Mary’s assumption into heaven calls people to put aside all those insignificant, mundane and petty concerns competing for their attention and instead be drawn to God and his greatness, Pope Francis said.
ROME - Mary’s assumption into heaven calls people to put aside all those insignificant, mundane and petty concerns competing for their attention and instead be drawn to God and his greatness, Pope Francis said.
After reciting the Angelus prayer on the feast of the Assumption Aug. 15, Francis also blessed thousands of rosaries that will be given to Catholics in Syria “as a sign of my closeness, especially for families who have lost someone because of the war.”
“Prayers made with faith are powerful. Let us keep praying for peace in the Middle East and the whole world,” said the pope, who explained that Aid to the Church in Need spearheaded the initiative to send some 6,000 rosaries to Catholic communities in Syria.
He also expressed his concern and prayers for those affected by monsoons in South Asia.
A week of heavy rains triggered deadly landslides and flooding in India, where, according to government officials, nearly 300 people died and more than 1.2 million people were forced from their homes. Officials in Myanmar reported more than 50 people have died there.
“May the Lord give strength to those (affected) and those who help them,” the pope said.
With the assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven, she is “like a mother who waits for her children to come back home.” Knowing that she is there with God in heaven “gives us comfort and hope during our pilgrimage” on earth, he said.
The feast of the Assumption of Mary is an invitation to everyone, “especially for those who are afflicted by doubt and sadness, and live gazing downward,” he said.
“Let us look on high,” he said, where Mary awaits. “She loves us, she smiles at us and she comes to our aid with haste.”
Just as every mother wants what is best for her children, “she tells us, ‘You are precious in God’s eyes; you were not made for measly worldly gratifications, but for the great joys of heaven,’” the pope said.
In life, it is important to seek what is truly great, “otherwise we get lost” chasing after so many trivial things, he said.
“Mary shows us that if we want our life to be happy, God goes first because only he is great,” he said.
“Instead, how often we live chasing after things that don’t matter: Prejudices, grudges, rivalries, jealousies, illusions, superfluous material goods. How much pettiness in life!”
But today, “Mary invites us to lift our gaze up to the great things that the Lord has done for her” and reminds people that the Lord also does great things in them.
“Let us be attracted by true beauty, let us not be swallowed up by the petty things of life, but let us choose the greatness of heaven,” he said.
"My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it's widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it's an absolutely serious scientific argument…. In fact it's the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It's got to be dealt with intellectually".
by Stephen Wynne • ChurchMilitant.com • August 8, 2019
Dr. David Gelernter: Darwinism can't explain origin of species
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (ChurchMilitant.com) - Famed Yale University computer science professor Dr. David Gelernter has renounced Darwinism. In a column for the spring edition of the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter announced that he is no longer a disciple of Darwin, saying the English naturalist's theory has been disproven.
"Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory," he wrote. "Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview."
"Accepting the theory as settled truth ... certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life," he added. "But what if Darwin was wrong?"In his seminal work The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin proposed that all life forms have descended from a common ancestor, suggesting that over time, random variation coupled with natural selection gives rise to entirely new species.
But, Gelernter wrote, "The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain."
"Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape," he noted. "Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture — not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones."
Dr. Stephen Meyer A key problem for Darwinism, Gelernter said, is the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record reveals that "a striking variety of new organisms — including the first-ever animals — pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years," which contradicts Darwin's assumption that "new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life."
Chief among the flaws undermining Darwinism, he wrote, is molecular biology, which in recent decades has demonstrated that random mutation plus natural selection cannot give rise to new, more complex species.
Gelernter credited three books for his shift in understanding: Dr. Stephen Meyer's Darwin's Doubt (2013), Dr. David Berlinski's The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2009) and David Klinghoffer's Debating Darwin's Doubt (2015).
"These three form a fateful battle group that most people would rather ignore," he wrote. Gelernter singled out Meyer's work as especially praiseworthy: "Meyer ... disassembles the theory of evolution piece by piece. Darwin's Doubt is one of the most important books in a generation. Few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact."
Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one. ….
Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle-based think tank the Discovery Institute, is an advocate of a replacement theory, intelligent design (ID).
Biological life, ID proponents argue, is not the result of blind, undirected evolutionary processes, but the product of design by an intelligent entity.
Many adherents are religious. But, as Gelernter observed, "Intelligent design as Meyer explains it never uses religious arguments, draws religious conclusions, or refers to religion in any way."
Still, as ID has grown as a theoretical alternative to Darwinism, it has been savaged as a pseudo-scientific appeal to religion by committed Darwinists within the scientific establishment. This, Gelernter pointed out, is because Darwinism serves as their de facto faith:
The religion is all on the other side. Meyer and other proponents of I.D. are the dispassionate intellectuals making orderly scientific arguments. Some I.D.-haters have shown themselves willing to use any argument — fair or not, true or not, ad hominem or not — to keep this dangerous idea locked in a box forever. They remind us of the extent to which Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one.
Critics have long argued that Darwinism is atheistic philosophy disguised as science. Since Darwin's day, they note, it has been used to reject Christian orthodoxy and advance materialism, the view that human beings are merely the accidental results of unguided natural processes (as opposed to being purposefully created by God), and that the human mind is the only — and therefore, the supreme — consciousness that exists.
I am attacking their religion and I don't blame them for being all head up, it is a big issue for them. ….
In a 1997 article for The New York Review of Books, leading evolutionist and atheist Dr. Richard C. Lewontin testified to the fact that materialists are committed to Darwinism, in spite of its myriad inconsistencies and flaws, because they are committed to the denial of God.
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori [pre-existing] adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Gelernter worries that materialists' philosophical/religious commitment to Darwinism is precluding genuine scientific inquiry. In an interview with Stanford University's Hoover Institution last month, he expounded on this concern.
"My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it's widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it's an absolutely serious scientific argument," he said. "In fact it's the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It's got to be dealt with intellectually." ….
I’ve got a question, two actually, and I’m happy to be judged on their merits because I think the issue is important.
Who gets to decide when an unborn baby matters? Furthermore, who gets to say what worth is placed on the life of an unborn child when that life is ended either intentionally or recklessly by a criminal act?
This question had never crossed my mind until a couple of weeks ago, when a 23-year-old Sydney woman named Katherine Hoang was killed when an unlicensed driver ploughed into the car in which she was a passenger. In case you missed the story, Katherine was pregnant with twin boys, and she was about a week away from giving birth.
Because they were not born, their lives aren’t acknowledged as more than a biological extension of their mother. The law in NSW does not look at what happened to Katherine and see three lives lost.
No, the law in NSW — and in WA — sees the death of an unborn child as one of the mother’s injuries. The law says a baby must show independent life outside a mother’s body to be deemed a living person, and therefore a victim of crime.
The law, as they say, is an ass.
Who got to decide this, and when? Why is there such resistance to reforming this part of the Criminal Code?
Those unborn twin boys were mourned in their own right. Relatives told media “these babies were already part of the family”. They were mourned to some degree by each one of us who read the story and wept a little on the inside.
Like most of us, I know couples who’ve gone through the trauma of late-term miscarriage or stillbirth. Maybe you’re one of them.
You can’t tell me the babies you lost were nothing more than a bunch of cells attached to a life source. They were your children.
Disagree? OK, let’s have some real talk, some adult talk if you’re up for it.
How many of you have ever been invited to a foetus shower? Didn’t think so. We hold baby showers to celebrate the pending arrival of a unique life, brimming with promise. An expecting couple doesn’t get asked, what sex is your foetus or, have you chosen a name for your foetus? I could go on, but best I don’t.
Try telling parents who’ve lost a baby, or a woman who has delivered a stillborn child, that that baby is ‘just a foetus’ and doesn’t deserve to be recognised.
We call them babies when they’re born and foetus when we try to justify everything else. The language we use sanitises truth for the sake of our comfort, softens the blow when the blow is worthy of being felt.
A spokesman for Attorney-General John Quigley said the State Government had no plans to review WA’s legislation.
I want to know why not.
In NSW, the reform agenda is known as Zoe’s law. In 2009, Zoe Donegan was stillborn at 32 weeks after her mother’s car was hit by a mini-van. Behind the wheel, a drug-addled driver. You should google the story. It will break your heart. Zoe’s law seeks to amend NSW law to make it a crime to harm or destroy a child in utero. The Bill is yet to be passed and remains in limbo.
A lot of the pushback on this kind of legislative change has come from pro-choice campaigners who fret that adjusting the law could affect legislation around late-term abortion.
To me, the two issues are separate.
To conflate them is at best mischievous, at worst a terrible insult to the women who chose to keep their babies, but were robbed of their choice and their children by a crime.
What we’re talking about here is an appropriate penalty for criminal acts, and about recognising that life is precious, at every stage. If the law is drafted correctly, not reactively or in haste, there’s no need for concern.
Murdoch University lecturer Lorraine Finlay is a former State prosecutor, a former associate to Justice Dyson Heydon in the High Court (among many other things) and has written extensively on the topic.
She says while the concerns of pro-choice campaigners are important, the issues are not automatically interlinked. She wrote recently that the law can be drafted so that it has no broader implication for either abortion or the legal rights of pregnant women.
As a society, we acknowledge that life, at every stage, matters.
If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have such stringent, well-debated and carefully drafted abortion laws in Australia.
The taking of life, either medically or via a reckless or intentional criminal act, is a monumental thing and as a society we recognise that.
We don’t need to have further conversations around existing abortion laws. It’s about looking at current holes in the Criminal Code and plugging them. It’s about recognising that most of the difficult and complex social issues we face are worth the subsequent awkward and uncomfortable conversations.
Try telling parents who’ve lost a baby, or a woman who has delivered a stillborn child, that that baby is “just a foetus” and doesn’t deserve to be recognised. You just wouldn’t.
I mean, at the very least, stop and ask yourself, how would I feel if it were me, would current laws be enough?
This conversation is about as fun as walking barefoot through a paddock full of doublegees.
But here’s the thing — two ideas can and should be able to coexist in tension. This is no different — probably more emotive, but at the heart of it, no different.
Zoe’s life counted. The lives of Katherine Hoang’s unborn twin sons, counted. The law needs to reflect that.
by Stephen Wynne • ChurchMilitant.com • August 8, 2019
Dr. David Gelernter: Darwinism can't explain origin of species
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (ChurchMilitant.com) - Famed Yale University computer science professor Dr. David Gelernter has renounced Darwinism.
In a column for the spring edition of the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter announced that he is no longer a disciple of Darwin, saying the English naturalist's theory has been disproven.
"Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory," he wrote. "Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview."
"Accepting the theory as settled truth ... certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life," he added. "But what if Darwin was wrong?"In his seminal work The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin proposed that all life forms have descended from a common ancestor, suggesting that over time, random variation coupled with natural selection gives rise to entirely new species.
But, Gelernter wrote, "The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain."
"Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape," he noted. "Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture — not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones." Dr. Stephen Meyer A key problem for Darwinism, Gelernter said, is the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record reveals that "a striking variety of new organisms — including the first-ever animals — pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years," which contradicts Darwin's assumption that "new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life."
Chief among the flaws undermining Darwinism, he wrote, is molecular biology, which in recent decades has demonstrated that random mutation plus natural selection cannot give rise to new, more complex species.
Gelernter credited three books for his shift in understanding: Dr. Stephen Meyer's Darwin's Doubt (2013), Dr. David Berlinski's The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2009) and David Klinghoffer's Debating Darwin's Doubt (2015).
"These three form a fateful battle group that most people would rather ignore," he wrote.
Gelernter singled out Meyer's work as especially praiseworthy: "Meyer ... disassembles the theory of evolution piece by piece. Darwin's Doubt is one of the most important books in a generation. Few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact."
Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one.Tweet
Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle-based think tank the Discovery Institute, is an advocate of a replacement theory, intelligent design (ID).
Biological life, ID proponents argue, is not the result of blind, undirected evolutionary processes, but the product of design by an intelligent entity.
Many adherents are religious. But, as Gelernter observed, "Intelligent design as Meyer explains it never uses religious arguments, draws religious conclusions, or refers to religion in any way."
Still, as ID has grown as a theoretical alternative to Darwinism, it has been savaged as a pseudo-scientific appeal to religion by committed Darwinists within the scientific establishment. This, Gelernter pointed out, is because Darwinism serves as their de facto faith:
The religion is all on the other side. Meyer and other proponents of I.D. are the dispassionate intellectuals making orderly scientific arguments. Some I.D.-haters have shown themselves willing to use any argument — fair or not, true or not, ad hominem or not — to keep this dangerous idea locked in a box forever. They remind us of the extent to which Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one.
Critics have long argued that Darwinism is atheistic philosophy disguised as science. Since Darwin's day, they note, it has been used to reject Christian orthodoxy and advance materialism, the view that human beings are merely the accidental results of unguided natural processes (as opposed to being purposefully created by God), and that the human mind is the only — and therefore, the supreme — consciousness that exists.
I am attacking their religion and I don't blame them for being all head up, it is a big issue for them.Tweet
In a 1997 article for The New York Review of Books, leading evolutionist and atheist Dr. Richard C. Lewontin testified to the fact that materialists are committed to Darwinism, in spite of its myriad inconsistencies and flaws, because they are committed to the denial of God.
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori [pre-existing] adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Gelernter worries that materialists' philosophical/religious commitment to Darwinism is precluding genuine scientific inquiry. In an interview with Stanford University's Hoover Institution last month, he expounded on this concern.
"My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it's widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it's an absolutely serious scientific argument," he said. "In fact it's the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It's got to be dealt with intellectually." Dr. Richard C. Lewontin Gelernter said he's troubled by the conduct of many of his Yale colleagues, noting that "their intellectual behavior, what they have published — and much more importantly what they tell their students," doesn't reveal a commitment to scientific truth.
"[W]hat I have seen in their behavior intellectually and at colleges across the West is nothing approaching free speech on this topic," he lamented. "It's a bitter, fundamental, angry, outraged rejection [of intelligent design], which comes nowhere near scientific or intellectual discussion. I've seen that happen again and again."
"Darwinism has indeed passed beyond a scientific argument as far as they are concerned," he noted. "You take your life in your hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you if you challenge it."
Gelernter's observation echoes the testimony of multiple scientists who have been blacklisted for scientific "heresy," some of whom were profiled in Ben Stein's 2007 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
Repeating his earlier assertion, Gelernter explained that those who question materialism's fundamental tenet are targeted because for materialists, Darwinism is faith: "I am attacking their religion and I don't blame them for being all head up, it is a big issue for them," he said.
The students in my class, they're all Darwinsts. I am not hopeful.Tweet
Critics of the theory point out that in the classroom, Darwinism is almost universally presented uncritically — that its weaknesses go unexamined. The result, they say, is that by college, untold numbers of students have been severed from religious belief, convinced by materialist teachers, professors and textbooks that theology is incompatible with science.
In 2016, Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) published a study of why so many Catholic young people are leaving the Church. Summarizing the findings, Our Sunday Visitor contributor Mark M. Gray noted:
The reasons young people leave are complex and varied. However, there is an emerging profile of one of the most common ways this happens. Many historians and Catholic theologians will say the Catholic Church has no place in a "war" between religion and science today. Yet the Church does appear to be losing a related battle nonetheless. Some young Catholics have told CARA that they are leaving the Faith for science, believing that Catholicism is incompatible with what they are learning in high school or at the university level.
When asked "What are the reasons that explain why you are no longer Catholic?" the largest percentage of young ex-Catholics — 1 in 5 — said they abandoned the Faith because they no longer believed in God. Typical reasons given included:
"Because I grew up and realized it was a story like Santa or the Easter Bunny."
"As I learn more about the world around me and understand things that I once did not, I find that the thought of an all-powerful being to be less and less believable."
"I realized that religion is in complete contradiction with the rational and scientific world, and to continue to subscribe to a religion would be hypocritical."
"Need proof of something."
"It no longer fits into what I understand of the universe."
Gelernter affirmed Darwinists' commitment to proselytizing.
"Religion is imparted, more than anything else, by the parents to the children," he said. "And young people are brought up as little Darwinists. Kids I see running around New Haven are all Darwinists. … The students in my class, they're all Darwinists. I am not hopeful."
