Most posts on this blog are fairly technical pieces
directed at my fellow Catholics. This post will be sightly more controversial.
To the non-Catholics among you: My Catholic
religion is better than yours.
This statement may seem rather shocking at first, but I
do not apologize for giving offense. For you believe that your religion is better
than all other religions. (Or, if you are an
atheist, you hold your irreligion to be better than any religion.) Otherwise, you
would not adhere to that religion which you practice, or at the very least believe.
Please do not insult your intelligence and mine with
the idiotic assertion that “one religion is as good as another.” For if that
were the case, all religions would be equally true (or equally false, depending
on which way you looked at the question). And a true religion is better than a false one, since it better reflects reality.
But one religion claims that Jesus is God;
another holds the existence of many gods; another believes there is no such
entity as god. One religion claims Jesus is divine, another a demigod, another simply a good human. Even among different types of Christianity, there is
irreconcilable division – one holds that Jesus established one Church, another
posits personal interpretation of the Bible. They
can’t all be true.
The moral codes of each religion are wildly
different and contradictory. Some religions uphold divorce, others forbid the practice. One
approves abortion, another rejects it. One religion permits suicide, another
opposes same-sex marriage, still another forbids the eating of pork. Again, they can’t all be
true.
And there are a host of reasons why Catholicism is superior to other religions. Catholicism, the only faith that can credibly claim to stretch back to the time of Christ, has taken shots from every earthly entity for 2000 years – persecution
from without and within, confusion as to its basic principles, and the
corruption and outright stupidity of many of its leaders – and emerged from
every battle stronger than ever and unchanged
in its basic teaching. (Judaism is something of an exception,
but the Jewish people wait in vain for a Messiah who has already come.)
My Catholic religion embraces the reality of the realms of the intellectual and the spiritual. It makes sense that humans
would not fully understand a God who is by necessity beyond us. It makes sense that humans could use reason to come to a
limited understanding of the Maker of the universe and the architect of natural law. It makes sense that God would wish to supplement
what we can know about Him by reason through revelation. Christianity
is rational and mystical; Catholicism successfully navigates both realms.
To a much lesser extent, one can assert the
superiority of one political ideology over another. In the political sphere, the
analogous statement to “one religion is as good as another” is “Don’t enforce
your moral views on me.” But the enforcement of moral views is the entire point
of law; the laws a society adopts and enforces reflect both its moral vision
and (theoretically) its cultural consensus.
Thus, all laws reflect some form of morality.
Legalized abortion is the enforcement of a view which holds that the freedom of
the mother to do as she wishes with “her body” trumps any right of that which
grows within her. Redistributive taxation implies a moral vision that
government has an obligation to take care of the poor in part by taking from
the resources of the rich. The Second Amendment implies that people have the
right to defend themselves, using means that could be turned to evil.
Of course, politics is much less dogmatic than religion, despite the hysteria of many political commentators and politicians.
There is revealed truth in religious matters; there is no such revealed truth
as to how to run a government. There can and should be disagreement about
political matters, and the person who claims infallible knowledge of what
political course to take is either the second coming of Solomon or a clueless narcissist.
Nonetheless, I do hold definite political views, and
believe that those views should be enforced through the proper legal channels. Accordingly, I vote for candidates that hold similar views. If that constitutes “imposing my
moral views,” so be it. Presumably, you vote for candidates that support your views. If you wish me to stop pushing my moral views on you, convince me that my views are wrong.
So I can only say to those who demand that I remain silent and stop pushing for the implementation of my moral views on society: “I believe my ideas are
better than your ideas, and will vote accordingly to implement them. So do you.
If you wish to convince me concerning an issue, I will listen to you with an
open mind – I’ve been persuaded before. Please extend me the same courtesy.”