As readers know, Catholic Fundamentalism began almost twenty years ago, when a recent convert tried to connect parts of the Protestant Fundamentalism he’d left with The Church he was blessed to enter.
“If The Bible is the inspired Word of God, it must be correct.”, he said to himself. “How can the world be ten or twelve thousand years old, as it’s described in the Book of Genesis, when scientists seem sure that it’s fifteen or twenty billion years old?”
The convert was puzzled, and prayed about it, even as he discovered that none of the Catholics he met seemed to care at all about the issue. “God, please reconcile this huge contradiction between The Bible and the world. How can the world only be ten or twelve thousand years old?” The plea and question repeatedly came into his mind. Once, when it did, he happened to be watching a screen-saver that he’d downloaded on his computer. The screen-saver was a lifelike human program. It had a lifelike clownfish swimming through lifelike seaweed above a lifelike sea floor littered with lifelike shells. “God can program this, but in three dimensions!” he blurted, understanding in a mind-numbing flash that it was so.
Over the following years, the magnitude of the thought that came so overwhelmingly into his mind was boiled down: “God is able to program in three dimensions. He can program particles, like the pixels we see on a computer screen, but in three dimensions. Further, He can compile those particles into systems and beings, and have them move through the Time Program, propelled by various manifestations of His Energy Program, every part of every thing all working together within the huge Creation Program.”
As he understood that every thing that everyone saw was actually some sub-program or another of the perfectly working, and vastly larger, Creation Program, he understood that “the hierarchy of angels” was a medieval name for the ranks of angelic sub-programmers who had downloaded the hugest program of all. He asked a natural question: “God, why did you go to all that trouble?”
That answer came quickly, probably from one of the sub-programmers: “It was the way God decided to give you human programs free will. The most important part of free will is the freedom to choose belief in, and obedience to, Him, or to choose not to believe and obey. To do this, He had to program a vast system in which each human program would be free to believe in, and obey, Him or not. That’s why there are lots of fossils, seams of rock, carbon-14, and all kinds of old-looking, huge, tiny, and far-off things like galaxies and what some say are black holes. Everything was programmed to provide those who would choose to let themselves be led astray with what they could be reasonably choose to see as evidence that they, and everything else, came into being without The Loving Programmer.”
The first Catholic Fundamentalist then asked: “God do you love we who believe and obey that much?” The answer was clear and in the affirmative. Over the past twenty years, Catholic Fundamentalism has been slowly built into a system that, so far, has not only been uncontradicted, but also shows The Roman Catholic Church to be the infallible repository of truth and most reliable provider of access to The Loving Programmer.
