But I hope the Catholic Church of the future will take the defense of its flock more serious again. Many books (and movies and TV series...) out there contain downright evil ideas, sometimes presented in dishonest ways. Perhaps some organized, ecclesiastically sanctioned system of reviews to guide readers would be feasible?
No opinions on the ship itself, but the social proposals are very interesting :-)
Earth biomes will be kept intact with respect to their natural evolution. But human society will be treated as an amoral engineering problem seeking to optimize a few measurable parameters chosen up front. There is little sense in this proposal that human beings will bring along with them original sin or whatever you want to call it. But what allows human beings to flourish and keeps societies together, especially in conditions of scarcity (very much unlike the conditions of say the past half century), may not be obvious to the project planners.
In fact, much of what has been handed down to us in the legal and opaque cultural and religious traditions that have successfully survived such stresses in the past, is gleefully discarded.
The social engineering proposed is of the most dystopian and heavy-handed variety: it involves taking a group of volunteers to Antarctica to format them to a supposed sociocultural blank slate, followed by "characteristics monitoring". Despite the apparent care for superficial day-to-day happiness, human beings are to be indoctrinated to see themselves as discardable resources. They are not just governed with "mere" discipline, but with a program of violent population control (e.g. "maximum 2 childrens", "not necessarily with the same partner", "euthanasia", "not owned by the individual", ...).
So humans on Chrysalis will decide over every single aspect of life and death, not for themselves but for each other. But this time, unlike all earlier times, it will work because they're going to keep "governance architecture liquid, horizontal and inclusive" and "open source communities" and "not ethically compulsory" and based on "deep scenario exploration".
> taking a group of volunteers to Antarctica to format them to a supposed sociocultural blank slate
I'd love to see an actual blueprint for making this work. I don't believe in it at all.
> They are not just governed with "mere" discipline
Unclear to me what discipline exists. There's no mention of crime and punishment or enforcement. It seems assumed that you'll have indoctrinated everyone sufficiently to not need it?
My working model of indoctrination and control is based on power imbalance. Once they're on the ship, I don't think "the AI's will control everything" is gonna fly forever.
A miracle, by definition, transcends the nature of the thing in question. The cause is not attributable to the power of the thing effected or anything in the world.
If God is distinct from what is created, then a miracle cannot be said to be a manifestation of what is created. Pantheism, on the other hand, must deny miracles, because God and the universe are one, and so all apparent miracles are merely unaccounted for manifestations of reality and perhaps explainable by "some future human theory of reality".
Since Jesuits (ostensibly) hold to a Catholic view in which God and the created order are distinct, they must therefore believe that miracles are not only possible, but do happen. The question is then largely whether a particular effect is miraculous or not.
It might be added that Dominicans had the explicit calling to crown their preaching by leading virtuous lives marked by poverty. As an example of this, especially in the early days, Dominicans traveled a lot by foot as a form of austerity. This could certainly work with having a bit of a girth, but the full experience of 13th century Dominican life is hard to square with "morbid obesity" or being "physically grotesque". We also know that Aquinas was humble, spiritual and deeply motivated to join this new mendicant order specifically. He resisted all attempts of his noble family to steer him in other directions that would have been more prestigious in the eyes of the world. I also remember reading that Aquinas ate only once a day to devote himself more fully to his work (not sure where though).
He can't have lived in the Roman Empire, because those are words written in English, a language that didn't exist back then.
What's that? You meant, he lived within the bounds of the region that we call one thing, but would have been something else contemporaneously, but both refer to the same geographical location? Great, we agree he lived in Turkey.
It's a catastrophe, not just esthetically but spiritually as well. It has nothing to do with austerity or wealth. Some of the churches no longer seek to express holiness ("having been set aside for God") and support the numinous and eternal nature of the divine liturgy that takes place in them.
One of the most breathtaking pictures I've ever seen in this regard is of Mass in a German church completely destroyed during WW2.
Exactly. Sacred architecture flows necessarily from essence (what church is) through substance (can't be accident or easy-to-vary) into form (matter receiving truth). Regrettably, accidents get commonly confused for substance like mistaking material poverty for spiritual authenticity, or adorning for corruption. Poor churches in middle ages still had a golden chalice (for literal God), cruciform layout (or other hard-to-vary forms in orthodox churches), eastern orientation, and an elevated altar. Why would a church built in A.D. 2024 have less?
No. You are wrong. No fine stuff necessary for Jesus or his Dad.
Does God need an altar to be elevated? Who does that altar actually elevate exactly? Who most benefits from the splendor and opulence?
We cannot create anything so nice that it would be more than a 4 year olds drawing for the fridge - God created all things but is super impressed by Gold chalice, sees that as a show of sincerity rather than action and belief and faith - uh huh, sure he does - you kno what they say about rich people at the gates of heaven right??
Yes. You are right. "My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise." It would not be good to create religious beauty to "impress" God in a boastful way. All that is good in creation exists in God in supereminent fashion.
But we don't do things to impress God in that sense. By supernatural grace our broken spirit begins to heal and we become like God, from the inside out, in a way appropriate to our finite created nature. From grace comes our (sometimes clumsy...) imitation of Jesus and, why not, a taste for sacred art and beauty. By grace all of creation will be transformed.
Since you ask: what is elevated on the Catholic (and Orthodox) altars is the Son, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. It does not come from us, we did nothing to deserve it, and yet it was given to us so we can offer it to God. As the Lamb is elevated and we look up to it, we desire to add what little is in us. One expression of this desire is to have everything involved, from the building to the sacred vessels, express the sanctity of what is taking place. It may be clumsy, it may be mixed up with impure motives and false piety. Who knows, it may really have been a bit much at times. But in itself, it is good and appropriate. It does not exclude other expressions of grace. In fact, to suppress it completely strikes me as joyless, misanthropic, deeply unbiblical and likewise potentially mixed up with impure motives and false piety.
What I think is wrong in your reply, is that you seem to confuse the art and golden vessels found in churches (which is a growing heritage serving public and religious purposes) with privately owned wealth and a life dedicated to self-indulgence (like the rich man from Lazarus).
Finally, as a father I am always happy with the drawings of my kids, especially if I know that they really put effort in it. It is amazing to see that these little human beings I helped to come into existence have such creativity in and of themselves. Would this same joy not exist in our Heavenly Father in a supereminent way?
Yeah... and it's for God and the King that he so divinely ordained rule over all of us bc that is how that was, the church and the palace had all the money and they supported each other for thousands of years
Don’t confuse culture and gradual inculturation with purity of religion and validity of liturgy.
In the age of the Messiah the faithful are truly drawn “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages”. If your wife would go to any (decent) Catholic or Orthodox church, and learns to "read" the building and the liturgy of Holy Mass, maybe she could recognize the contours of the “pure” or “more Jewish" religion she is yearning for. She could go to modern or more traditional Latin/Greek/Ukrainian/Syriac/Ethiopian/... rites and in the plurality of all those different cultures and temperaments recognize over and over again the exact same elements and basic plan, organically evolved yet meticulously preserved in a chain of unbroken sacramental obedience.
Entering the church building she’d gradually walk from the holy water near the entrance, through the “outer courtyard” for the lay people, to the sanctuary with the sacrificial altar, golden vessels and incense, elevated and separated by altar rail or curtain. Behind is the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies containing the Real Presence, indicated by a lit candle. And if she was to e.g. carefully analyse the words of the Eucharistic prayers in all these different rites and languages, she would find over and over again the same underlying structure, complete with the Haggadah.
But language and cultural differences aside, there must be fundamental differences as well. It is Christ Himself who took the prescribed liturgy of the ancient Passover meal and gave it its full and final meaning by substituting Himself, in the presence of the apostles, for the merely symbolic lamb. It is through Christ that the Trinity is fully revealed.
How then could e.g. the exact same holidays have been retained? For instance, why would you celebrate Shavuot, if with Pentecost the Holy Spirit directly descended on the Church? Another example: the Lord's Day is not "Sabbath on the wrong day". Sabbath laws do not apply to those under the New Covenant. Beyond the most excellent idea of dedicating an entire day to the Lord with plenty of obligatory prayer, rest, food and family/community time, the Christian Sunday is simply not the Sabbath. On Sunday we celebrate the Resurrection, which occurred on the first day of a new week (the supernatural "eighth day", beyond the natural fullness of the old week).
The priest in this age is also no longer a Levite. To properly offer this sacrifice, he is now sacramentally ordained by proper religious authorities “in the Order of Melchizedek”, reminiscent of the royal priesthood of David and the priesthood of Adam and the firstborns. And where the old liturgy was a sign of divine grace, the liturgy of our age is an effective cause of divine grace. If the priest obeys the liturgy that has been prescribed for his own rite and his own day, no amount of personal corruption can take away the sanctity of his work. This also means that there is no fundamental need for wars in the Holy Land or for "conquering" the Temple Mount by force. The Temple is already being built. Every time the faithful, after having been sacramentally cleansed of mortal sin through baptism or confession, participate in the Lord’s sacrifice by eating the body and drinking the blood of the Lamb, they themselves will inevitably become more and more the dwelling place of the Lord within the material creation.
But I hope the Catholic Church of the future will take the defense of its flock more serious again. Many books (and movies and TV series...) out there contain downright evil ideas, sometimes presented in dishonest ways. Perhaps some organized, ecclesiastically sanctioned system of reviews to guide readers would be feasible?