The Godless are on the loose!  They normally converge and plot their attacks on Christ at about this time of the year.

      It reminds us of one of the most successful attempts to embarrass Christ -- the filming of The Da Vinci Code based on the anti-Christ novel by Dan Brown.  Here Christ was pictured as a father who left a bunch of bastards in Europe! Christ was re-crucified as a lover living an immoral life! This is of course more than just mutilating Christianity.

      The cinematography itself is a satanic trophy that non-believers of the Holy Scripture think they so richly deserved in the battle against Christ.

       It has been foretold before the time of Christ that when Christ is born, the world will have those dying with envy. Do anti-Christ radicals fit into this picture? I am sure most of us wonder. For, the tribe of atheists appears to be slowly multiplying over time.

      But I will not drag the biblical truth into this stupefaction and wonderment because to a leftist atheist, the exact fit will just be regarded as a religious tall tale instead of the greatest story ever told.

     More of this can be gleaned in Apologetics, a branch of theology that opens our eyes to a cacophony of good and evil. Here you can measure the degree of Christ abuse.

     Godless attackers are open and frontal when they express their Christian resentment at this time of the year. In an open Media debate, I defended a Catholic devotee who was disgraced after being stereotyped as a blind Catholic follower.

      The philosophical abuse she received in public was that her parents have been in the Catholic Church religion for generations and she just followed their footsteps. Thus the Godless were convinced that blind devotees were deprived of the opportunity to find out the truth of what they believed in.

      Consequently, the final insult was, blind generational believers were suffering a certain cognitive disability. They are stereotyped as retarded adults, impeded to learn on their own what life is all about. They have been prevented to grow up in their own way to self-maturity.  

      This labeling is an illustration of ignorance of what belief in divinity or religious doctrine is all about.

       Belief, more so in the exercise of religious faith, is well learned and better understood in epistemology [1] and metaphysics, more particularly in the areas of the “nature of knowledge” and “causality” in both studies, respectively.

       My take is that, the knowledge that the anti-Christ pontificate with certainty – and that is in their mind the Catholic youths forfeited the opportunity to know that God does not exist through generations of blind adherence to the Catholic faith – is in fact just a philosophical if not a delusional invention similar to if not worse than blind adherence to a traditional belief handed down in time to later generations.

      The only difference is that the Catholic generational believer believes on something and the atheist believes on nothing.

      The former has knowledge of a positive belief that survived throughout the years, whereas the latter has no knowledge of anything at all as a premise from which to conclude that God does not exist.  Without knowledge, there can be no truth, although what is true and believed need not count as knowledge.

       It was Plato who said that “…[K]knowledge is what is both true and believed, though not all that is both true and believed counts as knowledge.” [2]

       The concept of “causality” is philosophically real as it is in metaphysics and qualitative reasoning. Sciences, abstract or material, pivot on “causality”. [3]

       For as long as we know the initial conditions and the forces that govern the happening of an event such as the birth of Christ, the Catholic Church and belief on its manifest Being such as the celebration of the Holy Mass, can be established by the law of causality. Thus the Catholic belief on Christ based on the Holy Scripture that was handed down from generation to generation authenticates itself when the Bible traces the seminal knowledge of Christianity from its very beginning deep back in time.

I would like to recall to mind Blaise Pascal’s discourse on “God Rules”. [4]  Christian belief in God is formed through three familiar means of belief: by inspiration, reason, and customs.

        The Revelation “inspires” belief in the existence of God. Theologians “reason out” the existence of the Omnipotent and Omniscient Being. These two channels of belief formation need not be further dissected because they are not only self-explanatory but also taught in middle school starting from kindergarten.

         Belief handed down through customs and tradition needs to be explained to the attackers of the Christian religious faith, i.e. accusation that Catholics are blind for following the Catholic Church from generation to generation.

       Take one Catholic belief practiced by church devotees -- the celebration of the Holy Mass.

       Among genuine Catholics, belief on the Holy Mass is handed down through family tradition. Families go to church together on Sunday. The justifying and justifiable religious principles of this belief are known to ascendants like they do the back of their palm, before they were handed down through their offspring, if not, through adherence following years of usage and practice.  Thus belief on the Holy Mass is the Catholic Church itself. 

      An attack against the traditional celebration of the Holy Mass is an attack against the Catholic Church.  It is not only a misguided attack but a misdirected strike against the traditional Catholic believers themselves.

        When wrongfully assailed, innocent followers of the Catholic faith are expected to defend their inherited belief like they would defend their inherited material estate because according to English theologian Isaac Watts [1674-1748], “… they are born heirs …” to such traditional religious conviction. They believe not only those that they comprehend but even the incomprehensible that otherwise would have without question, re-enforced and fortified their faith.

         Contrast this to what the Godless advocates. The fallacy of “… what you see is what you believe …” is being preached by argumentative atheists. This logic insults your intelligence and mine. In journalistic parlance, I can kill this with a stroke of the pen: We are not an eye-witness to our birth yet we believe that we were born to a mother [unless of course you admit that you are a test tube baby].

Also the folly of “… never believe anything unless you experience it yourself…” is a pin-up foolhardiness if not a self-destructive idiocy propounded by radical liberalism.

       When President Bill Clinton was running for president, he tried very hard to win the votes of the youthful first-time-voters of the land by stressing the important philosophy of one’s individual freedom to try anything, including marijuana, LSD and other lethal addictive drugs.  When Clinton was their age, he wanted to experience and to find out for himself the truth as to why the young is prohibited “to sniff”.  So he gave himself to the American public as an example of those who had “inhaled” but were able to quit before it was too late. 

         But records show it was too late to adventurous legions of unfortunate youngsters who were trapped after their “first sniff” as drug addiction hooked them up -- a case of too darn late to learn what a bad example this is.

        “Don’t believe unless you experience it …” is a fatal philosophical prescription of the Godless.  It may work as a joke when you want to tickle somebody but not if it cost your life.  You might not live to learn the truth. We cannot experience death first, just to find out and believe that we can die next.

         These semantics of the Antichrist’s apostles that I have discussed here today may sound smart and philosophically disarming, but it does not hide the veiled resentment of Christ.

        It cannot also obscure the antipathy of liberal dissenters or conceal the profound dislike and an unhappy attitude of the Godless towards the Christian faith.  #

© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Freedomsphoenix.com access December 30, 2008.

The writer is an award-winning journalist. Know more about the author by reading his published editorials and feature articles or you may e-mail your comment at ed.superx722@yahoo.com.sg