the Atheistic Endarkenment (Enlightenment), geocentricity
(Tychonian model), uniformitarianism & catastrophism, Darwinian
macroevolution, Sigmund Freud & psychology, the Jews in history & their
role today, Freemasonry, the United States government, Communism, the war in
Iraq, homosexuality, feminism, the special & general theories of
relativity, quantum mechanics, geometry & mathematics, music as the window
of the soul, UFOs, Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings, C.S. Lewis, NASA & the exploration of outer space, demonology,
the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire, Judaism,
Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, other eastern religions or philosophies, the nature
of science, earthquakes, the death penalty, free speech, slavery, racism,
corporeal punishment, shamanism, the New Age, Hitler & World War II, Area
51, paganism, environmentalism, global warming, crystal skulls, pyramids &
the ubiquitous monoliths, the Great Apostasy, warfare, birth control, sexual
intercourse, Aldous Huxley, Vatican II, the
counterculture of the 1960s & its philosophical beatnik roots, Europe, the
revolutions of 1848, the Russians, the Prussians, the Poles, the story of grass
& cereal grains, John F. Kennedy, Hollywood & the motion picture
industry, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic the Preacher, the Holy Rosary,
Boolean logic, information theory, the Fourier series, the veneration of saints
& their statues, Atlantis, crop circles, automobiles & bicycles,
biofuels, renewable energy & a carbon neutral economy, the Federal Reserve,
Republicans & Democrats, the U.S. Supreme Court, the French Revolution,
Fatima, Fr. Leonard Feeney, Pope Pius IX, the terrestrial continents, the
seafaring knowledge of early man, ancient astrology, numerology, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, the Amerindians, the conquistadors, St. Joan of Arc, the Tower of
Babel, Berkeleianism, Randian objectivism, the Golden
Ratio, natural logarithms, the Apollo moon landings, Pablo Picasso, Sirius, the
electromagnetic spectrum, magnetism, the human aura, mesmerism, saintly
levitation & bilocation, animal cognition, artificial intelligence, the
morality of atomic weapons, missing persons, unmarked aircraft, triangles &
other fundamental shapes, St. Hilarion, St. Bernard
of Clairvaux, the bodies of the incorruptibles,
Jungian synchronicity, Kirlian photography,
biomagnetics & the operation of electric currents or fields within the
human body, acupuncture, the publishing industry, the nature of infinity, the
measurement of time, calendrical systems of the world, Antarctica, Japan, the
former Catholic Cathedral of Winchester in England, consciousness & its
focal point, Purgatory, indulgences, the evolution of languages, Galileo Galilei, and porpoises & dolphins.
·
How in the world could all of these things possibly have something
to do with the Catholic Church?
(5)
As I as much as said in answer to Question 1, the Triune Catholic
God made all that exists out of nothing. He therefore knows everything.
He also established His Roman Catholic Church as the Foundation of the Truth.
That is to say, we who are made in His Image can know the truth about what we need
to know --- and even sometimes what it’s only nice to know
something about --- because he guarantees its truth. When His Church
speaks, it is He, the Omnisciently All-Powerful God, speaking to us by speaking
through those of His that He has placed in the position of being His
Representatives, His Vicars & Stewards on earth. We can be certain the
things spoken of infallibly include anything to do with Faith & Morals. We
can also be sure that, because God exists and He speaks to us through the Body
of His Son, the Church, our world is not absurd. To wit, that it has rhyme
& reason, and does not operate capriciously without pattern, order, law,
rule & general predictability. Between these two poles --- between
assurance of an underlying order and infallible declarations --- we can then be
certain that things are ascertainable to varying degrees of confidence.
Accordingly, that we can investigate our world, figuring things out, and be
sure of what we can know and what we can’t know. Where we can know, we
can know with confidence how likely our conclusions are to be right.
Ergo why all those things listed above in Question 3 are related to
Catholicism. It is because the Catholic Church, being founded in the God Who
Made All That Exists, cannot possibly not have something to say about
them. It is simply a matter of figuring out the in-between stuff, the stuff
between infallible declarations and underlying order. Figuring this stuff out,
we can see, as a result, how it is connected to the God-Given Dogmas of the
Roman Catholic Faith. This, by the way, is where modern so-called
‘scientists’ go astray. They have divined a lot of the underlying
order of things, building on that to figure out a lot of in-between stuff that
they seem likely (if only in their own minds) to be right about. Nonetheless,
what they have not divined, since they effectively deny the Divine, is the
corresponding overlying order of things… the things that God keeps
hidden above, outside of our tangible sight, which we can only know something
certain about through the Infallible Guarantee of Divine Revelation. Viz.,
things He deigns to tell us about only via the Infallible Body of His Son,
Jesus Christ, having neither given us any way to certainly know these things by
careful observation nor through reasonable deduction. With these things,
it’s either infallible declaration or nothing at all. That is to say,
either God tells us or else we remain ignorant.
Not that everything one could list is necessarily worth commenting
on. A man must have some knowledge in the matter to say anything intelligent.
And the subject must, secondly, be worth knowing about during these days that
we live in. My whole life has been until this point --- even before I converted
to the Catholic Religion --- a preparation for just such a moment. The subjects
listed above (and a very incomplete roster it is) are each of them important to
the times we live in, although not by any means each of them equally important.
This is why I intend to address them. I invite you to peruse them as they are
posted & see for yourself what Catholicism has to say about the dark,
dizzying, demented, dangerous & defiant days that we inhabit.
·
So you’re claiming to know it all? (6)
Far from it.
I only claim to be standing upon the Infallible Foundation that the
All-Knowing God placed on this earth for men to know how to save their souls,
which is the Body of Jesus, His Roman Catholic Church. Beyond that, I merely
claim to know a little something worthwhile about the topics I intend to
address. One of my roles, during these times, is to pull together the things we
can know infallibly from God’s Catholic Church, along with the things we
can divine from the underlying order that God has created, thereby pointing to
the explanation for things in-between. The items in the incomplete roster from
Question 3 fall, to varying degrees, into one of these three categories:
1. Divinely
certain (infallible declarations of God’s Church).
2. Carefully
observed (underlying order of God’s creation).
3. Reasonably
deduced (in-between stuff that follows).
·
Why should this be of interest to anyone? (7)
Because, as far as I can tell, no one else has figured it out.
People have bits & pieces here-and-there. But no one, so far as I can see,
has put things together to the extent that this website will (pray God) manage
to do, melding infallible declarations with careful observation to reasonably
deduce much of what is going on in our topsy turvy world of the Great Apostasy
from the True Faith of Roman Catholicism. Part of the problem is that there are
so few real Catholics left today. And part of the problem is the general
blindness of the world, which is what allowed us to slip into Apostasy from
Catholicism in the first place. And, lastly, part of the problem is that what
is happening seems so novel & astonishing compared to what has come before
our times.
This creates confusion. It is my job to banish confusion --- not
because I know it all, but because I know a little something, such as it
is, that is worth knowing. And because, most important of all, I stand upon the
Pillar & Ground of the Truth, God’s Catholic Church.
·
Doesn’t this strike you as arrogant? (8)
Which is more arrogant… that I dare to say I stand upon the
Pillar & Ground of the Truth (the Roman Catholic Church, Jesus’
Body), knowing as well, beyond this, perhaps a little something worth
knowing… or that you dare to say that I don’t stand upon the
Pillar & Ground of the Truth and that I don’t have a little
something to say worth knowing?
Each of us is being audacious. I.e., we both dare to proclaim that
this is the truth of the matter, end of discussion. So how is it that your
audacity is right (I’m not standing on the Truth & I don’t
have anything worthwhile to say) while mine is wrong (I am
standing on the Truth & do have something worthwhile to say)?
Don’t you see that for you to declare with utter certainty that I’m
not standing upon the Pillar of Truth is tantamount to you claiming to stand
upon your own individual ‘pillar of truth’, that you are infallible
& can’t be wrong in this matter? I mean, let’s be honest:
Are you omniscient?
Do you know everything?
Then how do you know for sure that I don’t
stand upon the Pillar & Ground of the Truth?
How arrogant of you to pretend to know with absolute certainty that
which you can’t possibly be totally certain about!
Whereas I, at least, don’t pretend to be infallible in &
of my own self. I only claim to stand upon the Source of Infallibility in this
world --- a Source that you can stand upon as well. I have no monopoly
on it. Anyone can become Catholic; anyone can enter the Catholic
Church. You just have to be able to fit through the Narrow Door. And that means
giving up your pretensions to knowing it all, in & of your own self, as if
you, personally, couldn’t possibly be wrong when it comes to
axiomatically judging the Roman Catholic Church to be wrong. In short, you must
humble yourself and believe The One Who Really Is Both Omniscient & Infallible:
The Triune Catholic God, Creator of All That Exists.
·
So I can’t know anything without the Catholic Church? (9)
You can’t know anything of lasting importance with absolute
certainty without the Catholic Church. But we have delved too deeply into this
subject here. Please go to the section on Epistemology for further details.
·
I’m highly educated. Are you telling me that all my training
& knowledge is worthless?
(10)
It’s only worth something inasmuch as it is true or good, and
inasmuch as you manage to save your soul within the Catholic Church. You could
have everything in the world, all of the knowledge possible to gain ---
veritable petabytes of information --- and what does it matter if you lose your
soul in Hell forevermore? As Jesus said:
“For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world,
and suffer the loss of his soul?” (Mark 8:36 DRC)
But to learn more about this particular subject, please see the
section on Salvation in Q&A.
· I don’t
believe in this. Why should I look? (11)
Because you don’t know it all and you could learn something
vitally important.
· I’m
already religious. Why should I look at Catholicism? (12)
Because Catholicism is the True Religion, the one God started. If
you aren’t Catholic, then you’re in a false religion. If
you’re a fake ‘catholic’ (which applies to most going by the
name of Catholic nowadays), then you’re in a false religion. And if
you’re a bad Catholic, then you’re still going to Hell even if you’re
in the True Religion. Becoming a real Roman Catholic is The Only
Way to have Hope of Salvation, and being a good Roman Catholic
is The Only Way to make that Hope of Salvation secure.
· Again,
don’t you realize this sounds arrogant? (13)
Examine the website thoroughly before you make such accusations.
Because the one thing you’ve left out of your calculations is this simple
question, which I mentioned already in an earlier question:
What if he’s right?
You, dear reader, are not omniscient and you can’t know that
I’m wrong unless you first investigate the matter carefully. That’s
why I’ve put up this website, to allow you to do so with a minimum of
effort on your part. I’ve made it as easy as possible, and I’ll
continue making it as easy as possible --- for people of all kinds of differing
intellectual ability --- as long as Heaven permits.
I’m doing my job. Your job is to look.
· But how can you
be so cocksure of yourself?
(14)
Because I looked.
Seriously, how can someone be sure that
What’s more, we have the uniform testimony of our academic
leaders & the members of the publishing media (whether print, radio,
television, internet or what-have-you) as to the reality & nature of this
southern continent, a testimony that is relatively constant across distance of
miles & passage of time. They assure us of the truthfulness & accuracy
of our secondhand knowledge about
Likewise the Catholic Faith. I personally haven’t seen God
with my own eyes or talked to Him in a conversational fashion, hearing an
audible voice, but I have the countless testimonies of those who have.
Moreover, and more importantly, we have the infallible testimony of God’s
Catholic Church, established on earth precisely for the purpose of giving men
unwavering certainty --- across the world & through the years --- about His
Divine Revelation, just as our academia & media give us a fair degree of
earthly certainty about the existence of & facts concerning the Antarctic
continent.
Yet enough of this. Look at the section on Salvation and the
section on Epistemology to learn more.
·
Is there anything more to add about the Q&A section? (15)
Yes. I have counted consecutively the questions & answers in
each Q&A topic using a sequence of two hundred numbers. However, I might
have to add or delete questions & answers later on; thus, the sequence may
skip numbers or use similar numbers further differentiated by other means.
E.g., (248a), (248b) and (248c).
Also, I will oftentimes use questions & answers that I have
already employed in other Q&A topic sequences. I will identify these
questions by brackets such as these, [248], in addition to the normal sequence
of numbers within the particular Q&A topic that I’m working on. For
instance, I might follow a question by these numbers, (1212) [248], to show that the topic
I’m working on is in the 1001-1200 sequence but that, in this specific
case, I’m utilizing Question 248 from the 201-399 sequence. A symbol like
this, [~248], denotes that the question is reworded. If to the right, like
this, [248~], then part or all of the answer has been reworded. When symbols
are on both sides like this, [~248~], then both the question has been reworded
and part or all of the answer has been reworked as well.
+
+ +
Pilate’s
query met:
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