Declining numbers show that people are having a harder time relating to The Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, America’s Protestant Fundamentalist denominations have begun to shrink. The problem is not that souls today are worse than in earlier times. Nor is it that The Church has changed Her basic teachings. And, it’s not caused by the Fundamentalists, who have not changed their Bible.
What causes more people to feel alienated from their fathers’ faith? A big part of the separation is caused by our rapidly changing language. The onslaught of new words, things, and activities that fill our vocabularies, minds, and lives makes it harder to relate to the past than ever.
All the words in Catholicism, Fundamentalism, and the Bible have come down to us from the Iron Age. Every new I-Pod, flat screen TV, GPS, and cell phone shoves more words into our minds that separate us farther from the Iron Age vocabulary of Church and Scripture. As a a result, people can’t avoid have a harder time connecting with Her. The growing separation puts souls in greater danger.
Except for a handful of Catholic Fundamentalists who’ve identified the problem and realize how very, very serious it is, most of us don’t think about the growing number of souls who are linguistically separated from the most basic concepts of our faith. If we did try to help, what could we do?
What We Can Do:
We can, with surprising speed, explain the basics of Catholic Fundamentalism in words from our own age: “God may be thought of as the ‘Unprogrammed Programmer’. He has the power to program energies and particles that He compiled into structures, systems, and beings. He gave the first beings an opportunity to become His Programming Assistants. Those in the Iron Age called them ‘The Hierarchy of Angels’. They were programmed with the ability to help download and compile His energy and particle programs into The Creation Program. We see some of what they did in the amazingly complicated structures, systems, and beings around us.”
The above paragraph is a basic beginning. When you tell people about it, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that many people actually want to agree with it! There is a hunger for God. Once the language barrier is broken, that hunger can be satisfied.
You will also find that there is no logical way to disprove that things did come into being exactly that way. That, of course, is not proof, but does provide credibility that only increases with a growing consideration of Catholic Fundamentalism’s basic premise that God is The Programmer of Programmers.
Then, Consider A Great Mystery:
The Bible records that Creation was brought into being 6-12,000 years ago. Some who seem to be serious scientists say that the universe may be 20,000,000,000 years old. It looks as if there is an impassable gulf between the two positions. It is a great mystery. The gulf can be bridged and the mystery solved. Catholic Fundamentalism does so.
Solution:
We consider an operating system that lets us see how much more powerful He is than we are. If we believe that He is really powerful, we may reasonably conclude that He programmed and downloaded the fossils, seams of rock, carbon-14, and all the other “scientific” gizmos there are to let people be free to think that the universe is vastly older than it is. Why? He has programmed and downloaded a system that forces sheep to separate themselves from goats.
Thinking about that gives us a better idea of how powerful The Loving Programmer is. First, He programmed the huge, largely self-sustaining Creation Program. Then, He lovingly had each of us human programs, with free will and guardian angel, downloaded within it, each person in his time. (It may seem better not to overload the lost soul with talk of “guardian angels”, or, in Catholic Fundamentalism terms, “Spiritual Programming Assistant”, but doing so makes it easier for their guardian angels to start exerting more influence on the human program for whom they’re responsible.)
We know that many human programs decide not to believe in a Creator or the need to follow His Operating Instructions. Unbelievers choose their own operating systems, most of which incorporate the twenty billion year age of the universe. That strengthens their tendency to think of God, if they believe He exists at all, as a remote, loveless being with no effect on them and what they want to do.
Those who believe themselves to be at the center of the universe naturally choose and devise operating systems that allow them to do what they want without guilt. Broadly, there are two different operating systems. One allows the human program’s soul and mind to operate within either God-centered world. The other is for those who are self-centered.
Proof?
Catholic Fundamentalists respectfully suggest that the Biblical record from the Old Testament (Catholic Fundamentalists think of it as ‘The First Programming Log’) tells us that many individuals described a great many things that would happen in the future. We read those prophecies (“They shall look upon Him Whom they pierced”, “He shall be lifted up before men”, “No bone of His shall be broken.”, the otherwise inexplicable “born of a Virgin”, and hundreds of similar statements that only the coming of Christ explains and we, the happy band of believers, increasingly understand how powerful The Programmer is.
Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, many who chose not to believe in The Programmer insisted that parts of The First Programming Log were either written, or added to, after the coming of Christ. They believed that things Jesus said and did, and that were done to Him, were inserted into the text so He and His Church could be given the aura of having been predicted, thus validating both the First and Second Programming Logs.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was so well documented, and showed how accurately the First Programming Log had been transcribed, that such theories are now only embraced by a tiny and unusually bitter minority.
