"C'mon, is there such a thing as Hell?'

The best response to the complaint that an all loving God wouldn't allow for something like the Doctrine of Hell is provided (as always it seems) by C.S. Lewis. When talking about simply unrepentatntly bad people he responds:

'What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But he has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does."

Injecting a soul into hominids

I have never had much difficulty accepting the idea that the universe is not 6000 years old as some too-literal readers of the book of Genesis infer. Maybe some of this comes from my training as an archaeologist. As a Christian I take some small pleasure from the fact that the Big Bang hypothesis was first put forward by a Catholic priest, Georges LeMaitre. Likewise the theory of evolution never bothered me tremendously, since I reasoned quite early on that if there can be physical laws governing the attraction of matter and forces in the universe, surely there could be merit in some of the various forms of the theory of evolution explaining how biological life developed. Much of the hubbub about creationism versus Darwinism is really rooted in the fact that many creationists ignore the facts that science has revealed about the way in which the universe works; and many Darwinists try to use the scientific data to talk about metaphysical things.
As Pope Benedict pointed out in his book Christianity and the crisis of cultures, the proper attitude to take toward Scripture is the Catholic view which isn't always advertised well even by Catholics. Galileo wrote a letter in 1615 illustrating the perspective quite well:

And if the same Holy Spirit has intentionally refrained from teaching us
propositions of this kind, that is, of astronomy, since these have nothing to do
with his own true intention-which is our salvation-how can one then assert that
it is absolutely necessary to hold this position rather than that, so that one
is de fide, the other erroneous?... Here, I would repeat something I once
heard from an ecclesiastical personage of the most eminent rank, namely, that it
is the intention of the Holy Spirit to teach us how to go to heaven, not how
heaven goes.

So while I was living my career as a paleoanthropologist, I really had no trouble with the science of the origins of life and the universe in history, and believing in Scripture. But when someone would ask about when those hominids received a soul, I would just give a short stock answer that was only partly satisfying: "at some point God injected a soul into the hominid."I have just finished reading a book by CS Lewis called The Problem of Pain. And in the fleshes out a little bit the whole concept of God injecting a soul:

For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle
of humanity in the image of himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be
applied to each of the fingers, and joggers and teeth and throat capable of
articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all the material
motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have
existed for ages in this state before it became man: it may even have been
clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof
of its humanity. But it was only an animal because all its physical and
psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends.
Then, in the fullness of time, God caused it to descend upon this organism, both
on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say I
and me, which could look upon itself as an object, which new God, which could
make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time
that it could perceive time flowing past... Judged by his artifacts, or
perhaps even by his language, this blessed creature was, no doubt, a
savage. All that experience and practice can teach he had still to learn:
if he chipped flints, he doubtless chipped them clumsily enough. He may
have been utterly incapable of expressing in conceptual form his Paradisal
experience. All that is quite irrelevant. From our own childhood we
remember that before our elders fought us capable of understanding anything, we
already had spiritual experience as fewer and as momentous as any we have
undergone since, though not, of course, as rich in factual context. From
Christianity itself we learn that there is a level-in the long run the only
level of importance-on which the learned and the adult have no advantage at all
over the simple and the child. I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man
could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature
to be exploited or, at best, patronized. Only one or two, and those the
holiest among us, would glance the second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded,
slow-spoken creature; but day, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet.

Provides some pretty stimulating ideas doesn't it?

First Communion in the Hand

Did you realize that St. Joseph was the first person to receive communion in the hand?

This is precisely how screwed up my prayer life is...

Of late I thought I had been doing pretty good with a prayer life. I try and give one of the first half hours or so to God in dedicated prayer, whether it is Liturgy of the Hours, Magnificat Mag, Rosary, Meditation, Lectio Divnia -- what have you. Oftentimes in the morning it is a challenge to keep out impending thoughts of what I need to do during the balance of the day. Then, later on around noon I like to say a standard prayers, and read a bit out of the NT.
I have been fairly convicted by recent experience, including a talk by Fr. Larry Richards and C.S Lewis 'The problem of Pain.' I thought I was doing pretty good until I heard these two guys.

Fr. Larry:

You gotta have daily committed prayer. You don't TRY to fit God into your
day; you build your day around God...do you TRY to eat every day? Do
you TRY to read the paper every day? How about if your relationship with
your wife was like that? Every day in the morning after you wake up and do
your stuff, you go to see your wife with your book of poems. And you read
her a beautiful poem. And then you say "Shhhh!" And then you go
about the rest of your day, and you're one of these real good husbands because
you pick up the phone, call her and say, "Thank you for everything you've ever
done for me: SHhhhhh." and then you hang up. You go home from work
and your wife has made you a beautiful dinner, and every day you say the same
words, "Thank you for this wonderful dinner." And then you shove it down
your throat and never talk to her during your dinner time. After that, you
show that you're in that 1% of great husbands by saying "Thanks for that dinner,
it was really great." Next its off to read the paper or watch TV, and
right before you go to bed, you walk in to see your spouse with your book of
poems, and you read her the same poem every night... or the same 5 poems... or
'let's try something different tonite' and you try a different poem. And
after you do this for 50 years, what kind of relationship would that be
gentlemen? It would STINK. And that's our relationship with
God. We say our prayers, but we don't enter into a relationship

.

C.S. Lewis:
"We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; but
before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is
felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction
from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'.

OUCH!

Loving Your neighbor Challenge

"You love God as much as the person you love the least." Dorothy Day

The Trial

Was it Dietrich Bonhoeffer who asked, "If you were put on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"

Fr. Larry Richards in 'Be a Man' offers an insightful analysis of this: "Being a Christian means living a life of service. A life of service means you are not only concerned about yourself, but are concerned about giving your life away for others. Walk to where you have a mirror in your house. Look at your own beautiful face, then take out a sheet of paper and simply write on the paper, "I am third." Then tape that piece of paper onto your mirror. You need a practical reminder of your call to service. Then, before you go to bed each night, ask yourself, "Did I commit one unselfish act today, one act of service?" If the answer is no, you wasted your life in Christ today. YOu are not a servant. You are more concerend about yourself, and lust is all about you. Lust can't wait to receive. Love cannot wait to give."

The Good News?

Ever wonder why the Gospels are called the 'Good News? I was speaking with an 'anti-theist' the other day about free will and the problem of pain (the latter is the only good argument for being an atheist, but more on that later). The Christian answer to why there is pain in the world is that we have used our free will to become very bad. This doctrine is well known and hardly needs to be stated, but to bring this doctrine to light in the modern world, and even among Western Christians is very hard.

When the apostles preached, they could assume even among their pagan listeners, a real consciousness of deserving divine anger. It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as 'Good News'. It brought the good news of possible healing to people who were mortally ill. But all this has changed. Christianity in the West now has to preach the diagnosis which is itself very bad news, before it can win any hearing for the good news. Which is one of the reasons that Christianity is so unpopular in modern day America. Because it makes no sense at all unless there is a problem. "Jesus is a savior -- from what? Poverty, ignorance, voting for the wrong candidate? From Sin? Sin, what's that?"

So you have to preach the bad news before the good news makes any sense. I believe sin to be a fact, and the holier a man is the more aware he is of that fact. Who is the authority on how drunk you are: drunk people or sober people?