Time Immortal

A beautiful and meaningful reflection from Pope Benedict XVI delivered earlier this month just prior to leading the Angelus on March 2nd. And in addition to being yet another good example of why any sane person should reject theodicy as a legitimate objection to the Christian faith, it discusses another very visible trend at work in the post-modern world.

In the face of men and women marked by limitations and suffering, Jesus did not think of their possible guilt but rather of the will of God who created man for life. And so he solemnly declares: “We must work the works of him who sent me…. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (Jn 9: 5).

And he immediately takes action: mixing a little earth with saliva he made mud and spread it on the eyes of the blind man. This act alludes to the creation of man, which the Bible recounts using the symbol of dust from the ground, fashioned and enlivened by God’s breath (Gn 2: 7). In fact, “Adam” means “ground” and the human body was in effect formed of particles of soil. By healing the blind man Jesus worked a new creation.

But this healing sparked heated debate because Jesus did it on the Sabbath, thereby in the Pharisees‘ opinion violating the feast-day precept. Thus, at the end of the account, Jesus and the blind man are both cast out, the former because he broke the law and the latter because, despite being healed, he remained marked as a sinner from birth.

Jesus reveals to the blind man whom he had healed that he had come into the world for judgement, to separate the blind who can be healed from those who do not allow themselves to be healed because they consider themselves healthy. Indeed, the temptation to build himself an ideological security system is strong in man: even Religion can become an element of this system, as can atheism or secularism, but in letting this happen one is blinded by one’s own selfishness.

Atheists, secularists, skeptics, and other materialists do not tend to notice that they make the same mistakes the accuse the religious faithful of making; they are blinded to their own lack of reason and rationalism about a great many things, especially when the discussion turns to thinks like doubts about the scientific consensus (as has been happening, recently, with the global warming alarmists and those, like me, who doubt them), or religion itself. Moreover, they are blind to the consequences of their own views, as a reader of Vox Day’s recently noted in a comments thread at the Bad Astronomy blog, which is run by a self-professed skeptic.

Because the plain fact of the matter is that, if the secularists are right and if a human being is little more than a meaty outer container for an internal stew of random or hormonally-driven chemical reactions, why should human beings choose to sacrifice even a moment of the fun- and pleasure-driven “get what you can while you can” hedonistic ethos that is the highest moral reasoning of a purposeless existence for something so banal and demanding as a baby? It is in the “reasoning” of atheism and godlessness that humanity finds the strongest justification for its own extinction — why let something so taxing as procreation get in the way of an endless succession of Friday night romps and Thursday afternoon trips to the shoe store?

Moreover, how can we even say — rationally, and from reason — that human beings, being (in the secular view) little more than a meaty outer container for an internal stew of random or hormonally-driven chemical reactions, are even capable of reason? That seems to be one of the most irrational faith claims yet made, even more irrational than the notion that if in fact there is a God, He sent His only Son to Earth to die and rise again for the forgiveness of sins. At least it makes sense that a deity, if one of such power as the Judeo-Christian God did exist, could arrange for such a set of events to transpire. Reason from randomness? Not so much.

Allowing for the base assumption of the existence of the deity, the claims that follow from that assumption are reasonable. Conversely, by allowing only for the base assumption that humanity seems to have arisen randomly, and that human beings are just animals — some muscle and some bone, and a slough of random chemical interactions — it is wholly irrational to claim that reason even exists, let alone that human beings are capable of grasping at it.

Not that one is surprised that atheists are so muddle-headed, of course — when one is wandering in darkness, away from the light of truth, it is not surprised that one stumbles about as though blind. The same, by and large, can be said for religious folks who have fallen into the (temporary) darkness of sin. The Pope’s statement, above, addresses both realities, and the rest of his Angelus statement remarks on the method by which all people can be cured of this blindness and emerge from the darkness in which we are caught up — Christ. But to be healed by Christ, we must first allow ourselves to be healed by Christ, which begins with admitting our need for healing. Jesus will not force salvation upon any of us, because to love God and to desire to be with God is something each human being must choose, both by force of reason and by living out his or her life in a manner which is suitable and in accordance with both God’s teachings and one’s own desire to dwell with God in eternity.

Christians who have fallen into sin can and do often choose to return to Christ. Atheists and secularists may never even understand the need to do so. Theirs, then, is the darker night…theirs is the deeper blindness.