It’s the first day of the month, so the column is about Catholic Fundamentalism. That’s the new road to Rome that combines The Church’s ancient structure and doctrine with Protestant Fundamentalism’s great faith in the inerrancy of Scripture. Catholic Fundamentalism brings the two together by doing something as simple as using new words and seeing how well new processes make Scripture more readily understood.
Younger people no longer have a direct relationship with the old words we’ve inherited from The Iron Age. Now, we live in an Age of Controlling Electron Flow. Those familiar only with new processes and new words simply can’t easily relate to the older, Christian and Jewish descriptions of God and His works. It’s our duty to take the first steps toward helping them understand that the old truths are meaningful today by relating them to new words and processes.
By thinking of God, the Father, as The Loving Programmer, the new phrase is a little closer to what modern people see in the world. When we realize, then explain, that He has the ability to have programmed actual particles and compiled them into the systems and beings that make up The Creation Program, we are describing God in a way that computer literate people are more likely to understand.
Some religions would stop, right there. “Yep. God can program in three dimensions. He programmed particles. Then, He compiled them into systems and beings, and that’s how everything got where it is! What’s for dinner?”
Christianity is more complicated. We begin with The Loving Programmer. He wrote The Creation Program. Then, He downloaded it. It included countless galaxies, beavers, bluebirds, countless grains of sand, all downloaded and operating properly in an amazing six days. We can imagine the process being similar to a thousand, or ten thousand, Disney programmers programming a movie that looked 3-D in a regular work-week.
The Loving Programmer had help downloading The Creation Program. His earliest programs were angels. They were, and are, conscious, living forms of energy. They acted as His Programming Assistants. They’re still here. One of them is the Guardian angel who led you to read this far.
We may understand that Scripture, in today’s terms, is His Programming Log. It’s there to let all the generations between Download and Erasure know what He’s done. There’s an Old Programming Log and a New Programming Log. The Programming Logs let us know that He came to deeply love His most complicated programs, us human beings. Catholic Fundamentalists see ourselves and our neighbors as “self-replicating free-will programs” who operate freely within The Program.
He saw that His favorite programs tended toward error and erasure. He realized, from the earliest days of The Download, “I have to help, but not force, them choose to make the right choices.” At the pre-ordained time, The Living Program took human form and came to earth. He did so in the perfectly obedient, human form of Jesus Christ, Second Person of The Trinity. We take Him very seriously if we’ve been led to believe in the prophecies about Him that run through The Old Programming Log and are fulfilled in The New.
How do we know all this? Some are fortunate enough to have The Holy Wireless Connector join them with The Programmer, The Program, and all the necessary downloads described in The Programming Logs.
That’s a short form of how Catholic Fundamentalism begins.
