“I’m not a monster, just sick.” Ariel Castro and 49 Fewer Shades of Grey

                Judge Michael Russo really got it right when, after Castro’s statement to the court, which verbalized his detachment from reality, he noted that Castro was a narcissist.  This is the root of the problem.  Narcissism builds into a sociopathic personality which builds and becomes practically interchangeable with the psychopathic personality; while not every narcissist is a psychopath every psychopath is truly a narcissist.  The hallmark of this personality is an inability to empathize with others.  To disregard your fellows suffering if it suits your personal agenda and to believe that you’re personal agenda is actually really everyone’s agenda.  Castro, for instance, insisted that the women he kidnapped were actually happy in the house.  It highlights the world of the narcissistic psychopath and the potential blind spot of us all.  We believe that what we do is valid and even good simply because we are doing it, others may not understand but how could they as they lack the rarified view from one’s own skull.

                There is a social aspect we should consider too; the individual experiences the world through the filter of themselves, but it is getting easier and easier for narcissists to find validating information coming from society.  Their interior life is bolstered by a world which seems ever increasingly sympathetic to their hopes for broader acceptance.  The women of the world are not helped by the success of a novel which features fantasy rape scenes, though it is written by a woman, and therefore it becomes charitable to lovingly and verbally jettison the tome.  It is merciful to napalm music videos which exploit women and apply social pressure for the artists to seek reconciliation from those which he has publicly injured.  It is necessary to boycott companies which exploit women’s bodies and feed women and men a message of superficial accessibility void of psychological, sociological, and spiritual truth. 

The problem is that we are losing the ability to identify these sources of social and personal rot.   Society and the individual are locked in the proverbial spiral of death falling from the sky towards the unflinching and diamond hard earth, which represents the truth in this analogy.  We must see though that the truth is not the destructive power in the analogy, it simply is, and evil destroys itself.  Evil consumes itself.  Evil is a cancer which envelopes its surroundings until the organism, humanity, dies.

The anti-thesis is obvious: self-sacrifice, service to others, basically being a loving person.  The problem is that the discomfort this produces causes the individual to flag, to wilt.  Communism insists that the balm is material; that the economic and material benefit associated with the proposed altruism would create this loving society of the disinterested self.  The result instead is abject materialism.  The comfort we seek is not truly about material wellbeing or Castro could be vindicated if he fed and sheltered the women he terrorized, he becomes a Stalin figure teaching society his will or Mao chaining workers to their machines because their sacrifice serves an imagined good but actually serves a privileged few.

Our motivations require something more than materialism, they require spirituality; but they require more than spirituality, they require religion.  The reason for this is that we need to follow a path to God, through God, and in God, which the sacraments of the Church provide.  We see this through the example of the Trinity.  Jesus personifies the will of the Father, not Jesus’ own will, which exemplifies Jesus’ love of the Father.  The Holy Spirit does the will of the Son of God which is the ultimate expression of love for Jesus.  Does this then set up the Holy Hierarchy?  No, rather God the Father exemplifies His love through the words He expresses through Jesus who insists that the greatest must be the servant of all.  God made everything from nothing and holds it together through a constant act of His conscious will.  If He did not serve all He would simply allow those who disobeyed Him to return to their natural state of actual, as opposed to merely poetic, oblivion.

So we have a Trinity which could easily be construed as a hierarchical system but which gains its true nature in it’s being the prototypical loving relationship.  The Trinity is totally open to its members as its dignity is never compromised by any of its members.  The Trinity seeks only to serve, only to love, and that love bore the fruit of all that God called “good” which was created out of that love and is inclusive of the entirety of creation from the beginning.

Jesus stated that everyone who does the will of His Father is His brother and sister.  We become a part of the mystery of the Trinity in the same methodology as the Trinity, and we discover the same life giving fruit which is born of that love.

The ultimate culmination of that love was the crucifixion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ; but more than that, the fruit of Jesus’ obedient love was the realization of the fullness of human life and it’s potential through the Resurrection.  The simply material appreciation of the world is the cross.  It is the instrument of death.  We who believe in the promise which Jesus embodies die to the material of the world in favor of a greater reality which is the fullness of truth, Jesus, and we share in His life, His death, and His Resurrection.

                We seek not our own monstrous will, our own truly evil and narcissistic self-interest, and our idolatry in which we fancy ourselves as a god.  We understand that truth by definition can only be One, Holy, and Perfect.  It is not increasingly smaller increments of grey. 

“Perfection is founded entirely on the love of God: ‘Charity is the bond of perfection;’ and perfect love of God means the complete union of our will with God’s.” St. Alphonsus Liguori

Without this love of God, which is exemplified in the love of charity. Our society is becoming a reality which we will use that house in Cleveland as an analogy for.  May we seek the love and will of God brothers and sisters in Christ.

Atheist Chaplains, Gay marriage, and Army Intelligence or "Topping Orwell!"...snicker...

                Jason Heap has submitted his resume to the Navy Chaplain Corp. and he is being considered though he is an atheist.  He feels that atheists must be represented equally in the modern military just as people of differing sexes, races, and sexual orientations are.  So what’s the big deal?  Atheists are people too right? If we prick them do they not bleed?  Can’t we accept all?  Is this not just another way the religious are bigoted?  It could be considered thus in a world lacking in definition.  A world which eschews order and logic in favor of the warm fuzziness of relativism. 

                Many believe that there is no difference which cannot be ignored until it simply goes away and this may be quite practical until it is untenable; at which point we have forgotten so much we have no idea what the problem actually is.  We are dishonest with ourselves for the sake of some greater honesty.  This is how dystopias are built.

                Let us consider the case of Jason Heap, the would-be Navy Chaplain and the motto of the Chaplain Corp. “Pro Deo et Patria” or “For God and Country”.  The problem is that the suggestion of an atheist Chaplain is simply dishonest at its very core; as we cannot serve a God we don’t believe in any more than we can serve a country we don’t believe in.  Take for instance if you had a Chaplain who was an imam yet felt America was “the great Satan”. Here we have just the opposite of what is being proposed by Mr. Heap.  We have an individual who believes in God but not in country.  I feel that most would find this person detrimental to the mission of the Chaplain Corp.  The only difference between finding “Deo” significant and “Patria” is that as an atheist he already finds God insignificant and thus disregards the importance and weight of that part of the motto; though one can plainly see it comes first within said motto and rightly so for Chaplains after all.

                The problem is simple and pervasive in our culture; the problem is entitlement.  We feel therefore we are entitled and therefore we are, to modernize Descartes.  Therefore we have contradictory titles and terms becoming normal and accepted, like Army Intelligence. 

                Similarly we have the inherent contradiction within the term gay marriage.  How can this be contradictory to anyone who is not a bigot?  Well it is contradictory because marriage is about sex.  The problem is we have no idea what that means. We use the term “sex” generically as a catch all for pertaining to a person’s sexual organs.  We are wrong if we call masturbation “self-sex”.  We are just as wrong to call “homosexual sex” sex. 

                Why? How can I possibly defend such hate speech?  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  Well the answer is written not by our ability to intellectualize incongruities but in our bodies, ourselves.  We can see a vast difference in the ability of male and female organs to accept the male; no woman ever has to understand the term “bottoming”. Women are padded, protected, and lubricated in most healthy individuals.  Men accept men into thin walled, waste eliminators, with no natural lubrication save for perspiration, and no reason beyond the fact that there are nerves bundled there.  Can we spot the difference and this is outside of the obvious procreate argument; which actually is a valid argument regardless of what Judge Sotomayor opines.  Women have various obvious problems simulating sex as well, isn’t it all so obvious if we just look at it as a logic problem and not as “sex” per se.

                The trouble once again is that we are entitled to our emotions and so we are entitled to our entitlement.  So we have a Chaplain who cannot actually be a Chaplain and married couples who cannot actually “couple”.  Even the BBC knows what “coupling” really means.  We cannot accept what is true so we must make those who uphold those morals to be villains.  They are bigots and hate mongers, but on a very superficial level aren’t they also entitled to their feelings; of course not, so bully on until there is no meaning in words.  It is something greater even than Orwellian doublethink; it is nothink.