I bought into a kind of mentality for a few decades where I would shake my head at the portrait of the faithful Christians as a bunch of superstitious, inbred fools. For quite some time, I could not revert to belief, because it meant letting go of many of my assumptions and biases. I wanted certainty, having ingested years of education, television, and gobs of self-help new-age fluff that sold just that tale. But having lived some forty years, it became increasingly clear that a long campaign to bash and re-write Christian history has been the motive of many of my educators and most of the media that I’ve consumed.

There was a clear villain, especially in public school and (oddly enough) the Catholic university I attended for one year before transferring to a public university. I lost my faith at a Catholic university. Today I feel like I paid $14,000 in my freshman year to have my soul amputated, which was an unexpected surgery.

The enemy in classrooms was the Church. It wasn’t always said directly, and was often more like a flank attack on every single teaching of the Church. But behind the “teachings” was always the Catholic Church. I put “teachings” in quotes because most of what I was taught turned out to be very loose on details and often directly dishonest. The accusation was not always made directly at the Church, but when the direct inverse of faith and morals was being taught, the wind from my professors, which I was paying for, was set on full sail toward anti-religion. Honestly, I have to wonder for a few if it wasn’t kind of a thrill to teach history or philosophy at a Catholic university and actively try to kill a student’s faith. Everything that the Church held sacred was discarded, and seemed almost a part of the core curriculum, literally, on nearly every doctrine of faith and morals. This may sound like exaggeration, but if I have enough time I will go into it further, and I have covered it in some degree in prior posts.

Obviously it wasn’t only the college experience, but television and the internet as well, and my own need to rebel and get buck-wild as much as possible, from Thursday to Sunday night if I could swing it. Four dollars bought a plastic cup at “all you can drink” house-parties, and with a fake ID, three beers for a buck at the bars. I could get hammered on the cheap. I took school seriously, but the extra-curricular of drinking was a close second. I often wonder why I even went to college because I could have learned to program and code myself, but instead I paid a lot of money to read books (that I could have read at home) and lost my faith and meaning in life. But I do love learning and reading, so I lapped it up, but the fruit of my education was full of worms for a long, long time, until I finally slipped on my own rotten banana peel and hit bottom.

Somehow I was seeking answers and oblivion at the same time, and by the end of my freshman year, I had all the answers I needed. There was no God. Jesus was just a human teacher, like Buddha, or Bill Nye. The divine never broke through into our world. Miracles were ludicrous. The universe has always existed, and evolution explains it all. Now it was time for Metallica and shots of Blue 100 and Aftershock, Jag-bombs, straight whiskey. Eat, drink, and get wrecked, for tomorrow we die! Oh - and make money. Everyone assured me that money was very important, and that my American pursuit of happiness really, really needed money.

So I really only saw oblivion and self-determination as the road ahead to any kind of meaning. And that is how I purchased the product that the culture and college were selling.

There was a sales pitch happening with much fanfare and intellectualizing and it felt a lot like how I came to take my first drink, which was by peer pressure and wanting to be cool and counter-cultural. While the cheerleaders of the modern world assured me that “justification by STEM alone” and the unending song of “Believe in yourself” promised a glorious future kingdom on earth, the progress toward the utopia, whether by science, humanism, capitalism or socialism, didn’t match the sales pitch. In the end, the shiny product I bought to be cool turned out to be a Ford Pinto that exploded when life rear-ended it.

When you are selling a product, you craft a story. This is critical in sales, and academics and business people have gone to great lengths to craft and hone their tales, and if you don’t think so, if you turn on a radio, TV, or open your phone, within seconds you will be ingesting a crafted story, professionally made just for your eyes, ears, tongue, and stomach to desire.

However, the crafted sales pitch is only one-third of making a sale. The second part is the demonstration, and the third part is proving it. Now, a “demo” can be every bit of smoke and mirrors as the pitch, and often is.

I was once tasked with creating a “demonstration” for a keynote speaker for our company’s largest annual event. To show how great our software was, we created an app that showed meters and gauges wobbling and measuring temperature and wind speed. It looked amazing, useful, cutting-edge.

And it was all fake.

We used fake data and the app was connected to no real world hardware, no wires, no live data.

But it looked good.

For another demo, I had to create a long series of click-through screens to show how well our product worked, with transitions to mimic a mouse click, so that the presenter could appear to be using the actual app. But there was no app. It was all just images appearing to look like the application. The demo was a magic trick. But it looked good. When a keynote speech is delivered, nothing can go wrong in the slides or demonstration. That was made clear to me, hence the need for the fake app and the click-through images. Nothing could go wrong. Even with the fake data, I was assured that if the demo errored or failed somehow, I would be looking for a new job.

When I left that company, I joined one that didn’t play the same games and it felt much more authentic, because we were showing and selling the actual product, without smoke and mirrors, or as little smoke and mirrors as possible. Customers appreciated this. Employees appreciated this. Being a “demo-dawg” means having to dance in front of the customer, but it’s far more enjoyable when what you are showing actually exists and if it fails, you speak honestly about the problem.

Authenticity: that is what people really want today, but the smoke-and-mirrors of the screens attract us like moths to the bug zapper.

The third part of selling is the proof that it works. This is of course the most important part of all, because repeat sales do not happen if this part is fake, because in the end it’s the only thing that really matters.

A good salesperson can sell a piece a junk one time, but then he had better move on to the next town, because the jig is up when the product fails. Perhaps you’ve seen the musical, The Music Man. The reason Harold Hill must keep town-hopping is because the con game requires new suckers. Charlatans get caught, because reality is always the test that proves out the claims of both the pitch and the demonstration. As they say, it’s where the rubber meets the road.

Remember the old Castrol GTX oil commercials? They showed engines running at high RPMs with a low quality oil. Of course, the engine with the lesser oil seized up in a dramatic clunk (while an engine with Castrol oil clearly would have kept hammering the piston like a sewing machine). The story was that Castrol protected your engine “from viscosity and thermal breakdown", which turned on every car guy and armchair engineer, and presumably even men who had no idea what those terms meant. (These were shown during NFL football games, as the target audience was men and boys who liked gladiator games and powerful engines as a substitute for their own insecurities and feelings of powerlessness…but I digress.)

The demonstration in the commercial recorded engine breakdown at high RPMs, which made for a compelling story for the Castrol claim, which was: “Our oil is high quality and performs under pressure.” But the real test was always in the real world, not the advertisement or the demo. No one knows what engine was used, or if the gauges were even real. In other words, to keep selling a product, there has to be something more than words, more than just the demo. It must actually do what is promised. Marketing acts as the prophet, demonstrators (a.k.a. “demo-dawgs”) perform the sign, and the usage is the proof, the fulfillment of the prophecy. If the ball is dropped anywhere along the way through this gauntlet of sales, you don’t make the second sale. Sure, for a while you can fool people, because companies can and do step up their marketing and sales games, but it cannot last forever. The cracks eventually show. We consumers may be stupid, but we are not completely stupid. Sometimes a failed idea that sold well can even take a few centuries to play out, as the marketing story sounds so good you just can’t believe your eyes that it failed. (Here I am alluding directly to the stories and pitches of Karl Marx, the absurd demonstrations of Potemkin Villages, and the proof of the utter and complete failures of organizing a society around anything that even touches his ideas. Yet, we want to try it again…but I digress.)

We are seeing the cracks today in four ideas that have dominated the past two centuries: socialism, capitalism, humanism, and scientism. All four of these, in their actual testing, have proven flawed beyond repair.

The reason is simple.

They all push God off the stage so that the sacred Self can be the center of all things. That alone is the flaw.

The goals of these ideologies alone are not bad, but anything that fails to include God as the highest good will fall into disorder. There is no other way. Order and disorder come from a cosmic, theological law of spirituality. There are laws of physics, yes. Then there are the higher laws: the laws of spirits. God is the author of life, of this book, so he chooses the ending, and any mere mortal that fails to follow the Greeks advice to “Know thyself” is writing himself clear out of the book. Knowing thyself means knowing humility before God, and as I’ve said before, most people don’t seem to have a problem with that idea. Humility before God and thanksgiving to God is the point of religion, the purpose of all prayer, but we so easily forget that.

Most people today would say I’m wrong. They would say that the one thing that has proven flawed is Catholicism. It’s backwards, they say (unaware that universities and hospitals wouldn’t exist without it). It’s sexist, they say (ignoring that women make up more of the Church and had more to do with starting the Church than any other religion in history). It’s racist, they say (while it is in every country with every type of person imaginable who join together daily worldwide for Mass).

They accuse it of many things. Its enemies are everywhere. But what I’ve come to learn is that few people, not even most Catholics, understand Catholicism very well. Much of what is known covers only the scandals of the church itself, which it certainly has its share of. Most people think it’s just a list of rules, for a bunch of guilt-ridden fools. But by far the most divisive and false beliefs about the Church come from active campaigns of misinformation, libel, and slander. And lastly, millions of fallen away Catholics had a bad example as their icon of faith, who screamed and hollered and obviously misunderstood the whole thing, too. The common chorus is “I am a victim of Catholic Guilt.”

Dear readers: Catholic guilt is not a doctrine of the Church. Joy, however, is. What a shame that no one knows this. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the word guilt appears four times. The word joy appears forty-six times. Something has been lost, or misinterpreted, in the translation and delivery of the Church teaching.

Here’s my point: no one ever built a cathedral out of guilt. No one ever did the unnecessary toil of lugging massive amounts of stone across the ground in order to hang up a set of rules on the wall. No one built statues or made sacred art or wrote hymns because of their guilt. All of these things were done for the joy that Christ gives to his followers.

This association of guilt with the Church is the greatest tragedy of modern times, because it’s so utterly incorrect, and it is largely a manufactured fib that has now been passed down generations. People who treat the faith like just another Elk’s Club or Costco membership have completely missed the point. Costco followers have not yet built a Notre Dame or Salamanca Cathedral. It’s far more than an identity, it’s salvation, rest, peace, joy. (And by the way, feeling guilty is the correct emotion if you did do something wrong. It’s appropriate. But if that’s all you learned about Catholicism, you know nothing, just as I did not.)

Now what floors me, over and over, as you comb through the history of the Church, is that through all of the persecutions and attempts to stifle it, it does not die. It returns. This is maddening to its enemies. Every earthly kingdom that has put resources into destroying it, whether by sword or tongue (which are often used as synonyms) have failed to complete the job.

Why?

How can the nearly unlimited resources of emperors and kings, with their armies of soldiers and intellectuals, fail to destroy the Body of Christ?

I can tell you why. It’s because they already tried it once on the Cross, and the same resurrection that happened with Jesus happens with those that he calls. It cannot be killed.

But why?

The reason is joy. The reason is that once you are lost and found again, the joy cannot be replaced by anything else in this world. For those who God calls, there is no replacement, no backup plan, no second option. All of what was desired before becomes absurd once Jesus finds his chosen followers. The question of “why?” doesn’t have an answer beyond “joy.” The rest is the mystery, and the mystery is glorious.

So the reason that it has lasted is because orthodox Christianity is the one thing that has worked for bringing joy to the world. It has worked for 2,000 years. It will work for as long as God keeps our story in the Messianic Age that we are now in, the third act, as we await the return.

It has been proven to work. This is the product that has reviews from every generation, shouting that “This Jesus really does what he promises!” Tested repeatedly through the centuries, the results show through clearly. For those announcing its demise today, they will be disappointed just as every other group or king that tried to kill it by violence, propaganda, mockery, and indifference, and there have been many: Napoleon, Nero, Diocletian, Julian the Apostate, Suleyman, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Vikings, Henry VIII, Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao, Robespierre, and even Thomas Jefferson. That’s just a short list of names.

Christianity has been pronounced dead before. During the siege of Constantinople (A.D. 674–678), some were crying that the last days of Christian Rome had come, and that the armies of the Prophet would soon wipe out Christendom, as they had already destroyed Sasanian Persia and its ancient religion. In the thirteenth century, as Machiavelli observed, trust in the Catholic Church, mired as it then was in corruption and infested with heretics, only survived thanks to the holiness of Sts. Francis and Dominic. Prognosticators foresaw the collapse of Christian Europe after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, but two centuries later, following the Battle of Vienna in 1683, it was the Turks who were driven out of Europe. The French Revolution tried to de-Christianize France, but that campaign lasted less than a dozen years. (First Things)

Nothing lasts like faith in Jesus. We know this God can’t be killed. From history alone we know this is a fact. From the Cross to the tomb, we know this. It is a repeated and ever-present truth of The Way, with the uncomfortable reality being that Jesus isn’t dead. God is a living God. So even though many today like to point to the flaws alone, the scandals, and call that the totality of Catholicism, there is something far more going on. At some point it doesn’t even make sense that this thing would continue given all of the energy put forth to snuff it out. If that seems like I’m generalizing, read about the martyrs and the saints. Read about how the Church nearly died, time and again, only to re-emerge again. In real time today, I’m witnessing the onslaught of the world against the Church, from professors to internet atheists to national governments, all who go out of their way to attack and blame Christianity for all the world’s ills. It almost feels like a game, or a joke, as the blame and accusations pile up. At some point, when considering it all, I even laugh, because the dogpile is so uneven and absurd. And that absurd imbalance leads to questions, as the resilience of this Church surpasses any other institution in human history. The big question that began to stick out like a sore thumb had less to do with the Church than with its enemies. The more you see a someone or something being attacked, the more you start to wonder about the attackers.

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