Swords, Roses, and Feminism!

nikosnature:

Anonymous asked you:

“Dogmas — religious, political, scientific — arise arise out of the erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of “I know.”— Eckhart Tolle I wonder how this can be properly refuted. It ‘sounds’ convincing & I know ppl can be swayed by this >:I but as Catholic, of course I see it as empty statement. Thoughts?

~

I would give you an answer, but GK Chesterton has beat me to it. 

Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of that improvement. The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

And

Suppose a great a commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A greyclad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good …” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp post, the lamp post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmedieaval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

and

So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalisitic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated.

nikosnature:

gaychristian asked you:

You don’t withold communion from people because of who they fall in love with, for who God made them.  Jesus died for them, they have the right to share in the Eucharist, YOU do not judge, that is what God does come judgement day and you may very well be facing awkward questions come that day and hour.  “Why do you not love the people I created,

I loved them as you loved them.  By offering them the truth, which is you.  If they rejected the truth, I did not change the truth to suit their sin, but continued to preach the truth in the hope that they may turn from their sin and embrace you.

why did you deny them rights,

I denied them no right.  In fact, I fulfilled their right to know the truth, which is their right the world violated most.  No man has the right to violate your laws.  Did you not deny greed to the greedy, lust to the lustful, usury to usurers, violence to the wrathful, and idolatry to the idolaters.  But You did not violate their rights, rather, you showed your love to these by fulfilling their right to know what is sin and what is not.  In the same way, the Church loves homosexuals by fulfilling their right to know that homosexual acts are wrong.

why did you cast them out of my church?

Why did you tell the rich young man that he had to sell all his wealth and give the proceeds to the poor?  You knew that was the one thing he would not do.  Was it hatred that led you to rebuke his sin, my Lord?  As you taught, so I learned.

Why did you lead them to believe I hated them?”

I told them nothing of hate, but only of your fierce love.  A love that loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us that way.