One great thing about our age is that humanism and scientism have sown the seeds for the return of faith. Let me explain.

One of the mantras of modern education, especially in America, is: “Question Everything.” This has become a commandment, right after the first commandment of “Believe in Yourself.” Surely, the first commandment of modernity is “Thou shalt have no gods before Thy Self.”

Through life experience, study, and observing others who follow this commandment, who believe in themselves, I have found this first modern commandment to be a tragic falsehood. Twenty years of personal research proved it to me. I really, really tested that commandment, and believing in myself led to every one of my problems. So that one had to go.

But the second commandment of “Question Everything” remained stuck in my head for a while, and since God gave us brains to use, I did. Instead of subscribing to what academics and celebrities said, I started looking beyond what had been spoon-fed to me my whole life, starting with the history of the early Church.

Reading material from the early Church is extremely enlightening, much more than anything I learned from the Enlightenment thinkers.

In fact, because the first commandment of our time is false, this second commandment of questioning all that we know, led me right back to questioning all of the things I learned from teachers, professors, television, and even coaches. The funny thing about commandments is that there is an order to them, and badly ordered commandments make the whole structure crumble.

Growing up, we are forced to listen to the sales pitch and watch the demo for the product that educators and screen magicians want us to buy. All children must go through this, even through their college years, and the aim is like any other sales pitch: to conform our minds and thoughts and ideas to the pitch and the demo. The Church once held this role of indoctrination of children, but the government took it over, really wresting it away from believers entirely, and making sure that anyone with faith was locked out of the school building. The new sheriff in town didn’t believe, and it was imperative that parents or children that did believe, keep quiet about it, and like every modern HR department, the order to “shutup” is done using a very honeyed voice, with sugary arguments and niceties. However, the result is the same as if a drill sergeant has shouted it in your face. You are not to discuss faith, because the supernatural is not real, and speaking of such things will not be tolerated - not in public schools!

The reason for the shunning of the supernatural is because that product has attributes that the school’s product lacks. That product may appeal and detract from the mainstream sales pitch and demo. In the sales world, salespeople study “kill sheets” which is a list of arguments to kill questions about a competitor’s product. I’ve seen these kill sheets and added notes to them, about why my company’s products are superior, and that choosing the other company’s product surely leads to the road to ruin. This is basically how apologetics works for Christians, Protestants, and atheists as well, where one side has it’s “kill sheets” when someone starts suggesting another option, like for example, “What about Mormonism? I’ve heard that’s good.” The salesperson goes to his kill sheet and says, “Yes, that is an option. Here’s fifteen reasons why it’s not for you.”

The point of having a public education is supposed to be about enabling a workforce to build a strong nation. But it’s become more about buying the school’s product. As I said in a long post before, you will be indoctrinated to something. That is unavoidable. Moreover, after your indoctrination is complete, much of your life will be figuring it out and wondering if what you were indoctrinated into is the actual truth. Most people will never even learn how far down the indoctrination rabbit-hole they are, unless they turn off their devices and take a hard look back at the guidance they received. In case you are unaware, the purpose of the devices and the dancing images is precisely so that you do not begin to ask those questions. The commandment of “Believe in yourself” precludes the second commandment of “Question Everything” if in your questioning you come to question the first commandment. This is kind of like Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics.

First Law

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Likewise, in the laws of modern indoctrination, since the human self is a god, questioning everything is permitted, so long as questioning the principle of “Self as god” is not questioned. There is even a third law, which I have to marvel at. Asimov was an atheist, and he kind of nailed the worldview that I was taught.

Third Law

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In these laws, a human is sacred and the robot is a slave. The sacred thing must be protected at all costs, even if suicide of the slave is needed. Finally, obedience to all orders from the sacred things must be followed. Likewise, the first commandment of the “Self is god” is unassailable by the lesser laws, such as “Question Everything.”

The goal of any indoctrination is to build a wall around you, so that you become a disciple who will not even consider other products. Because if you buy the product that the pitch and demo are indoctrinating you into, you will use it for the rest of your life. If you believe that the Self is a god, then the hope is that you will stick with that idea for the rest of your life.

It’s pitched to us as the only option, like fear-based advertising for life insurance. “Believe in yourself” is pitched in the same way that a salesman will suggest that there’s nothing else in the warehouse and this is the only one in stock, so you’d better take it; and that the other models have been discontinued and are all recalled as defective. That is exactly the message taught about Catholicism - that it’s no longer for sale, because it stopped working for people.

The odd thing about Catholicism is that it was never pitched or demonstrated in the same way to me. There is no smoke and mirrors, even if there is incense sometimes at Mass. It’s all laid out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Church doors are often not even locked, even when no one is around. It was the opposite of robotic. There was nothing coercive about it. There is not even any trickery. It’s not a car that is being sold, it’s something different. It’s not my “Self” being sold to me, it’s bigger.

To be human, "man's response to God by faith must be free, and. . . therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act." "God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced. . . This fact received its fullest manifestation in Christ Jesus." Indeed, Christ invited people to faith and conversion, but never coerced them. "For he bore witness to the truth but refused to use force to impose it on those who spoke against it. His kingdom. . . grows by the love with which Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws men to himself." (CCC 160)

So once I bought the product of the “Self,” after high school and college I had to put that product into usage. I suppose I knew early on that the product from the pitch and the demo wasn’t working very well, but teachers and elders and newsmen and movie stars kept assuring me that this was the way. Perhaps I was just using the product incorrectly. I just wasn’t believing in myself enough. Quite honestly, everything did go well for me, but luckily I had one glaring flaw in alcohol usage that revealed to me the gaping hole in my indoctrination of the “Self as god.”

Once the professors faded away, and I finally started to turn off the screens around me, the product I had bought proved to be a real lemon. For all of us, life is the proving ground. Life is not a book or a lab experiment or a demonstration. It is real. Bad ideas and bad patterns of living surface eventually. They cannot be hidden forever. No matter how shiny, no matter how many people are nodding at you in assurance, a bad product tattles on itself. When you go to use the product that promised strength and direction on a dark and cold night, and it doesn’t work, you know the truth because you are sitting in the dark and cold, and the “Self as god” can do nothing. The Self proves to be a useless god.

But it wasn’t only personal experience that showed the broken springs in the lessons of humanism and scientism. The problems were everywhere. I actually tried to ignore the obvious problems, because I wanted to believe my indoctrination. But observing macro issues happening in the wider world, which seemed to mirror my personal micro-revelations, I saw the same gaping hole happening on a larger scale that I discovered on the dark and cold night .

Many of our current problems, particularly the threat of nuclear war, the disintegration of the family, the numerous eco-disasters, and the Covid virus itself, are a direct result of our choosing the way of Prometheus over the way of Christ. (Yes, I for one am done pretending that the virus didn’t come from a lab. That “wet market” pitch didn’t win me over from the start.)

There was no doubt that a free-will choice happened before I was born, on a national scale. I use the Atom Bomb as a point of inflection. It’s a fine explosion to mark the change in direction, where technology became a god to us. Honestly, I think the fire started much earlier, even way before 1776. The explosion happened when we ate the apple or separated from apes - however you want to interpret it, the difference between animals and humans is clear, and the “Fall of Man” is the best answer available. You can deny God all you like. The fact of sin remains, and is truly the one provable fact in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. There was a Fall. Something is wrong with humans. Everyone has a flaw, a struggle, a dysfunction. Even Billy Joel acknowledges this in his history lesson called, We Didn’t Start the Fire.

So who did start the fire?

Prometheus did. Or he is the one of the stories we use for where our problems came from. Sometimes his theft is portrayed as good thing. He was the ancient symbol of technology and human advancement. In the Bible, it’s Cain, whose descendants built the first city and weapons. Both of these guys believed in themselves. When he chose to steal the fire from the gods, Prometheus certainly believed in himself. He may have even questioned why he shouldn’t have fire. Oddly enough, questioning everything is exactly how the serpent in the garden lured Eve into eating from the forbidden tree.

And even if Prometheus’ intentions were good (I’m unconvinced), those scientists in Los Alamos who tinkered with physics to produce the atom bomb also believed they had good intentions. But like Prometheus, what was loosed into the world led to far greater problems, the biggest of which was fear and doubt. Fear and doubt lead to disenchantment. Fear of man overtakes fear of God. Doubt over God leads to faith in the self, or groupings of selves that will remove the fear.

That was the mistake. And it’s a huge error. It’s the error that leads to all others. Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Mt 10:28) The mantra of “Self as god” and “Question Everything” gets its wings in every age, just as surrender to Christ does. Affluence doesn’t save you from fear. Pleasure doesn’t either. Power? Not even close. If you have power, you are more fearful than the person with nothing. Because with the atom bomb, the United States had found power. But so did others, and it led to a fearful era in the fifties, leading to the hedonism of the sixties, the aimlessness of the seventies, the greed of the eighties, the nihilism of the nineties, and the internet age of narcissism and isolation today.

And now we need a way out. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner, a lonely corner, where the light of our device only lasts as long as the battery.

Technology went into hyperdrive and the message of the “Self as god” became louder and louder, because the technology carried the message, suggesting it at every waking moment, asking us the whole time the classic phrases from Genesis 3: “Did God really say that? Are you sure God said that?” and “He just doesn’t want you to become like him.”

Thus came the long march to meaninglessness that Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre and other philosophers saw coming. Meaninglessness is simple to explain. It’s Godlessness. Meaninglessness happens because the Self is not a real god. It’s a fake.

The funny thing, however, of all this messaging and indoctrination is this: questioning everything is exactly what will lead you right back to the truth, and that truth is God. The truth is that the self is not-God. As the saying goes, the farther you run from God, the more likely you’ll run right into the arms of God.

The goals of the Renaissance, in its attempt to re-invigorate the world and ideas of classical Greece and Rome, were human-focused rejections of the long, successful, sustainable journey of Christianity through almost every culture in the world. The success of Christianity is hard to fathom or explain, given what it appears to offer externally, which is self-denial and humility. Its great sales pitch was the life of Christ and the demonstrations came through martyrdoms, which hardly seem appealing to humans who shun any and all discomfort and pain. Yet it drew people to Jesus. Self-denial instead of self-determination drew people in droves, because they saw something worth living for, and death, the great fear, no longer mattered because something greater was being given to all.

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