St. Austin Review: Reclaiming Culture

October 26th, 2009Facebook Folliesby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

After swearing off the Vast Vacuity that is Facebook  for some weeks, I am back on.  I still think there’s a way to make it worthwhile, perhaps by kicking off all the friends who are giving me grief – kind of like life.

Anyway, I am learning from Facebook the appalling state of Reason in the post-modern world.  I link there to my posts here at the Ink Desk, and I often receive comments there on my posts here.  My point in my most recent post (“The Sterility of Culture” – see below) was, “We use various ways to opt out of life and retreat into self-indulgent shells and this is part of the Culture of Sterility”.  One of the Facebook commenters said, “Stop bashing technology!  Ipods and computer networking are not bad things!”  Thus he confused my critique of ends (cutting oneself off from interaction) with a critique of means (the technology used to do so).

Elsewhere on Facebook I was very critical of the five bishops from the USCCB who issued a statement on Catholic – Jewish relations in which they said dialogue with the Jews, “'has never been and never will be used by the Catholic Church as a means of proselytism,” nor is it a “disguised invitation to baptism”, a statement I called “despicable”.  To deny the Great Commission is perhaps worse than Peter’s three-fold denial of Our Lord.

This elicited at least one strong objection from a Facebook commenter who compared interfaith dialogue with the Jews to setting up a law firm in which one partner is Christian and one is Jewish and they both agree to “leave religion out of the office”.  He went on to say that we should not be heavy handed when it comes to evangelization and that listening is as important as talking, etc.

Again we have confusion of means with ends.   Our end in all of our dealings with all people should be to call them to baptism, and to proselytize by showing forth our love for Jesus.  There is never any dialogue or human interaction in which this end  - the call to salvation, either by our silent witness or our spoken witness  - should be ignored or renounced.  Thus what I call despicable is not the bishops’ assurance to the Jews that we will listen to them and not try to strong-arm them into baptism (means they did not renounce) but the assurance to the Jews that we will not proselytize them nor call them to baptism (ends they did renounce).

But there’s a creeping devil at the root of this.  The confusion of my Facebook friends leads to something dark and sickly and ultimately insane.

If I were to sit down for an interfaith dialogue with a Jew, a Muslim, and an atheist, for example, I would certainly hope that each of them would try to proselytize me, try to convert me to their own faiths or points of view.  If any of them were so lackluster about his faith or his philosophy that he wouldn’t bother to try to convert me to it, I would wonder what kind of thing this faith or philosophy of his was and why, if he thought it was right or true, he would not try to make a case for it and defend it.

This post-modern tentativity, this squeamishness and unwillingness to commit, this desire to “leave religion out of the office”, even when the “office” is a room where an interfaith dialogue is supposed to occur, is all based on the dreadful lie that religion is a private subjective thing, a mere matter of taste, a benevolent delusion that has no bearing on the truth or on reality.  What gives the lie to this lie is that it is not content to hold itself to religion – it spreads to everything.  The devil overplays his hand.  He not only denies that God is truth but denies that anything can be true.

And so we can not discuss anything, for it is no longer allowed that we can take a stand on anything or convince another that we believe in anything. Without truth there can be no Reason, and without Reason you end up with the post-modern malaise, including the bizarre field of communication called Facebook where discussion has taken a back seat to flashy pictures and “status updates”.

Whether my Facebook friends who read this post can manage to see past the emotional diversions of the Jewish issue, the discomfort when a layman criticizes anti-Christian bishops, or the bare mention of the word “atheist” remains to be seen.  Comments, anyone?

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