Bad Catholic is writing about things:
An ever-evolving religion, taken at its word, is a series of beliefs forever changing into other beliefs. Now I may be wrong here, but I’ll nevertheless stake my claim: A belief forever changing negates itself. One cannot hold an ever-changing conviction that something is true, or else it is by definition not conviction. It is a non-Thing.
If you were to say “I am a square forever becoming a circle”, one thing is absolutely certain — you’re not a square. Similarly, if you were to say that “Our ever-evolving religion holds that God(s) should be referred to as She as often as He,” one thing is absolutely certain: Your religion does not hold the belief that God(s) should be equally referred to as She. It holds the conviction that God should be referred to as a She, which is forever changing into another conviction, and therefore isn’t a conviction at all.
Not to say I believe these New Agers think this, or that they’re deliberately negating their beliefs. They’re more than likely just trying to be all hip and non-dogmatic (a dogma in itself, of course). But by their own flatteringly modern definition, they’ve unwittingly staked themselves as a non-Thing, saying: “We hold beliefs that by their nature cannot be held.” “We believe in things that are becoming what they aren’t.” In short, “We believe in Nothing.”
And this is what made me choke. The problem — or the genius — of rallying around a non-Thing is that it can never be criticized. How is a man supposed to take into intellectual consideration a series of beliefs that are ever-evolving? He cannot, no more than he can grasp the wind.
Thus I hereby unabashedly promote and defend Things. Things idiotic and brilliant, dull and shiny, (even good and evil, for I would rather have an evil Thing that can be demolished than an “ever-evolving” evil that grows like an evasive, indefinable and incurable cancer.)
(Oh Lord, Isengard has been unleashed): I hereby spit upon (and I did spit) the use of non-Things, like that awful term “I feel like,” which never precedes a statement of feeling, but always seems to precede a statement of belief, a belief negated and non-Thinged by the absurd claim that it is in fact a feeling! And Open Marriages! A marriage is specifically and at the very, very least a commitment. To “open it” is to rid it of commitment. Thus we are left with a commit-less commitment, to which I shout “Principle of non-contradiction! Open Marriages aren’t Things!” Neither, therefore, are Open Relationships, and I don’t care if they’re an option on Facebook! And the modern use of the word Progress, forget that too! To say an idea is progressive is to say that it is moving in a direction, which makes it a moving (changing) idea which means it’s not a damn idea at all! As Chesterton said ‘”progress” is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress–that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what.”
Righteous.
Bad Catholic is just... good.
I'm feelin' that.
You?
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