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Culture is King. When your culture is one of worshipping cults, society will implode. The cults of abortion; the cult of Darwin [humans evolved from rats ? Really ?]; globlaoneywarming; Statism; cultural Marxism; relativity; Islam is Peace; and the rest, all point to a lost culture. Christians are portrayed as a lunatic fringe, self-flagellates who are not nearly as sophisticated as say a 1400 year old supremacist moon cult from Mecca, and rather uncivilized as opposed to say Communism or National Socialism which itself is now equated with the direction of 'right wing' [political orientation is not a weather vane]; and evangelical muscularity.

Post-modern culture is a magnificent and terrible failure. It screams 'rationality' yet little which is rational can be discussed. Do you really believe that Dinosaurs 'evolved' out of a lizard ? Is that something a sensible person truly forwards ? Or that a frog evolved into a human ? Come on. Or that a natural trace chemical necessary for life causes weather patterns to change ? Is this not cult stupidity framed in corruption, fraud and irrationality ?

Weigel's book goes to the heart of what the Leftist media call the 'Catholic problem'. Yet that 'problem' only confirms the insanity of modern culture. An example is question from that smug, insular and buffoonish George Stephanopolous who asked Cardinal Dolan of New York; 'Why do 60% of Catholics have a problem with the Church?', to which Dolan replied, '100 % of my congregation has no problem with the Church so where do you get your number from?'. Little George's insinuation is this: why doesn't the Church became another empty vessel, goose-stepping with government diktat like say Planned Parenthood, ACORN, or the United Church and various Protestant sects ? Little boy George is representative of the media and Marxist culture which animates a deep hatred of anything which promotes the immaterial and which opposes state power. This offends little minds like Georgie's. They must have sad lives.

There is most definitely a material and an immaterial world. Miracles and the unexplainable do exist --past, present and future.. Like the caterpillar dying and becoming the butterfly, the impossible becomes the possible in both the material and immaterial world. It is proud and empty hyperbole which screams 'we know it all'. The smart man says 'I know little'. As with the human incapability to understand climate, or how dinosaurs or mammals actually did come into being; the immaterial escapes those stricken by their egos, saturated in their narcissism.

The modern cult does have a church – it is the Holy Church of Narcissism.

In comes Weigel, famous Catholic apologist and writer; and founder of the James Madison Institute [link]. Culture is King and our culture is rotten. Just watch TV or Hollyweird to see how destructive it is. The state is driving out the immaterial, the truly religious based, and the immanent spirituality which is necessary for a high culture:

“It was Christ whom Jacobin politics, in a line from Robespierre to Stalin, sought to drive out of the future of the West by the brutal suppression of the Church. It is Christ whom the twenty-first-century Christophobes fear. And if the West is to recover from the crisis of civilizational morale in which it has been immolating itself in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, it is Christ, through Evangelical Catholicism, who will help humanize the earthly city through the agency of the City of God, present in an anticipatory way in the counter-culture... “

Yet in less than a decade after the Council [Vatican II 1965], the high culture of the West took a sharp turn toward an aggressive and hegemonic secularism that, in the twenty-first century, manifests itself as Christophobia: a deep hostility to Gospel truth (especially moral truth) and a determination to drive Christians who affirm those truths out of the public square and into a privatized existence on the margins of society.38 In these circumstances, the preaching of the Gospel and the living-out of Gospel truths in activities ranging from health care to foster care to education are profoundly counter-cultural.

Hating Christianity is not just the purview of Moslems. They are enthusiastically joined by the cult members of the state, who rejoice in secularism and abhor the Church for its lack of 'relativity' and 'rationality'. The ignorance of those who believe that the Church is irrational is overpowering. It was the Church which promoted and defended free-will, freedom, faith through reason and standards of conduct premised on rationality. But why think when bumper stickers are so much easier to affix to your life ?

As Weigel states Evangelical Catholicism is happening. It is a vital part of the Church's reformation, on-going for 125 years. This past Easter 150.000 North American adults entered the Church as converts. The Church is far from dead with 1.6 billion world-wide members and growing.

Evangelical Catholicism is an expression of the four fundamental realities of Christian ecclesial life—unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity—as mediated through the deep reform of the Catholic Church that has been underway since Pope Leo XIII [early 20^th century Pope].

Why would anyone believe in the above ? There are sundry reasons, all of them valid, but the core of the belief is that the miracles of Christ's rebirth, along with the unexplained yet incredibly well attested miracles of the Apostles, and hundreds of Saints are true:

He is Son of the Most High God, incarnate in the flesh and in history, for, as C.S. Lewis provocatively suggested, there are only two other possibilities: that Jesus of Nazareth was a madman, or that he was history’s greatest liar. There are no other options. Evangelical Catholicism begins with the confession of faith that Jesus is indeed Lord, as the Great Tradition of Christianity has always understood him. And Evangelical Catholicism affirms that that basic confession of faith measures all theological efforts to explain just how this could be, or what it might mean.

Many people reject Christ as anything other than a nice man, who did some good preaching. Others state he did not exist. There are 2 times as many sources – non Christian – detailing the life of Christ and his Resurrection, an event that both the Romans and Jews acknowledged as occurring, than there is for the life of Caesar for instance. Yet Marxists who might have heard of Caesar [a limited number to be sure], seem to know that he existed. Yet they will laugh off the life of Christ, though the proof of his existence his miracles and his risen, have been attested to by the harshest of Church critics throughout the ages including our own and far surpass that of the populist Julius. How consistent.

Faith leads to freedom, by destroying sin [itself a product of slavery]; opening up the mind and soul and challenging the material. Without faith freedom withers. Truths are unknown, the soul lies dormant.

Thus the obedience of faith, rather than leading to oppression, is the path to radical freedom: the freedom to freely choose the good, the true, and the beautiful, and to do so as a matter of moral habit. This, of course, is a profoundly countercultural way of life, based on what is, in the twenty-first century, a deeply countercultural apprehension of reality.

Faith through good works matched with the spirit of reason. It is no wonder that the Catholic Church is the world's largest charity. Where are the Moslem or Hindu charities for non-Moslems and non-Hindus? Where are the Moslem hospitals in developing nations, along with schools, sanitation systems, and care for lepers and others who are marginalized ? Nowhere to be found.

Post modern culture leads to State manipulated Gnosticism. Everyone is a little god or goddess, and should be shaped as such by the state. You should be told what to do, think, and how to act, only by the state. Your children are to be raised in the 'village' managed by the state. Your views must be censured and accountable to the state. You must follow like a good little slave, everything that Marxist orthodoxy, represented by the state, demands of you. This is deemed the highest intelligence, and is called 'democratic freedom' by the cult members of the state:

Late modernity and postmodernity have seen a powerful cultural revival of Gnosticism, the most ancient of heresies, which denied the goodness of creation and sought redemption not in history and the fulfillment of history, but outside history and materiality. In its twenty-first-century form, Gnosticism teaches the utter plasticity of the human condition: there is nothing given in men and women, not even their gender; all is malleable; all can be changed to fulfill the desires (or, as it is usually phrased, to meet the “needs”) of the imperial autonomous Self. Nor are there any givens in society...

Redemption comes through the very hard work of faith, itself built on reason and even scepticism. It is much easier to be a goose-stepping cult member than to actually argue out, accept, and implement a true immaterial faith, which produces real world benefices. The post-modern world is long on rhetoric and hot air. It is short on effort, knowledge and virtue. Apparently most people like it that way. Evangelical Catholicism will however, over time, change millions of minds. The battle is far from finished.