Year: 2004

Attending A Pagan Wedding

A correspondent writes:

I recently ended a relationship with a good friend because of the issues surrounding his wedding plans. I feel that this wasn’t the only reason, it was an ending waiting to happen but my question is this. He had invited me to his wedding as a witness and as a practicing Catholic I declined to go because the ceremony is Pagan… or his "Version" of Paganism I’m unsure because I know nothing about the Pagan belief system.

I said that his marriage was invalid in the eyes of the Catholic Church and therefore before God and I could not, as a Catholic give witness to the wedding. A fight broke out, I was called a number of things and the friendship is now over, but, did I say something wrong? Did I say something about the validity of marriage which would go against Church teaching?

Frankly, his weird Pagan beliefs scare me because they have such a dark tone to them and so I not only wanted to remain loyal to Rome but I wanted to protect my own soul as well. Can you help me sort this out? I’m confused as to which marriages are considered valid outside of the Catholic Church because I know some are IE. Protestants getting married in their own church and the like.

There is some good news and some bad news here.

First, the bad news: Unless there was some other factor (like a divorce or membership in the Catholic Church) affecting the situation, the mere fact that it was pagan would not affect his marriage’s validity. Those who are members of the Catholic Church are bound to observe the Catholic form of marriage, but people who have never been Catholic and those who have formally left the Catholic Church are not. Thus if two pagans get married to each other, the marriage will be presumed valid.

Now the good news: I still wouldn’t recommend that you attend the wedding. It is possible in principle to attend a non-Catholic marriage that will be presumed valid, but there are limits. If two Protestants are getting validly married in a church, fine. If two Jews are getting validly married in a synagogue, fine. In both of these cases, people who worship the true God are getting married in a venue where the true God’s blessings will be invoked upon their union.

Now let’s extend further: If two Protestants or two Jews (or some mixture of the two) are getting validly married in a courthouse, fine. Even though God’s blessings (presumably) won’t be involved on their union by the official, at least nothing is being done that disses the true God.

One more step: Suppose two atheists or two pagans are getting validly married in a courthouse. Again, I’d say that attending the marriage is fine, though this is where we are at the line. These people don’t believe in the true God, but at least they’re getting married in a ceremony where the true God won’t be dissed.

Now let’s take a step over the line: Two pagans get validly married in a pagan ceremony. Not fine, in my opinion. Their marriage may be valid, but the ceremony will (presumably) involve the invocation of the blessings of false gods (or false spirits or falsely personified nature forces, or what have you).

I would not attend such a wedding. In our culture, at least, attendance at a wedding represents a form of endorsement of and participation in the rite that is being enacted. For me to attend such a wedding would represent my endorsement of and participation in a sacrilegious rite, and that is something I will not do.

The fact he not only asked you to be present but also to be a witness means that your cooperation would be all the more problematic.

So I would say that your instincts were right. You may not have articulated the problem with the ceremony quite right, but you sensed that there was something gravely wrong here and you made the right choice.

If your friend can’t understand that your faith might require you not to attend a service of his faith then he is a friend you don’t need to have.

Now for some even better news: I would say that you did him a great spiritual kindness by refusing to go. Out of a juvenile sense of rebellion, the neo-pagans in our society are game-playing false religions despite having a cultural (and likely familial and even personal) heritage of the true faith. By holding fast and refusing to attend one of his rituals, you have done something that may help wake him up to the fact that one’s religious beliefs are important, that one can’t play with pagan rites and expect everything to go your way, and that there is a fundamental incompatibility between paganism and Christianity. All of these are things he needs to be aware of, and they may play a role in his future conversion (or reversion) to Christ.

Excerpts From Flew

Here are a few notable quotations from the Flew:Habermas interview for those who don’t have time to read the whole thing. They indicate where Flew is now and contain significant signs of hope, as well as significant notes of caution.

I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before.

Yes, absolutely right [i.e., "My views can be described as deistic"]. What Deists, such as the Mr. Jefferson who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.

Yes. I am open to it [the idea of special revelation], but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.

It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

I, too, having been brought up as a Methodist, have always been aware of this possible and in many times and places actual benefit of objective religious instruction. It is now several decades since I first tried to draw attention to the danger of relying on a modest amount of compulsory religious instruction in schools to meet the need for moral education, especially in a period of relentlessly declining religious belief. But all such warnings by individuals were, of course, ignored. So we now have in the UK a situation in which any mandatory requirements to instruct pupils in state funded schools in the teachings of the established or any other religion are widely ignored.

I must some time send you a copy of the final chapter of my latest and presumably last book, in which I offer a syllabus and a program for moral education in secular schools. This is relevant and important for both the US and the UK. To the US because the Supreme Court has utterly misinterpreted the clause in the Constitution about not establishing a religion: misunderstanding it as imposing a ban on all official reference to religion. In the UK any effective program of moral education has to be secular because unbelief is now very widespread.

Well, absent revelation, why should we perceive anything as objectively evil? The problem of evil is a problem only for Christians.

[HABERMAS: In your view, then, God hasn’t done anything about evil.]

No, not at all, other than producing a lot of it.

I think those who want to speak about an afterlife have got to meet the difficulty of formulating a concept of an incorporeal person.

I find the materials about near death experiences [some of which involve people during an NDE learning information that turns out to be true about affairs remote from their bodies] so challenging… . this evidence equally certainly weakens if it does not completely refute my argument against doctrines of a future life

An incorporeal being may be hypothesized, and hypothesized to possess a memory. But before we could rely on its memory even of its own experiences we should need to be able to provide an account of how this hypothesized incorporeal being could be identified in the first place and then—after what lawyers call an affluxion of time—reidentified even by himself or herself as one and the same individual spiritual being.

I still hope and believe there’s no possibility of an afterlife.

If all I knew or believed about God was what I might have learned from Aristotle, then I should have assumed that everything in the universe, including human conduct, was exactly as God wanted it to be. And this is indeed the case, in so far as both Christianity and Islam are predestinarian, a fundamental teaching of both religious systems. What was true of Christianity in the Middle Ages is certainly no longer equally true after the Reformation. But Islam has neither suffered nor enjoyed either a Reformation or an Enlightenment.

As for Islam, it is, I think, best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism. Between the New Testament and the Qur’an there is (as it is customary to say when making such comparisons) no comparison. Whereas markets can be found for books on reading the Bible as literature, to read the Qur’an is a penance rather than a pleasure. There is no order or development in its subject matter. All the chapters (the suras) are arranged in order of their length, with the longest at the beginning.

One point about the editing of the Qur’an is rarely made although it would appear to be of very substantial theological significance. For every sura is prefaced by the words “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” Yet there are references to Hell on at least 255 of the 669 pages of Arberry’s rendering of the Qur’an and quite often pages have two such references.

Whereas St. Paul, who was the chief contributor to the New Testament, knew all the three relevant languages and obviously possessed a first class philosophical mind, the Prophet, though gifted in the arts of persuasion and clearly a considerable military leader, was both doubtfully literate and certainly ill-informed about the contents of the Old Testament and about several matters of which God, if not even the least informed of the Prophet’s contemporaries, must have been cognizant.

This raises the possibility of what my philosophical contemporaries in the heyday of Gilbert Ryle would have described as a knock-down falsification of Islam: something which is most certainly not possible in the case of Christianity. If I do eventually produce such a paper it will obviously have to be published anonymously.

The Bible is a work which someone who had not the slightest concern about the question of the truth or falsity of the Christian religion could read as people read the novels of the best novelists. It is an eminently readable book.

No, I don’t think so [i.e., "I am not closer to believing in the resurrection of Jesus"]. The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It’s outstandingly different in quality and quantity, I think, from the evidence offered for the occurrence of most other supposedly miraculous events.

[Regarding previous remarks he has made in debates that for a person who already is a Christian there is good reason to believe in the resurrection of Jesus:] This is an important matter about rationality which I have fairly recently come to appreciate. What it is rational for any individual to believe about some matter which is fresh to that individual’s consideration depends on what he or she rationally believed before they were confronted with this fresh situation. For suppose they rationally believed in the existence of a God of any revelation, then it would be entirely reasonable for them to see the fine tuning argument as providing substantial confirmation of their belief in the existence of that God.

The greatest thing is their [John and Charles Wesley] tremendous achievement of creating the Methodist movement mainly among the working class. Methodism made it impossible to build a really substantial Communist Party in Britain and provided the country with a generous supply of men and women of sterling moral character from mainly working class families. Its decline is a substantial part of the explosions both of unwanted motherhood and of crime in recent decades.

Certainly John Wesley was one of my country’s many great sons and daughters. One at least of the others was raised in a Methodist home with a father who was a local preacher. [NOTE: This is a wry joke. Flew himself was raised in a Methodist home with a father who was a local preacher.]

I think it’s very unlikely [that I would become a Christian], due to the problem of evil. But, if it did happen, I think it would be in some eccentric fit and doubtfully orthodox form: regular religious practice perhaps but without belief. If I wanted any sort of future life I should become a Jehovah’s Witness. But some things I am completely confident about. I would never regard Islam with anything but horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering the world for Islam.

Well, one thing I’ll say in this comparison is that, for goodness sake, Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not.

READ THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW.

CHAPUT: Scrub "Happy Holidays" From Vocabulary

YEAH!

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput ROCKS!

According to CNA:

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has urged his faithful to "scrub" the expression "Happy Holidays" from Catholic vocabulary.

"We

don’t celebrate a generic excuse for gift-giving," he wrote in his

latest column, published in the Denver Catholic Register. "We celebrate

the birth of Jesus Christ."

"For the vast majority of Americans,

Christmas has a distinctly religious, Christian identity rooted in

Scripture. Publicly ignoring this fact is not a form of ‘inclusion’ or

‘tolerance.’ On the contrary, it’s a deliberate act of intolerance and

exclusion against Christians," he wrote.

He

said lumping Christmas together with seasonal celebrations devalues and

marginalizes the sacred nature of Christmas, and reduces Christian

influence in society.

"No other religious community would be

subjected to this kind of treatment – and remember, American Christians

are in the majority," he said.

GET THE STORY.

READ THE ARCHBISHOP’S COLUMN.

CHAPUT: Scrub “Happy Holidays” From Vocabulary

YEAH!

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput ROCKS!

According to CNA:

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has urged his faithful to "scrub" the expression "Happy Holidays" from Catholic vocabulary.

"We
don’t celebrate a generic excuse for gift-giving," he wrote in his
latest column, published in the Denver Catholic Register. "We celebrate
the birth of Jesus Christ."

"For the vast majority of Americans,
Christmas has a distinctly religious, Christian identity rooted in
Scripture. Publicly ignoring this fact is not a form of ‘inclusion’ or
‘tolerance.’ On the contrary, it’s a deliberate act of intolerance and
exclusion against Christians," he wrote.

He
said lumping Christmas together with seasonal celebrations devalues and
marginalizes the sacred nature of Christmas, and reduces Christian
influence in society.

"No other religious community would be
subjected to this kind of treatment – and remember, American Christians
are in the majority," he said.

GET THE STORY.

READ THE ARCHBISHOP’S COLUMN.

More From Flew

A commenter down yonder beat me to posting the link, but Philosophia Christi has an interview between Antony Flew and Christian apologist Gary Habermas about Flew’s newfound belief in God.

READ THE INTERVIEW PAGE-BY-PAGE

READ THE WHOLE INTERVIEW (WARNING: Evil file format [.pdf]!)

(Cowboy hat tip: Southern Appeal.)

Before the facts of the case were known, Flew himself really set the cat among the pideons by publishing

THIS LETTER IN PHILOSOPHY NOW.

(Again, cowboy hat tip:  Southern Appeal.)

Language Learning Strategies

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Jimmy, you write that one only needs to learn to read a Biblical language.

I’m inclined to differ, I would have learned Greek far better, had I
learned to -speak- it, likewise with Hebrew, save that far less of it
stuck. Most of my classmates had been engineers, and the learning was
directed toward purely left-brained, list-learning thinkers.

But that isn’t how humans learn and use language. I tend to suspect
– strongly? that we’d understand the Bible better if we could actually
speak it, read it aloud and understand it, and thereby better catch
nuances and emphases that grammatical commentaries – such as the blue
one from the Vatican, as helpful as they can be – can enable us to do.

Treating the text as computer code may, I am inclined to think,
cause us to misinterpret from time to time. Think of Shakespeare, or
Donne.

What think you?

I agree that a person will learn a langauge better if he learns how to speak it (meaning "knows how to generate his own sentences in it") rather than just understand it (meaning "knowing what a person or a text is saying").

I think it’s a very good thing for students to learn to speak a language as well as understand it, and as they progress in their knowledge of the language, they should learn to do so.

In my article, though, I was concerned with encouraging students who are just beginning in a language. When one is at this stage, most people are so intimidated that they simply quit trying to learn the language. It is imperative, therefore, to do everything possible to make the process less intimidating until the student gains the sense that he really does have the ability to master a language.

One way of doing that is not demanding that beginning students immediately learn sentence generation. The ability to generate sentences is not the goal of biblical language studies; the understanding of biblical texts is. The quicker the students get the satisfaction of understanding texts, the more they will be motivated to continue their studies.

Learning sentence generation is of benefit to students, but in my judgment it’s better not to tax beginners with this.

WOW!!! Antony Flew Believes In God!!!

This is big news!

For decades Antony Flew has been one of the main standard bearers for atheism in the world of philosophy. He has done a ton of work trying to argue atheism, including authoring some of the standard articles on the subject.

His reversal on this subject is certainly cause for rejoicing in heaven.

Unfortunately, that rejocing (as yet) would seem to be incomplete, for Flew has not become a Christian or even a theist. He’s now a deist, meaning that he believes God exists but doesn’t interact with the universe and people’s lives. He also is willing to say harsh things about the Christian image of God (based, I think, on a failure to separate the kind of historically-conditioned imagery the Bible uses for God from the reality toward which these images point).

Still, it’s a major step in the right direction.

GET THE STORY.