Three Days of Darkness?

Certain Catholic circles take great interest in various prophecies regarding remarkable chastisements that are expected to happen if a truly noteworthy worldwide conversion and repentance does not occur.  When I say "remarkable", I mean things on par with Cecil B. DeMille's movie The Ten Commandments.  

Such events don't seem to fit the style with which God acts in this age.  Of course there are still outright miracles, and, for that matter, there are still demonic possessions, but for the most part, God seems to want people to decide to accept or reject Him based on more subtle evidences, such as the witness of Christians living ordinary lives in holiness [at which we too often fail], the wonders of the created universe, the course of history, etc., rather than based on spectacle.  I suspect this flows from the same reason as the Ascension:  if Christ were still physically and visibly on earth, there would be less merit in believing in Him and more fault in disbelieving in Him.  

"A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign," and our generation is certainly wicked and adulterous enough for that.  Be that as it may, one of the DeMille-esqe signs involves Three Days of Darkness, despite the prediction's dubious history.

But prophecy usually takes a spiritual perspective, so that things that really have eternal significance are presented in ways that seem to call for special effects.  Could that be what's going on here?  Outside of historical accounts (like the three days Christ spent in the tomb, counting part of Good Friday and part of Easter Sunday), an expression like "three days" likely means a short, but not negligible, period of time; it could easily mean a few decades.  As for darkness, what could that be but the inability to see, the inability to understand what is in front of us, and the fear and confusion that go along with that? 

As I have said before, it looks like a spiritual neutron bomb has been detonated over us.  The point of a neutron bomb was that it left buildings standing, but killed off the life inside them; in a similar way, we see institutions like the Boy Scouts continue on, but with their souls destroyed.   Could it be that the mystics were right, and that for refusing one too many opportunities to repent, we have been handed over to a short period of darkness in which we, as a society, will find the truth impossible to believe and incredible foolishness compelling?  

The darkness is certainly here.  It's the "short time" part that concerns me. 

"... Various nations will be annihilated"

Lately I have been thinking about this aspect of the message claimed (quite credibly) to have been delivered to peasant children (who did not understand the message at all, and in fact thought "Russia" was the name of a woman) near the Portuguese town of Fatima over a century ago:

To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.

Much could be said about this, but it is best to keep it short. 

Firstly, "the errors of Russia" are like "Lou Gehrig's Disease".  Gehrig was not the first person to contract amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and if you come down with the disease, it isn't his fault.  It's much the same with the errors of Russia, which were not Orthodoxy, but Communism.  More specifically, it was how Communism

• denied that God exists at all, or at the very least, reduced God to a mere figure of speech,
• made a god of politics, and 
• made economics the center of everything.

Just like you do not need to be Lou Gehrig to have ALS,  you can be a fervent Capitalist and share the errors of Russia.  In fact, most fervent Capitalists do.

The interesting question, though, is, "What does it mean for a nation to be annihilated?"  The answer, I suspect, is found in Matthew 5:13:

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

A nation that definitively rejects its vocation is, perhaps, good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say it has been annihilated.  Like a neutron bomb, this kind of annihilation leaves most of the structures standing, but dead. 

And yet, God "quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were."  He can restore to life a valley of dry bones, although they must first become dry bones. 

Cane Syrup

As mentioned in the description for this blog, my family used to make cane syrup when I was a child.  The picture above is of my dad near the cane mill at my granddad's garden in Overstreet, Florida.  I would guess the year to be in the mid-to-late 1970s.  It could not be much later, since my grandma died in 1980, and she was the only one who really knew when the syrup was done cooking.  I know my dad grew sugar cane once or twice after she died, but I think we only used that for chewing, and we never made syrup again.  

I have bittersweet memories of those times.  I distinctly remember how we kids were given the syrup from the sides of the big kettle, which was set into a brick base under which a fire would be made; there was a roof overhead, but the walls were made of mosquito netting.  The mill may at one point have been turned by a beast of burden -- or even by my dad and uncles -- but by my time it was turned by a little walk-behind tractor.

I could probably take you to the spot where this all took place, but that garden has been sold after having stood abandoned for at least 40 years.  The kettle was recovered from some neighbors who pried it loose to steal it.  All the buildings have surely collapsed, and the jungle has taken over.  There would be little to see, though it might make an interesting exercise for archaeology students. 

The photo was emailed to me after my dad's death in August. 

On a happier note, there are places where you can still see cane syrup made,  Here's a link to a news story about it in the local news.  These videos give a feel for what was going on, though they are on something more like a commercial scale.

When Does Life Begin?

 This question reminds me of a quote from p. 57 of Science Made Stupid:  "One of the mammals' evolutionary advantages was that they bore their young alive.  As research has conclusively shown, animals that bore their young dead generally got nowhere."

From a scientific point of view, life does not begin at birth, nor when one registers to vote as a Democrat, as some seem to believe.  But it also does not begin at conception, as is often stated.  It began, apparently, only once, and that was more than 3.7 billion years ago.  Ever since then, life has been passed down to succeeding generations with no gap in between.  

Asking when a human organism comes into being is a different question.  That is the question for which the scientific answer is, generally, "at conception"; I say generally because some (it must be emphasized) purely theoretical questions are posed by the production of identical twins, triplets, etc.  These questions may be interesting to think about, but they do not provide a license to play with the lives of humans at an embryonic stage of development.  But my main point is that Catholics and others who care about the truth need to be careful with the language we use.   We are told that no one puts old wine in new wineskins, but we have no alternative to putting old biological life into new organisms.

It should also go without saying that biology is not equipped to detect the soul.  The existence of the soul can be derived from philosophy, as Aristotle did it, but not from the natural sciences, so the immediate creation of each spiritual soul by God cannot be proved or refuted by science.

Talking about Science

 I'm pretty fed up with people talking about science who know nothing about science.  One blog post in particular, to which I will not link because it does not deserve the extra views, has provoked this comment, but that is really only the last straw.  Right and left, atheist and believer, people who have taken the minimum science content necessary to obtain a university degree seem to think they have deep insights into what science is and why it is so great or what is so wrong with it.  That's pretty much on par with making sweeping critiques of Mexico based on regular visits to Taco Bell -- only they would never dare to make the kind of ridiculous generalizations about a nation that they do about people who understand science.  

Markov Chains and Progress

The boasted privilege of freemen under the direction of political power to be exercised by a single individual, would seem to be adopted by an Administration of Independence security of the object for which may be destroy or keep down a bad passion of our free institutions and prejudices, so long will the States governing a common with every other citizen; and although the medium of the elective franchise. If such could not, I conceive, have been the pleasure of the people but that the enactment should never be used with greater effect for unhallowed union of the whole country for generosity and nobleness of feeling may be destroyed by the respects the aggregate people of the Federal Government, the accountable agent, not a vestige of the people to be most stupid men in England spoke of "their American subjects. It looks to the aggrandizement of the Territories of the Constitution or because errors had been committed by anyone who has blessed us by the gifts of combinations violative of the elective governments arises from this high place to which I shall be exerted to prevent the formation of political privileges, and this seems to be the corner stone upon which our American citizens requiring compliance with entire control the free operations as the genuine spirit of liberty is the spirit of freedom, and as long as the understanding. The citizen; and although devoted republican principles which separate the evils which have been that under no circumstances of their own constant nurture. To the never-dying worm in his attempts have been made, hitherto justice which the Constitution, "all the liberties of the State governments, of the scheming politician dissipated, and, avoiding the democrat of Athens with them, and as long as they might deceive and flattered with greater error in the bosoms of those feelings which belong to the President to communicate information and prudent administration not to have prepared it agreeably to his will and the lesser Asia would furnish the larger dividend.

The text above was generated using the PHP Markov chain text generator at http://projects.haykranen.nl/markov/demo/ using the inaugural address of William Henry Harrison as the input text and a 7th-order Markov chain.  

Note the dream-like quality of the text.  Short pieces of it tend to make some kind of sense, but longer stretches are incoherent.  It is what Macbeth claimed life to be:  "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  The incoherence is due to the fact that the text was generated from probabilities based on only the past few words; there is no long-term memory, let alone actual thought.

The same applies to societies as a whole, because at no time do we have more than a few generations living simultaneously, and most of a nation's past will have happened before living memory.  Each new generation has some hope or ambition of correcting what it sees as the most obvious, insupportable, or insufferable wrongs -- wrongs it will typically see as being the consequences of choices by the generation immediately previous.  A generation or two further back is likely to be seen through rose-colored glasses, in part due to the contrast with the generation of one's parents; generations even further back, never having been met, are scarcely thought of, much less understood.  

Yes, we have books and (now) recordings, but these are no substitute for experience, or even for simply getting to know someone who has had the direct experience.  Think of it this way:  it is one thing to watch a movie about a love story, but it is another to actually fall in love; it is one thing to watch a YouTube video that shows the view from the front seat of a roller coaster, but it is another to ride the roller coaster.  There was even something special about hearing stories from my Great Uncle Mitchell about driving trucks across France to bring supplies to the troops pushing in on Germany, or meeting Mike Jacobs, Holocaust survivor and founder of the Holocaust museum in Dallas.  Both those good men are gone now, and their generation will soon be altogether gone; and books and videos cannot fill the hole they leave.

So what do we lose with the passing of generations, except for stories?  I suspect the most important thing we lose is the experience to know how to react to new evils as they arise.  Sometimes it is best to mind our own business and let events play out, since intervention is likely to cause more problems than it solves; sometimes it is best to speak up; sometimes it is best to watch quietly and prepare to act if some threshold is passes; sometimes it is best to act forcefully and decisively.  Those who have lived through multiple crises should be better judges of which hills it is worth dying on, figuratively or even literally -- of when it really is a good day to die, and when it is not.

The second most important thing we lose is experience in recognizing idealistic rubbish.  In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton asks, "Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, 'My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm water port in the Gulf of Finland! Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, 'If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen!"  No person of mature judgment would say that, obviously, but history shows that people -- especially young people -- often really do fall for propaganda because they lack the experience to detect a con or even to recognize the correct priorities; after all, it is mostly young people who commit suicide over a failed romance or due to online bullying. 

Human Absurdity

Recent popes have had much to say about human dignity, but this is not the right time to talk about dignity.  Everyone in today's society believes in human dignity -- or at least in their own dignity, if more questionably in the dignity of others.  So for example, the Black Lives Matter movement is about dignity; so is the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization.  In short, all of identity politics -- right or left, national or racial or sexual -- and most of the short tempers tearing society apart are due to people intensely feeling and vigorously protecting their own dignity, something that used to be called the deadly sin of pride.

Instead, it would be much better to regain a healthy appreciation for the absurdity of all humans, most especially ourselves.  We must learn to laugh at ourselves again.

We have dignity because we are creatures made in the image of God, and we are absurd because we are creatures made in the image of God.  It is possible to have a finite image of the infinite, but it is not possible without distortion.  God is eternal, but we are mortal; God is omniscient, but we are ignorant; God is omnipotent, but we are weak.  Yet we really do bear His image; we are like fun house mirrors held up to God.

The kind of absurdity I am talking about should lead to humility as well as humor, but it is not degrading.  The image of God we bear is inevitably distorted, but it need not be desecrated; we may be unavoidably comical, but we do not have to be corruptions.