Richard Dawkins, the brilliant evolutionary biologist and loud, arrogant atheist, may be an unwitting Christian evangelist. Some have reported being moved toward Christ, not away from Him, after reading Dawkins’ arguments.

This is fascinating. Not all atheists are like Dawkins and many find him distasteful. For those of the new atheist bent however, he is something of a hero. I find them prideful and arrogant, ridiculing faith as unproved by science and thus untrue. First, science does not posit that which is unproven to be false, just unproven. Second, science itself proposes understanding only of the natural world at most. Their worldview is embarrassingly ignorant.

Judith Babarsky, writing for the Dead Philosophers Society, talks of how she was challenged by her stepdaughter to read Dawkins arguments. She writes:

Truthfully, I found the book a waste of my time as it afforded me no cogent arguments concerning the existence or non-existence of God. In fact, not only was Dawkins disrespectful of opinions other than his own, I found his statements about Jesus to be so ill-informed (and, mind you, I was no fount of scholarly information myself) that I resolved to actually learn something about Jesus Christ.

Reading Dawkins challenged me to go beyond my comfort zone and honestly confront the issues holding me back from a full commitment to faith. My sense of The God Delusion is that it is written as a testimony to Dawkins’ belief system (which I call fundamentalist atheism) and that the author cherry picks convenient quotes to bolster his opinion that esteemed scientists (such as Einstein) couldn’t possibly be ignorant enough to actually believe in a supernatural God, no matter what they may have said to the contrary. In fact, anyone with any intelligence at all couldn’t possible believe in a supernatural God. Dawkins is preaching to his atheist choir and evidently they loved the book based on their many five-star recommendations of it. But in that sense, Dawkins is no different than the many Christian authors who write in a similar manner. There is a pre-judgment that whoever disagrees with the premise of the book is, essentially, an idiot! Well, I don’t like to be called an idiot.

I realized I was no better than Dawkins. I was basing my faith on inner feelings and a perceived sense of my world, having never thought much deeper than surface level. I went in search of some answers. Who was this mysterious figure of Jesus? Obviously, he was a man who rocked 1st century Jerusalem to its very core. Something of great significance happened back then. There had been numerous other prophets up until that time, prophets described in the Bible. If any religion would emerge as victorious on the worldwide stage, why would one ever imagine it to be Christianity? Surely it would have been Judaism or perhaps some iteration of the Roman gods. After all, Jesus was a poor craftsman/carpenter, with a rag tag bunch of followers. They certainly were not literate, powerful or politically connected men.

And that was the beginning of the last leg of my journey to conversion to Catholicism. In reading to refute Dawkins as well as educate myself and find answers to questions, I discovered the God-man Jesus Christ. Not only did the Catholic view resonate with me emotionally, but perhaps more importantly for me, it was intellectually honest. The Protestant view seemed watered down (maybe part of the reason I left the Lutheran Church to pursue exploration of Judaism).

Damian Thompson, writing for The Telegraph, picks-up on the story and adds another:

My school friend Michael — an atheist for decades — rang me the other night and told me he’d returned to the Catholic Church. “And you’ll never guess who converted me,” he said.

“Your wife?”

“No! It was Richard Dawkins!”

He explained that he was, and is, a huge admirer of Dawkins the biologist. (I’m with him there: I read The Blind Watchmaker when it first came out and was blown away.) “But then I read The God Delusion and it was…   total crap. So bad that I started questioning my own atheism. Then he started tweeting.”

Like a loony on top of the bus, no?

“Exactly!”

Funnily enough, this is the second time in a week that I’ve heard of Richard Dawkins leading someone to Christ.

[…]

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might conclude that Prof Dawkins secretly converted to Christianity decades ago, and then asked himself: “How can I best win souls? By straightforward argument, or by turning myself from a respected academic into a comic figure fulminating against religion like a fruitcake at Speakers’ Corner, thereby discrediting atheism?”

(That is my bold highlight above. It was just too good not to!)

Read both full articles: Reading Richard Dawkins Led To My Conversion and Is Richard Dawkins leading people to Jesus?. The Catholic Herald also covers the story in The academic who read The God Delusion then turned to God.

Guns make me uncomfortable. People can get hurt with them.

Other things that raise special caution for me are stairs and cars. Lots of people get hurt with those too, including me (hence my extra caution). Cars and stairs are not intrinsically evil, of course. They have useful functions, but can be the source of lethal accidents and can be used in the commission of capital crimes.

So it is with guns, useful for good and evil purposes. They do nothing sinful by themselves, ever. Some use them for hunting and some for sport. I suspect most people keep guns for self-defense. Against a stronger or armed attacker or group of attackers, nothing else compares in effectiveness. If you are American, it is your right to possess them – at least until the government finds ways to infringe on that right as they have on freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

BTW, the Catechism says the following on the topic of self-defense:

2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not.”

2264 Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:

If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.

In upstate New York, a businessman (and other church members) donated merchandise he sells to his church to raise money. People do that all the time, but in this case the man is a gun dealer. The church plans to offer it as a raffle. Hysteria and pandemonium ensue.

The Times Union (the local paper) has the story:

The Rev. John Koletas, pastor of Grace Baptist Church, said the service and gun raffle are aimed at “honoring hunters and gun owners who have been so viciously attacked by the antichristian socialist media and antichristian socialist politicians the last few years,” according to a letter he posted on the church website.

Koletas, who works as a Rensselaer County court reporter, said he wanted to show support for Second Amendment rights.

“I’m just trying to be a blessing and a help to the gun owners and the hunters and give away a free AR-15,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

He said the constitutional right to own a gun should not be abridged, any more than First Amendment rights should be.

“If someone doesn’t want to own a gun, that’s their right,” he said. “At the same time, I don’t think we should be critical of legal gun owners who gave us our freedom.”

Members of his family, congregation and the owner of a gun shop that will donate the Smith & Wesson semiautomatic rifle backed his contentious plan.

“I’m for it,” said longtime church member Jarvis Heater, 52, a carpenter doing maintenance Wednesday inside the red-brick 1886 church on Fourth Avenue in the Lansingburgh neighborhood of Troy.

“I’m totally in support of Second Amendment rights,” said the pastor’s 19-year-old son, John Koletas. About 100 people typically show up for a Sunday service, he said.

Irene Koletas said it was not a marketing ploy and underscored her husband’s strong belief in a constitutional right to bear arms. The flier was mailed to a list of gun owners, she said. It featured aspect a photo of an assault rifle under a bold headline: “Win a FREE AR-15.” It included a Bible quote from John 14:27: “My peace I give unto you.”

The Kentucky Baptist Convention of churches made national news this week and garnered controversy for recent “Second Amendment Celebrations” that include a free steak dinner and raffle to win handguns, long guns and shotguns. The outreach effort for “unchurched” young men resulted in a spike in attendance.

Read the whole article: Troy pastor’s AR-15 assault rifle giveaway creates controversy.

Father Zuhlsdorf also offers his views on the subject. More on self-defense in general is in the New Advent hosted Catholic Encyclopedia.

In our sophisticated, modern world the concept of demonic possession seems like religious kookiness to many. That is understandable for those who do not believe in God and Satan. For the rest of us, our personal experience with it is typically non-existent so we too often see it as far-fetched. Even the Church is prudently very cautious in reaching such a conclusion. While rare, it does exist and is quite serious. All the psychiatrists, drugs and restraints in the world can not “cure” the truly posessed.

The Ammon family of Gary Indiana found this out first hand. Everyone tried to pin their behavior and physical problems on something else. Child Protective Services suspected the mother of mental illness or abuse, probably both.

New Evangelists Monthly contributing author Patti Armstrong covered the story in an exclusive interview for the National Catholic Register. Father Michael Maginot, the investigator and exorcist, recounts the events:

What had been happening to the Ammon family?

The Ammon family had gone to their physician out of desperation, not knowing what to do about the strange behaviors and occurrences in their family. The children went into trances and spoke with demonic voices, reported being choked, levitated and were thrown into things. The youngest boy claimed to see another little boy who visited with him in a closet. No one else saw the visitor, who would talk about what it was like to be dying or getting killed.

At the doctor’s office, the boys growled and cursed in demonic voices. The medical staff saw the youngest one thrown into a wall. Then the boys passed out. An ambulance and police were called to take the children to the Methodist hospital. Then CPS was also called to investigate LaToya for suspected mental illness or abuse of the children.

The oldest boy woke up at the hospital, but the younger one screamed and acted like [he was] in a trance. He was waiting in the psychiatrist’s office with his grandmother when he walked up the wall backwards, then flipped over his grandmother and landed on his feet. The nurse and CPS worker ran from the room. When the psychiatrist came in, he tried to get the boy to do it again, but it was impossible, and the boy could not even remember doing it.

What was your first meeting with the family like?

LaToya and her mother were staying with a relative, but they agreed to meet me at the house the next day, Sunday, at 6pm to tell me their story. Both women were Baptist and said they never dabbled in anything occult. The mother never missed church on Sundays, and LaToya sometimes went.

They told me their story. It all started when the family moved into the house in November 2011. The first day, something strange happened. There were horseflies everywhere in their screened-in porch, even though it was almost winter. They cleaned them up, but then, for several more days, there were flies again. In the basement, sand appeared all over the floor – around two buckets full.

One time, the grandmother woke up at 3am and saw the shadow of someone in her house. The next morning, she checked to see if anything was taken, but only saw muddy boot prints that seemed to come from the basement. Later, the family would sometimes hear footsteps coming up from basement. Sometimes there was knocking on the door or growling like a dog, but, when it was opened, nothing was there.

The family started getting sick. The kids were waking up with bloody gums, noses and ears. Sometimes they went to school, and there would be blood, but the school nurse would find no reason for it. At one point, the grandmother saw the daughter levitate over her bed then fall back down.

Family and friends were afraid to come to the house. LaToya and her mother could not afford to move. They asked people from their church to help, but they refused. A group from a charismatic church agreed to come to pray. A lady with the group, who said she was clairvoyant, claimed there were 200 demons in the basement. She ran from the house, with the others following close behind.

Around Easter time, everyone was watching TV, and a Febreze bottle lifted in front of them. It was thrown into the mother’s bedroom, smashing her lamp. When they got up to look, a black figure looked out at them from an open closet. The mother yelled for everyone to pack some clothes and get out of the house. They stayed in a hotel that night; then LaToya’s brother agreed to take them in.

Did anything strange happen when you were there?

Yes, around 8:30pm. It was then that LaToya told me that things got much worse, right after her ex-boyfriend came by the house in March. He said he wanted to give something to the boys. He gave them both $5 to remind them to be good and said the girl did not need anything to be good.

I said I wanted to know more about the boyfriend, and that’s when a series of interruptions occurred. The bathroom light flickered. Every time I went to investigate, it stopped, but started again when I walked away. “Well, I guess it’s scared of me,” I said. Then it started flickering again, as if in defiance.

I ignored it and said, “Let’s get back to the boyfriend.” That’s when the Venetian blinds in the kitchen started to sway back and forth. The strings for pulling them up were perfectly still; just the blinds swayed. The swaying kept the same speed, then the swaying went from window to window, room to room.

Find out what happened in the complete interview at the Register: Parish Priest Aids Family in Fight Against Demons. The Indy Star also has coverage of this story, including a video.

New Advent has Catholic Encyclopedia articles on exorcism and exorcists. Catholic Essentials also has a good piece on possession and exorcism. Catholic Doors has a FAQ.

Catholic Social Teaching, in service of social justice, has well developed principles. In the political world we also here the words “social justice” used, but often in service of highly distorted, political ends.

The principal of solidarity is commonly misused in support of ever-growing, unrestrained central government. Some people simply assume that more government programs, more government regulations, more government everything is the solution. It is not. Such thinking inevitably tramples human dignity, reducing people into minor cogs in the wheel. In my opinion, many people are about to learn first-hand of their increasing “cog-ness” as ObamaCare unfolds.

The balancing principal which keeps solidarity in check is subsidiarity. These are equal and complimentary principals, one without the other leads to disaster.

James Kalb recently wrote an excellent piece for The Catholic World Report on what subsidiarity is and how it is currently practiced (spoiler: it isn’t).

Subsidiarity is a basic principle of Catholic social teaching. Like other such principles, it is praised more than practiced, because it is at cross purposes with the outlook that now governs our public life.

It springs from concern for man in all his dimensions. Each of us participates in the human nature that is common to all. Each of us also has his own will and destiny, and knows who he is through a social identity that includes local and particular connections. So we are at once universal, individual, and socially situated, and become what we are through active participation in a complex of networks and institutions.

Concern with that aspect of human life puts Catholic social teaching at odds with the understandings of social life now dominant, which take equality and efficiency as their concern, and consequently want to reduce society to a sort of machine run from the top down for simple purposes. Such understandings make man less than he is, and end up treating him at bottom as an employee, voter, and consumer: someone who holds a position in a system of production and distribution designed and run by other people, periodically registers his assent to that system and how it is governed, and otherwise is free to amuse himself however he wants, as long as he doesn’t interfere with other people or the smooth operation of the system.

Dissent from that vision puts Catholic social teaching at cross purposes with every other political ideal now prominent. Catholic teaching wants man to be an effective participant in his world, so it wants the center of gravity of social life to be within his reach. For that reason it insists, in the face of the modern tendency toward the industrialization of social relations, on making the business of society as local as reasonably possible. It therefore asserts the principle of subsidiarity, which insists that lower-level groups such as families and local communities are not tools in the hands of higher-ups but have their own life and integrity that must be respected.

Subsidiarity rejects all forms of tyranny. It makes hierarchy more a matter of enabling those in the middle and bottom to carry on their lives than giving those at the top the power to plan out what is wanted and see to its achievement. It rejects the conception of social justice most common today, which emphasizes equality and universality and thus a comprehensive system of supervision and control. Instead, it stands for the Catholic and classical conception of social justice, a state of affairs in which each part of the social order receives its due so it can carry out its proper function.

More generally, it rejects present-day liberalism, the attempt to turn the social order into a technically rational contrivance for maximum equal satisfaction of individual preferences. It opposes it not only in its leftist or progressive form, which emphasizes expertise and equality, and prefers to act through neutral bureaucracies and international authorities, but also in its rightist or conservative form, which emphasizes energy and efficiency, and prefers global markets and the exercise of national power. So it is ill at ease with both the politically-correct welfare state and such aspects of present-day capitalism as outsourcing, big box stores, the penetration of commercial relations into all aspects of life, and the bottom line as the final standard for business decisions.

It nonetheless accepts certain tendencies often identified as conservative or liberal. It generally favors family values, distributed powers, federalism, local control, and freedom of enterprise and association, all of which now count as conservative causes. It also favors causes that count as liberal, such as grassroots democracy, limitations on big business as well as big government, and certain kinds of unionism. It favors neighborliness and an active civil society, which everyone says he likes, and maintenance of borders and limits on globalization, which our major parties along with the whole of our ruling class now reject.

Read James’ whole piece: Subsidiarity.

See also my previous essays touching this subject: social justice / not social justice and hijacking CST.

Satan has an enemy and that is Jesus Christ and His Church. Ultimately of course, Satan loses. Until then he wishes to gather as many souls as possible to accompany him to his eternal defeat. The success of that mission is directly at odds with the Church and so the Church must be dealt with.

How to do that is the question? The Church is formidable, contains the fullness of truth and is protected by the Holy Spirit. It will never be defeated. The key for Satan is to peel people away from the Church. Ideally to coax them – and very importantly their future generations – to abandon the Church altogether, separating them from truth, sacraments and ultimately God.

Satan’s challenge is this can not be done in 1 step. It must be done slowly, taking orthodox believers step by step off of the narrow path of salvation to the wide path of destruction. During this process, the Church might be viewed as “two Churches.” There is the faithful, orthodox one – consistent from the time of Jesus – and there is the other church-inside-the-church community. The latter consists of those who, often unbeknownst to themselves, are slowly separating from the Church.

This phenomenon is described well by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski in his recent piece for Corpus Christi Watershed:

IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY, we see a broad trend: at first, believers are focused on God, who alone is their hope and salvation; then, on themselves as rational beings who can know the truth; thereafter, on themselves as free agents who can choose their way in life; lastly, on themselves as emotional narcomaniacs. God, reason, will, passion. When each new stage arrives, the former one is jettisoned. It is a descent from the apex mentis, the still point of the soul touching eternity and infinity, to lower and lower levels of the soul — discursive reasoning, freedom of choice, concupiscence.

In keeping with this trend, it is possible to discern the lineaments of the two churches — the true Church of Christ, having its concrete existence in the Catholic Church, and an anti-Church, which represents and does the gruntwork for the anti-Christ, the anti-Word (to use the language of Karol Wojtyla). The profound difference between these two can be gleaned by considering a list of things that are found to be regularly associated with each:

THE CHURCH: a serious view of the sacraments as efficacious actions of Christ; recourse to acts of penance and the sacrament of penance; worship of the most holy Eucharist; emphasis on devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary; obedience to the Pope; an attitude of adoration, quietude, and humility in prayer; monasticism; support of celibacy and the male clergy; large families; natural and teleological view of sexuality and its place in human life, with traditional roles for the sexes; high and rich cultural history (e.g., in music and architecture); liturgical majesty and reverence; vehement hatred of heresy and schism; perception of the deep differences between Catholics and all others who call themselves Christians; willingness to fight for and even die in defense of the truths of the faith (like the peasants of the Vendée); knowledge and support of the whole system of papal bulls, decrees, encyclicals, and Church councils with their clear statements of doctrine to be embraced by every Christian throughout the world; the assumptions behind missionary work and the ultimate fruit sought from this work, viz., the expansion of the one true Church from east to west; the very idea of the necessity of converting to the Catholic faith for salvation; the belief that outside of the Church there is no salvation (extra ecclesiam nulla salus); a holistic understanding of the union of man’s soul and body. Most telling, of course, will be the devout worship of the Eucharist in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass worthily offered.

THE ANTI-CHURCH: here, the community worships the community; penance is downplayed or forgotten; the Eucharist is a “love-feast” that affords an occasion for people to be friendly with one another; sermons are typically on “love and forgiveness,” without any reference to faith or morals; there is widespread ignorance of Church teaching, contempt for or indifference to papal decrees, agitation for radical changes in doctrine and practice; one finds various mutations of feminism, and a tacit approval or vociferous defense of contraception, abortion, and homosexuality; there is the mushy nouveau muzak, a complete severance of present liturgical art from the past, distrust of and even attacks against traditional forms of piety and devotion; the liturgies are “spontaneous” and informal feel-good gatherings; an accommodating attitude is extended towards “separated brethren,” downplaying or even denying the importance of any differences in doctrine or practice between Catholics and other Christians (after all, everyone is trying to do their best, and that’s basically good and pleasing to God); heresy and schism are cruel or intolerant ideas, martyrdom is an emotional aberration or the result of unfortunate nervous excitement (for there could be no reason not to compromise a little bit when the government tells you to do so); religious life and monasticism are irrelevant carryovers from a dark age; premarital sex is not only normal and unobjectionable but de rigeur; the serious purpose of life is not working out our salvation in fear and trembling by penance and recourse to the sacraments and constant prayer, but rather, enjoying all the good things of this world with a clean conscience according to our technologically bolstered appetites. And one could throw an uncritical acceptance of the historical-critical method and its application to the infallible and inerrant Word of God into the mix.

Read Peter’s whole piece: The Two Churches: Which One Do You Belong To?.

IMHO, a big part of the problem is catechesis and internal evangelism. The collapse of quality instruction in the faith after Vatican II is legion and the fruits of that are now apparent. Fortunately, that is beginning to turn around. Internal evangelism is the other big piece. Catholic in name only does not apply only to those seen once or twice per year but to many more. To one degree or another, to all of us. Leading the internal evangelism charge must come from the pulpit.