Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

The other day I cited John Paul’s admonition of what happens when we forget God–man become an enigma to himself and ends up turning against himself. As I was preparing for a theology of the body lecture, I reread John Paul’s Jan 20th, 1980 Wednesday Audience in which he teaches that because man is created in the image of God, Who is Self-gift, man becomes a gift to the world.

How different this view of man is from those who have rejected God. We are hearing more and more from even the mainstream media about man as not a gift to the world but rather its bane. This view is being fed to them by misguided atheistic ecologists who, after rejecting the Triune, transcendent God of Christianity, have divinized sub-personal creation. They now consider mankind a virus. For example, last year a Texas ecologist was being investigated by the FBI for statements he made that seemed to advocate bio-terrorism. According to LifeSite he said:

“Good terrorists would be taking [Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire] so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of people.”

To “save” the world from the “scourge of humanity” he advocates the eradication of 90% of what he terms the “fat, human biomass.” Earlier this year an interview with an author who wrote a book about what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from the earth, Matt Lauer from the Today Show seems to advocate this same line of thinking. Rather than asking critical questions, he and co-host Meredeth Vieira talk about human developments such as cities, dams, canals, etc. as making a mess of the environment. They both agree that the world would be much better off without us. What the world without humanity would mean is a unanswered question. Does it make a difference to the world if it is a molten mass of lava or a lush green paradise? These confused souls seem to presuppose that “better off” means pristine conditions for the highest forms of life but then they reject the highest forms of life–human beings–as the problem. This dichotomous thinking is also epidemic amongst those fanning global warming hysteria. Global warming, if human caused, will only harm humans…so what would be the beef that these anti-human ecologists have with it?

Let’s look at this confused “thinking” a little more closely. The interesting thing here is that the first premise in their logic is that humanity is just another form of life, with no more value than any other. They reduce humanity to the animal aspect of its hylomorphic nature. However, they then have to distinguish humanity from the rest of the animals in order to be able to declare that human beings are the virus while the rest of the animal kingdom is not.

Therefore, for the next step in logic they are forced to make a distinction and it is a fundamental one. The reason that humans are dangerous for the world are that they alone have the capacity to transcend themselves and their environment. The capacity that makes us distinctly different from the rest of creation is no longer a sign that man has a vastly higher moral worth than sub-personal animals. Rather, not being constrained by instinct and having intellect and will, free will, becomes a danger that reduces us to the level, ironically enough, of a virus. A virus is a non-living entity that has no free will and simply responds to environmental pressures according to its nature. A virus is seen as bad, by the way, because it is dangerous to humans. There is no consistency in thought here, except to throw whatever one can at one overriding idea–the self-hatred of man.

However, it would not be correct to say that this self-hatred arises simply out of nowhere. It is a self-hatred that arises from a hatred of God and the fact that we are made in His image. It is a rebellion against the only creature which God put here on earth for its own sake. When one rejects God, he rejects himself and comes to hate in himself the reminder that he is created in God’s image–his free will. Paradoxically, he must employ and, in fact, make his will into an idol in order to do so. But again, we have shown that it is hate and self-will, not logic, which drives this movement.

We have removed God from public life and our late-modern thinking has eliminated the idea of things having a nature. The result is that there is no foundation for morality. One can no longer speak of divine law in public discourse. Nor can one easily speak of natural law because there is professed to be (by our high priests of modern science) no order to nature but a random arrived at arrangement of matter (that only begrudgingly will these “thinkers” admit is ordered). The “thinking” exhibited by these folks is vague at best. If one recalls the tradition that Satan’s non serviam was a rebellion against serving humanity because its animality was too far below him, one might justly call this latest assault on human dignity, satanic.