From One We Can Judge The Rest

Excerpts of the letter from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy that President Barack Obama delivered to Pope Benedict XVI earlier this year and an account of the pope's response, as read by Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington:

"Most Holy Father I asked President Obama to personally hand deliver this letter to you. As a man of deep faith himself, he understands how important my Roman Catholic faith is to me, and I am so deeply grateful to him. I hope this letter finds you in good health. I pray that you have all of God's blessings as you lead our church and inspire our world during these challenging times. I am writing with deep humility to ask that you pray for me as my own health declines.

"I was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago and although I continue treatment, the disease is taking its toll on me. I am 77 years old and preparing for the next passage of life. I have been blessed to be part of a wonderful family and both of my parents, particularly my mother, kept our Catholic faith at the center of our lives. That gift of faith has sustained and nurtured and provides solace to me in the darkest hours. I know that I have been an imperfect human being, but with the help of my faith I have tried to right my path. I want you to know Your Holiness that in my nearly 50 years of elective office I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I have worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I have opposed the death penalty and fought to end war.

"Those are the issues that have motivated me and have been the focus of my work as a United States senator. I also want you to know that even though I am ill, I am committed to do everything I can to achieve access to health care for everyone in my country. This has been the political cause of my life. I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field and I will continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national health policy that guarantees health care for everyone. I have always tried to be a faithful Catholic, Your Holiness, and though I have fallen short through human failings, I have never failed to believe and respect the fundamental teachings of my faith. I continue to pray for God's blessings on you and on our church and would be most thankful for your prayers for me."

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An account from the Vatican of the pope's response, according to McCarrick:

"The Holy Father has the letter which you entrusted to President Barack Obama, who kindly presented it to him during their recent meeting. He was saddened to know of your illness, and asked me to assure you of his concern and his spiritual closeness. He is particularly grateful for your promise of prayers for him and for the needs of our universal church.

"His Holiness prays that in the days ahead you may be sustained in faith and hope, and granted the precious grace of joyful surrender to the will of God, our merciful Father. He invokes upon you the consolation and peace promised by the Risen Savior to all who share in His sufferings and trust in His promise of eternal life.

"Commending you and the members of your family to the loving intervention of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Father cordially imparts his Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of wisdom, comfort and strength in the Lord."

"Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable."

For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

...I have often wondered how anybody could be stupid enough to believe in a soul, which is invisible and has exactly zero evidence for it.

I guess there's nothing too childish for the brainwashed masses to believe.

Thesis that factual knowledge based on rational interpretation of sensory evidence is the only valid knowledge. On a broader base it includes some nonsensory data drawn, e.g., from introspective observation. Excludes moral, aesthetic, and religious experience. Proponents include representatives of logical* positivism.

If you laugh at that, you're like Bill Mahr's audience, you'll laugh at anything. I don't like being told that my arguments aren't as good as his because he has divine information that I don't have. There's an assumption with which I will dispense before the inquiry - there is no supernatural intervention in this argument. Like LaPlace, I don't need the god-hypothesis. If he does exist, he is incompetent, absent-minded, capricious and cruel.

To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell [a London insane asylum] at all.

View that the soul* of a new infant is generated from the souls of its parents. Many prefer this view to creationism* because they feel that it helps to account for transmission of sin from parents to offspring (see also Sin, Original).

The propagation, or origination of the human soul, has been explained by three theories, viz: Preexistence: Creationism: Traducianism.

The theory of Preexistence was maintained by Plato, who dwelt upon a seemingly dim recollection of a former condition, anamneesis. It went over from Plato through Philo, to Origen, but never met with general acceptance in the Church, and was expressly condemned in the Council of Constantinople in 543. In recent times, it has been defended by Kant, who thinks, in his work "Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason," that to the explanation of the radical evil in man is required the intelligible fact of a decision made by him at some former time. Schelling has maintained the same view in his "Philosophical Investigation, in regard to the Essence of Freedom," 1809.

It has also been most ably defended by Julius Mueller, in his great work "On Sin" (4th Ed., 1858), (translated into English, Clark's For. Libr.,) who employs it to solve the problem of Original Sin. Nowhere,however, has the theory been put more beautifully, than in the lines of one of our great English poets, Wordsworth, in his "Intimations of Immortality,from the Recollections of Childhood." In that poem he makes this noble statement of the Platonic theory:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But, trailing clouds of glory, do we come,
From Heaven, which is our home."

But beautiful as is this theory, and not without speciousness, it will not bear the test of logic, nor of the witness of Scripture. It only cuts the knot; it simply throws back the question, puts it out of sight, and does not answer it. It is an obvious subterfuge to get rid of a perplexity, and is like the hopeless cosmography of the Hindoos, except that it stops at the elephant. It is opposed to the great fact of our human experience, as to the similarity between the soul of the parent and child, and is contradicted by the general drift of Scripture, and specially by Gen. iii. and the whole argument in Rom. v. 12, seq. It in truth involves simply an undeveloped metempsychosis, a transmigration of the soul. Its latest defender is an American, Dr. Edward Beecher, who lays this theory as part of the basis of what he claims to be the solution of the "Conflict of Ages." (1854.) The theory of Preexistence in another form asserts simply that all souls were created at the beginning, by the word of God, and are united, at conception, with the human organism.

Immediate Creationism maintains that there is a direct creation of the soul by God, and that about the fortieth day after conception it is united with the embryo. The passages of Scripture which have been appealed to sustain this view are Jer. xxxviii. 16; Isa. Ivii. 16; Zach. xii. 1; Acts xvii. 28; Ps. cxix. 73; Job x. 12; Do. xxxiii. 4; Numb. xvi. 22; Do. xxvii. 16; Heb. xii. 9, and in the Apocryphal books, 2 Mace. vii. 22. Jerome asserts that this was the view of the Church, but this is an overstatement of the fact, although it certainly was the view of a number of the Fathers. Clemens Alexandrinus says: "Our soul is sent from Heaven." Lactantius says: "Soul cannot be born of souls." It is the predominant view of the Roman Church. Most of the Reformed (Calvinistic) theologians maintain it, and usually with the theory that by the union of the soul with the body the soul becomes sinful.

But this theory is really untenable. The strongest of the Scripture passages quoted to sustain it, imply no more than that the spirit of man has higher attributes than his body, is preeminent as God's work, and the chief seat of his image, without at all implying that His creation of the soul is a direct one. It would be quite as easy, not only to show from other passages, but to show from a number of these, that the body of man is the direct creation of God, which, nevertheless, no one will maintain.

To Pelagians, and the Pelagianizing Romanists, this theory indeed is not encumbered with the great moral difficulty arising from the acknowledgment of Original Sin, but to all others, this view involves, at its root, unconscious Gnosticism. It makes matter capable of sin and of imparting sinfulness. It represents the parents of a child as really but the parents of a mere material organism, within which the nobler part, all. That elevates it, all that loves and is loved, is in no respect really their child. On this theory, no man could call his child really his own. He has no more relation, as a parent, to its soul, which is the child, than any other man in the world, and is as really the father of that which constitutes a human being, to every other person's children as he is to his own. Moreover, with all the explanations and ingenious resorts which have been found necessary in retaining this theory, there is no escaping the inference, that it makes God the author of Sin. According to this theory, God creates a perfect, spotless, holy soul, and then places it in a polluted body; that is, He takes what is absolutely innocent, and places it, where it inevitably, not by choice, but of necessity, is tainted with sin, justly subject to damnation, and in a great majority of cases actually reaches eternal damnation. We do not hesitate to say, that though the doctrine has been held by good men, who have guarded with great care against obvious abuse, it could be pressed until it would assume almost the character of a "Doctrine of Devils."

The third view is that of Traducianism, or mediate Creationism: the theory that both body and soul are derived from the parents. This theory corresponds with the prevailing and clear statements of the Holy Scriptures, as, e. g. Gen. v. 3; Acts xvii. 24-26. It is a doctrine absolutely demanded by the existence of original sin, and the doctrine that God is not the author of sin. This view is defended, among the Fathers, especially by Tertullian, Athanasius, Gregory of Nissen, and many others. Augustine remained undecided, confessing his ignorance, yet leaning strongly to the Traducian View. The Lutheran Divines, with very few exceptions, are Traducian. The expressions in the Symbolical Books, such as in the Catechism, "I believe that God has created me," and in the Formula of Concord, "God has created our souls and bodies after the fall," are meant of the mediate creation, not of the direct.

The true theory of Traducianism is, that it is a creation by God, of which the parents are the divinely ordained organ. The soul of the child is related mysteriously, yet as closely, to the soul of the parent as its body is to theirs, and the inscrutable mystery of the eternal generation of God's Son from the absolute Spirit, mirrors itself in the origin of the human soul.
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