Let’s check out a famous City of Man. Let’s go to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is the most famous red-light district in the world in the Netherlands, where people can tour and observe prostitutes showing their wares in single stall bedrooms. I’ve been there. It’s very odd, as you have naive tourists walking around as if we were wandering at Costco in the meat section, except in Amsterdam you can make eye contact with the meat while it’s still alive. Or perhaps more similar, it’s like the cattle judging at the county fair, where the judge pokes at the young heifer and says, "Well, this rump is marbling nicely - this one may get a Reserve Champion ribbon," or "I bet she’ll draw a good bid at the auction."

The experiment that the Netherlands has done is to permit everything with the underlying goal being that it would reduce crime and drug use overall. This is meant to be merciful, as heroin addicts and sex addicts just need a little outlet, and if allowed they could be productive members of the city and not harm others. Mercy is the goal, and the flip side of mercy is justice. Surely allowing people to let their wild side out for a run around the yard is more merciful than locking up every casual drug user and dirty john. The same merciful motive created wet houses for hopeless alcoholics, or free apartments for chronic homeless. This is intended to be the flip approach to the “War on Drugs” approach, the heavy hammer, which imprisoned a lot of people but may not have actually quelled drug use. However, wide open policies haven’t seemed to work either, as the famous Platzspitz experiment in Zurich played out in a very public way.

The TV show The Wire has great episodes about this, where a place called "Hamsterdam" is allowed to exist in Baltimore, in an attempt to fix a city overridden by crime and drugs. The show portrays the experiment as a success, but politics in the city disband Hamsterdam because it makes them look like they are promoting the destruction of the city rather than being merciful. Oddly enough, the roping off of an area does allow the majority to live outside of the influence of the chaos of drugs and red-light vice, and done with the understanding that suppressing all vice will lead to an explosion, allows the edge of society to live in sin while families and careerists can pursue their own dreams. In the TV show, a man named Bunny Colvin wants to save Baltimore by creating a vice district:

Colvin wondered if there was a way for drugs to be made safe for low level users to take them without facing punishment; comparing the city's drug problems to the illegal public consumption of alcohol, which was circumvented when people began keeping their beer in a paper bag. After the attempted murder of Officer Dozerman, Colvin finally decided that he would independently set up three "free zones" in his district where addicts and dealers were allowed to conduct their business under supervision but without interference. This would move the drug trade into a controlled, uninhabited area to protect the rest of his district.

What happens in end is that the vice district is removed and the crime and drugs moves back into the neighborhoods where parents, children, and elderly live. To quote the band, the Offspring, "You gotta keep 'em separated." Mixing the innocent with the fallen must be done with caution. Any caring parent raising a child will try to steer his or her children toward good choices, just as any bird does not build a nest where predators can climb. Taken to a wider level, a city or nation that embraces the disorder of the Prodigal Son and places it at the center will suffer. Las Vegas, and increasingly Nashville, act as the main outlets for American party, like a neverending Saturnalia or Fat Tuesday. Vegas even advertises this in its moniker of Sin City and the motto, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." The message is: come here to sin and get wild. This is the outlet for the Groundhog Day kind of life that people feel, where you get up and go to work and raise kids and do laundry and do it all over again the next morning.

The idea of "setting apart" a time or place for letting loose and celebrating pleasure has been with humans for a long time, but the overall governing idea on how a city or group should be formed has been battled about just as long. Plato’s Republic is around 2,400 years old, but the Code of Hammurabi is close to 4,000 years old. The Laws of Israel in the first five books of the Bible was written about 3,000 years ago. But that doesn’t mean these discussions and ideas were not taking place long before they made it to paper.

We are lucky to have the preservation of these arguments, because for some 20,000 to 30,000 years people have been discussing and observing how we should organize our world. Along with those descriptions of law and governing philosophies, we have ample evidence of festival and party weekends that acted as part of the fabric of a culture. Before Mardi Gras and Oktoberfest there was Saturnalia, Kronia, Purim, Chinese New Year, the Festival of Drunkenness (in Egypt), and a thousand other small festivals around harvest and marriages and victory. We still have these today, and even dedicated places where people can go to have their own festival whenever they choose.

Las Vegas is a place set apart for rejection and rebellion from the typical rules of society, and most certainly against the idea of a watchful God. If anything, Vegas is modern shrine to the Greek or Roman god of wine, Dionysus (or Bacchus for the Romans). Vegas also worships the gods and goddesses of sex, Eros and Aphrodite (a.k.a. Cupid and Venus), since people go there specifically for nude shows and strippers and red-light action. Much like an altar, the stage at a strip joint presents a ritual gathering place where men offer money, eat, and drink in front of it. Even the dance that strippers do acts like a ritual, since they all do the same things in luring dollars out of pockets. The same can be said for the Sports Book areas where people gather in the dark, around TV screens, and make offerings of money, sacrifices, in the hopes of the sports gods granting a wish. Again, food and drink is present, and the ritual of watching and praying to the screens happens at every table.

Vegas is set aside for a kind of ritual pilgrimage for those in rebellion. The idea of drinking, gambling, and partaking of bodily pleasures makes Vegas clearly a place where Holy and Sacred things are not welcome, or not the traditional Holy and Sacred things. There are substitutions which take their place. The reality is that while in Vegas, the holy and sacred things are sports, sex, food, and drink. Once you see the ritual and sacrificial aspects of what happens in Vegas, you see a religion in process. It’s difficult to see it as anything but a pilgrimage. When you hear someone say, “I go to Vegas every year,” they have identified their offering of sacrifice (money, brain cells, liver tissue), their veneration of the warm sins (of gluttony, lust, and greed), their place of pilgrimage (Luxor, Excalibur, Treasure Island), their liturgy ritual (repentance by hangover, spa rebirth, poolside libations, slot machine offertory, nude dancing adoration, and communion by all-you-can-eat-buffet with chocolate fountain chaser). It’s all there, it just not called “religion” and no overt human sacrifice is raised up to unmask what it really is (except Nevada actually is one of the leading states for human sacrifice to Moloch per capita).

There are places set apart for where the party never ends, like Las Vegas or Key West or Bourbon Street. Then there are established weekends for celebration in every town and city, known as festivals and block parties. Both of these set-aside places and events allow people to feast, to let loose, and to reset their moral compass. The letting down of morality for a day or weekend is intended to allow recalibration and grounding of the party-goers greater purpose. By letting the masses off the leash, they get to run wild for a bit before returning to productive and ordered living. The festival weekend mimics the fall and the redemption, which is why it makes sense for every culture and city and town to hold these events. An allowance for rebellion is made, even in the most strict cultures in order for people to see why the norm of order is so valuable. If the celebration doesn’t center on alcohol, then it’s a feast of some kind. A touch of gluttony is added to the calendars in the form of feast days in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions.

One of the greatest paintings of this block party rowdiness was from Pieter Breugel the Elder, known as The Peasant Dance, and while the fashion of the peasants may differ greatly from today’s attire, the characters and actions within the painting can be witnessed wherever heavy-duty drinking takes place. Unrestrained dancing and haggard drunken faces own the foreground. There is a couple in the background sneaking into a barn for solitude and a presumable tryst. There are tankards of liquor everywhere. Lust, gluttony, and wrath are present, just like any nightclub today. The unrefined people of the peasant world engage in everything that happens annually today at Coachella among our elite, privileged, and “refined.”

Most interesting in the painting are two subtle elements that are shoved aside in favor of the tavern. On the right-hand side of the painting is a blurry picture of the Virgin Mary, tacked on a crooked tree. She is fully ignored by the peasants. In the background, at the center of the painting, is the church, the centerpiece of the town, ignored for the day. The celebration is thought to be the feast of St. George. This feast day is like other days surrounding holy days in our time, like Fat Tuesday as a feast before the Lenten season of fasting, or Halloween before All Saints’ Day. There is a season for fasting and for feasting. The Peasant Dance shows a lack of morality, yes, but it also shows the allowance of a sanctioned escape from the ordinary churn of days where the townspeople, whose rituals of work and worship, are dispensed for a time.

The idea of having a Liturgical calendar is designed with this in mind, because if all days were fasting, then fasting would lose its meaning as an offering and be mere drudgery. Worse, if all days were feasts, then civilization would collapse. The calendar of the Church did not balance feasts and fasts by accident or dumb luck. It is designed to move with the seasons of life. This reminds me of an old Huey, Dewey, and Louie Christmas special, called “Stuck on Christmas” where the duckling boys think it would be great to have Christmas every day. Getting their wish, they soon discover that after about five days of feasting and toys, they are miserable. Christmas and endless feasting grows into a burden, just like any addiction.

The error happens when this feasting is made the center of life. This goes to the core issue of our mental illness outbreak today. The fact that every day can be a feast now is why so many addictions seize lives. Pair this with declining belief in the one true God, and you have a problem that science cannot solve alone. Because there is no longer a concept of “sacred” time and space, all days are flattened into Groundhog Day. The idea of sacred places and things and days is no longer recognized in culture, which leads to a kind of malaise in all the days. We can overeat and get drunk and find a sex partner any day we like. Or we can do some New Age prayer routine, but only in a yoga studio or our living room, because we have no sacred place to go to. After all, “Everything is sacred,” which of course means that nothing is sacred.

For replacements, things like Super Bowl Sunday and Fourth of July Parties have overtaken the prominent places of Easter Sunday and All Saints' Day. I think this over often, as it’s clear that most Christians put far more preparation into Super Bowl Sunday than Easter. That alone tells you how secularism and the new pagan “holy days” has come to dominate America. There should be a widespread outcry among Catholics to boycott Super Bowl Sunday, because it is literally the new “holy day” where we not only gather in a ritual, but also eat in front of the liturgy presented by the TV. There is so much pagan cult ritual in Super Bowl Sunday, it’s hard for me to fathom that it has slipped past every self-proclaimed Christian as “just a social gathering.” Super Bowl Sunday is one of the only set-apart days that Americans share, and it is anything but holy or sacred. If you watched Jennifer Lopez’s halftime show in 2020, you will know that you were watching something demonic or perhaps the greatest satirical wake-up call of all time to every Christian in America. In the show, she did an imitation of the three crosses at Calvary using stripper poles, where she was lifted up on a center pole and appeared crucified in the center. What other word could be used for this than demonic, as the entire imagery was the inversion and mockery of Jesus Christ? If you believe that Jesus is God, then what do you make of this image, which took a lot of planning and practice to perfect for a live show? There are no accidents in Hollywood.

Few Americans even batted an eye, but I knew then that something was rotten in America.

Sometimes an image or a moment jars you awake. You suddenly realize that the nation you thought were living in, is not at all what you imagined. It’s like when you get sucked into admiration for a group or company, only to find out after joining that the exterior is just a cheap veneer and the inside is completely rotten. Or when you meet a celebrity and find out he’s all too human. America today is like a jack-o-lantern after Halloween, still smiling but rotting and caving inside. When J-Lo was lifted up like Christ, I knew that a threshold had been crossed long ago, but I was only seeing it then.

We would all be wise to back away from sports, entertainment, and wealth worship in general, but I have a feeling we won’t, since those are the values of the elite. Now that we know how much cheating takes place in professional sports with rampant steroid use and sign stealing and deflating footballs, we know that professional wrestling is every bit as honorable. We know know that the media companies are hell-bent on mocking all things Christian. As far back as 2005, NBC’s Committed did a full episode mocking the Eucharist, where in the end, the consecrated host is flushed down the toilet.

Wealth and winning and comfort are what we worship, so we have just gone ahead and merged stripper poles and soft porn into our halftime shows. Why not? Let’s just stop pretending we aren’t living in a Roman orgy. I’d personally like to thank J-Lo for lifting herself up to be the new Christ, because I’d like to think that she was doing it in satire, using stinging ridicule and wit, and subtly yelling at us all to turn off the TV and get right with God. That’s the best charitable answer I can give, because if it was anything other than that, we need to pray for Jennifer, who once assured us in “Jenny from the Block,” while she was nearly nude in the video, that she, “Put God first and can't forget to stay real.” J-Lo is a very common specimen of modern Christianity however, which is a quick nod to God while you ignore every single thing He ever said.

The crucifixion of Jesus was mimicked using imagery from a strip joint, with an extremely wealthy woman being lifted up, alive and well, claiming the image of Christ on the cross. Moreover, notice that everyone is falling at her feet in worship below her. Yet, this passed by the viewers and we all went back to eating wings and talking football and gossip and getting drunk. Sinead O’Connor’s act of tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II brought an outrage, but this was more subtle dig at all things Christian, and there was hardly a bark because everyone who sets aside time for the Super Bowl is, let me say it here first, a modern pagan. There is no other explanation for it, and J-Lo just helped point it out. A good conspiracy could be made that J-Lo was actually calling us to be awakened to our faith, because she was pointing out how far we have fallen. Somehow I doubt it, but if she is ever reborn in the faith, this image will require some explanation.

The problem with our new holy days is that there is nothing sacred about football, and Super Bowl Sunday has all the hallmarks of a Roman feast day for Dionysus or Zeus.

What happens when the belief in the transcendent Most High God fades is not just that we don’t feel guilty, it’s that nothing is elevated into sacredness. We remain on the flat earth, never reaching up to God. Rather than being lifted up into sacredness, the reverse happens, and everything falls into the profane, the ordinary.

What this leads to is a search for the sacred, because if it’s not built into the calendar, into the week, into blessed objects, then the heart must go to seek it. With no restrictions or guidance, the search can go on at any time, any where, and thus what is best reserved for special days of feasting becomes a daily “Stuck on Christmas” that depresses the hell out of people. This falling and rising action of our life stories is built into the Liturgical calendar, and it’s even built into the seasons of the plants and animals around us. Fasting, feasting, and ordinary time; suffering, thriving, and holding steady - these are the ups and downs and in-betweens that make a life whole.

When the Prodigal Son's errant lifestyle becomes the norm instead of the exception, there is a problem. Escape from real life is not meant to be permanent. Anyone who reads the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32) knows that his choices are poor and the story resonates with people exactly because we can understand the character arc. The prodigal wild son begins the story whole, but in living in escapism, his version of Christmas every day turns to misery. He falls, and now he’s stuck. He threw away the sacred for the profane. Then he is brought to his senses and restored. He surrenders to his Father, and his Father rushes out to greet him with love. The end. Roll credits.

Notice that the fall in Act II did not become the final act for the Prodigal Son. Act II is not the happy ending, nor even a place anyone wants to stay. The point of the fall is to stand up again, just as Dante must go all the way down through the bottom of hell to emerge on the mountain of Purgatory, just as any addict must hit a bottom, soft or hard, in order to rise up, and in case you can't see where I'm going, it's why Jesus must go to the cross to be killed in order to be raised and resurrected.

This story of falling and rising is not just for us humans. God himself goes through this, which is what makes the story of Jesus so compelling and strange.

But why? I mean, isn't that always the question? Why would God have to come to us in order to die and be raised again? I didn’t understand this for a long time. It’s still difficult sometimes, and I know why cynics make fun of it, but I think it because it’s not easy to understand. Of course, it’s much easier to belittle the story with a meme like this one. I once thought this was clever.

Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Makes perfect sense.

There’s so many things in this that are misunderstood, but it is effective at destroying people’s faith, especially if the person has spent no time trying to learn the faith and spends no time in prayer. I mean, for goodness sakes, zombies eat people, people do not eat zombies. If this insult can’t even get the basics of zombiedom right, it’s pretty sad. And for the record: Catholics do not symbolically eat his flesh. We actually eat Jesus. And his glorified and risen body exists in the Real Presence of the Eucharist, under the appearance of bread. Yes, his body, blood, soul, and divinity is in the Eucharist. So please, fix up your insults before posting them. At least get the mystery correct. The Eucharist is everything and I feel sad for you if you don’t understand what the word theosis means.

Destroying faith is easy. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Most of us had little or no education on faith or religion, or if we did have some, it was sketchy and full of holes. If anything, it was some mashed potatoes of Catholicism, 50 shades of Protestantism, and a glued-and-taped-together Hollywood portrayal of Christians-gone-bad. I was so under-catechized that I couldn’t have defended my faith against a light breeze. And that’s exactly why my faith blew away like a leaf in the first rustle of wind at an outdoor keg party.

When you practice something you don’t understand, it’s just like doing busy work for no reason. I recall in the Army when a drill sergeant would make soldiers move a pile of rocks from one location to another, for no reason other than to keep us busy and to assert his power. Similarly, I recall doing hundreds and thousands of quadratic equation problems in math that I didn’t care about or understand. This is exactly what practicing a religion without understanding it feels like. Doing the Rosary without understanding why is much like moving a pile of rocks from point A to point B and back again, or like doing easy quadratic equations repeatedly. It is pointless. Without knowing how or why it’s done, you cannot grasp its purpose, usage, and application to your life. A kid who was told to read a book in Arabic when he can barely speak English would get about as much out doing the Rosary if he has no understanding of prayer and meditation.

On the other side, there is understanding without practicing, which is like telling everyone you are in shape and ready for a marathon, and knowing all the details of stretching and training, but when race-day arrives, your gut is hanging over your shorts. You have zero stamina and lung-strength for the race. To understand Christianity, you can’t have rules and no understanding, nor can you have understanding with no rules. You must practice the faith to be fit for it, and you must learn the faith to make sense of it.

Without faith, prayer, and understanding, of course it seems like nonsense. Without the interior change, it means nothing. And without the rules, it changes nothing. This is the body and soul needing both parts of faith and reason. This is where the leap of faith joins the mouth with the action of the hands. It’s not just about rules, and it’s not about living without rules. The whole thing is about humility before the one God, and when the change of heart happens, you don’t care about the rules or the vices, because everything begins to fall into place and make sense.

Even after the change, you still have battles with vice and wrongdoing, but you are eager to remove them from your life. Strict legalism and unbridled lawlessness no longer make sense, because neither can satisfy you. They can actually unite into a single thing called love, and that is the love of God first and foremost. But you have to understand forgiveness first, to know that you are loved, and to understand it, you have to kneel and say it out loud. You have to practice it to keep it, and to practice it, you have to be forever open to it. The change starts with a choice of “being willing to be willing,” to take that first step of asking the Holy Spirit to come and fill your heart with a flicker of light. Without opening up to that, you cannot expect the change to happen. Say yes to being open, and you never know where it will lead.

The sandbox and the red-light districts allows you to grow and get lost. What you thought you wanted turned out to be vapid and empty promises, like a cheap knockoff of the real thing. When you stop chasing the cheap things, the base things, you’ll know that you were crawling on your belly. But there is a way to think of this that can help make sense of time lost in the alleys. The caterpillar inches furiously on the ground, seeking forage and shelter, seeking something that it cannot possibly realize. And then one day, when it’s ready, it begins to transform, and after so much crawling and struggling, it undergoes a radical, difficult transformation, one that must be painful, but that suffering is transforming the caterpillar into a butterfly. And when the cocoon splits open, the new life begins, and what was once a caterpillar chasing things on the ground, is now a miraculous and beautiful being that flies.

All of those desires that occupied so much of your time, all the days of being lost, are the formation of your story guided by God, the growing of your soul toward meeting Jesus, and if you let the suffering transform you, you will never be inching on the ground again, you will be aloft with Him.

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