How Catholic Fundamentalism helps spiritual digestion.

Before solid food can be digested to feed, fuel, and provide nutrients for growth, it has to be chewed. The human mechanisms for chewing are so complicated that any number of professions centered around chewing have developed. Orthodontists, oral surgeons, and several dental specialties all provide very good livings for their practitioners because chewing is so vitally important.

The mind, similar to the body, is also fed, but by the senses. Information is taken into the mind, “digested”, and put into its proper place, to be drawn on as needed to help the mind make better decisions.

Ultimately, the soul directs these activities. It, too, is fed, but its ultimate origin and source of sustenance is the Living God Who programmed it. The soul who draws on that source will do well, but often, the mind objects. “I am not going to waste my time thinking about, much less obeying, something that doesn’t exist.”, it says often to itself and any who suggest obedience to Church and Scripture. There is no shortage of people and organizations who will help others avoid God or replace Him with something else.

So, one way to help a soul draw nearer to God is to provide it with a “chewable” concept of God so that the notion can be swallowed and digested, helping the soul to grow. Catholic Fundamentalism attempts, however crudely, to make the Kingdom of God more “chewable” by suggesting that God may be more easily seen as real and relating to us as The Unprogrammed Programmer. With this small thought, we can more readily conjecture that He has the power to program in many dimensions. He can program particles, arrange them into systems and beings, then have them move through time. In an age where so much depends on human programmers and programs, it is easier for many to see Him as The Unprogrammed Programmer.

He especially loves His human programs, each of whom was programmed with free will in a world that provides it for us. As the various stages of belief pass through us, we grow closer to Him. All of us begin with crude notions of Him and what He wants. Over time, those are refined to greater and greater belief. Thinking of ourselves as the most precious of programs in a vastly larger cosmos of other programs is a “digestible” beginning.

Author's Notes:

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