Friday, March 29, AD 2024 10:34am

Pope Addresses Our Truly Confused Age

 

 

We live in a time of technological wonders and “let’s pretend” denial of basic facts of the human condition.  Pope Benedict looked at one pernicious aspect of this “let’s pretend” mindset in an address on December 21:

 The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

Go here to read the rest.  We have always had a very few sad people bitterly unhappy in the fact that they were born male or female.  No great mystery here.  Mental disorders come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and the capacity of Man to make himself miserable in this vale of tears over anything is vast.  What has changed is that the ideological insistence that reality must conform to the predilections of politically favored “victims” has led to a massive attempt throughout the West to deny the division of humanity into male and female and to morph society into some sort of “transgender” utopia where the only meaning sex will have is copulation, and that will have no greater significance than merely satisfying a physical appetite.  Like all attempts by Man to play God, this will all end in tears after immense human suffering.

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philip
philip
Friday, December 28, AD 2012 8:47am

Extraordinary letter!
Thanks for the post.

When Jesus asked the new followers; “What do you seek?”, my thoughts turned to the confused minority of deniers that struggle with their identity. Are they seeking to be equal to God? Are they saying God made a mistake, I decide what & who I am?

Thank you for passing this along.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, December 28, AD 2012 9:57am

“Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.”

It is remarkable how many self-professed materialists adopt a sort of Cartesian mind-body dualism that often really does amount to “a ghost in a machine,” in the hackneyed, but expressive phrase. Not only are they oblivious of the fact that “mind” is merely an hypostasised abstraction, they have even turned the humble reflexive pronoun “self” into the very ground of their existence.

Is the concept of “rational animal” really too hard to grasp?

philip
philip
Friday, December 28, AD 2012 11:21am

St. Michael the Archangels words echo throughout the ages; “Who is like unto God.”

trackback
Saturday, December 29, AD 2012 5:09pm

[…] Pope Addresses Our Truly Confused AgeWe live in a time of technological wonders and ”let’s pretend” denial of basic facts of the human condition. Pope Benedict looked at one pernicious aspect of this “let’s pretend” mindset in an address on December 21:The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question.…more […]

Christopher Bowen
Christopher Bowen
Sunday, December 30, AD 2012 12:03pm

“the only meaning sex will have is copulation, and that will have no greater significance than merely satisfying a physical appetite.”

I was alarmed recently by the disturbingly obvious parallels in Aldous Huxley’s “A Brave New World,” with much of the “social engineering” being carried out today by organizations like Planned Parenthood, and aided/fueled by the homosexual and communist agendas.

1) The demand for the acceptance of the contraceptive mentality and more recent push for free contraceptives and abortion.
2) The whole scale attempt to rob children of their innocence through graphic sex education programs beginning in elementary school
3) The reversal of the virtues with PP’s recent instructional videos telling the youth that being a slut should by viewed positively
4) The normalization of homosexuality and so called same sex “marriage”
5) The undermining of parental authority and rights
6) The proposal to replace Father and Mother with Parent 1 & Parent 2 on birth certificates
And most importantly for their plan to work, remove God from the public sphere and undermine the moral authority of the Church.
The list goes on and on, but I don’t want to stray far from the context of the Pope’s address. If they have their way, we’re headed for a Godless, parentless over-sexualized socialist society.
Lord help us!

exNOAAman
exNOAAman
Sunday, December 30, AD 2012 6:22pm

“Like all attempts by Man to play God, this will all end in tears after immense human suffering.”

Good line, DM.

BTW friends; you may notice on some other internet forums that “gender” is listed for users. You will see a few listed viz: “I don’t have a gender, I have a sex”
(Gender is a grammatical term). Small victory over PC. Let’s all do it.

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