Judge Not by Appearances

by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg | June 22, 2016 12:04 am

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Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God is His revealed word. He is the single best source of Truth known to man and it is only through Him that we may catch a glimpse of who God is and who we truly are. The world today has turned away from Christ as the ultimate source of truth and turned instead to self-referencing experts. They have convinced us to self-reference and as a result we have become blind to truth. Our Savior tells us in John 7:24 “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” As this age descends into moral chaos and the collective mind darkens into insanity, we judge more and more by appearances and righteous judgement wanes. Perhaps the most startling issue of our day to illustrate this trend concerns gender and transgender theory. To support these modern innovations is to judge, not righteous judgement but to judge by the appearances of pathology and a false sense of tolerance. What is really going on is an insidious attack on the domestic church.

The Real Agenda

The LGBTQ agenda is a Trojan horse carrying our enemy, the bent one, within our gates. The LGBTQ agenda is being used by the powers and principalities under the universal and false guise of making this world a better place, an offer of peace, but a false peace. The illogical line of reasoning goes: all people are born a certain way, society cannot define what a particular person is or what they are attracted to, tolerance is the way we can all get along, so whatever one decides they are or whatever they want to do, who are we to judge? Live and let live.

This befouled line of reasoning is very appealing though we may not know why. Its appeal is likely our natural, but fallen inclination to deny our own sins by denying that others are sinning as well. The trouble with this line of reasoning is that it requires us to deny the revealed truth about the human person. We are made in the image and likeness of God. We have an immortal soul. We are made to end in heaven and this requires us to recognize the authority of God and to live according to his Word. The above flawed reasoning also requires that we ignore morality, virtue, vice and even sin. For the above to be true, we must deny the eternal, divine and natural laws. We do this to gain temporal peace at the expense of eternal peace.

The LGBTQ agenda is really just the ideology du jour following, Marxism, Communism, Socialism, and feminism as a way to strive to eliminate all distinctions between men and women. The agenda is primarily an attack on the revealed truth in the Book of Genesis that tell us “male and female He created us” and “be fruitful and multiply.” The power play is for the state to usurp the authority of God and this is best achieved by gaining control over sex and the family. It is a self-evident truth that men and women are inherently different with different societal roles and different ontological duties. It is as simple as to truthfully say men are fathers and women are mothers. But the current agendas would deny even this and claim that the revealed truth about male and female sex are social constructs. This is an obvious untruth that drives the agenda.

If the agenda can destroy the distinctions between men and women, then of course this will have a profound and devastating effect on the domestic church, the family. The eligible male and female married by natural or sacramental grace who consummate their marriage become one flesh and become co-creators of new life as an expression of their love for one another and their communion with the Creator. This is the only definition of the family that is modeled on the Triune God. Male and female are beautifully complementary as the man is meant to be the head of the home, protecting and sacrificing unto death for his bride. The woman is meant to be the heart of the home where she raises and educates her children in concert with her husband. This is the domestic church and the only configuration that can build up a civilization and come to bring true peace on earth and to populate the City of God.

So the real agenda behind all the feminist and LGBTQ propaganda is to destroy the family. The only thing that authentically stands between each individual citizen and the demand to worship the state is the well-ordered family. If the bent one and his minions can get us to judge by appearances and condemn the family as “antiquated” and “patriarchal” and “oppressive” then they can move forward with obtaining an iron clad rule over this world. Unfortunately, the fallen Lucifer and his legions do not work alone but with the cooperation of many unwitting humans who have lost a grip on Christ’s command to judge with righteous judgement.

The Schools and Modern Media Support the Agenda

The Modern Schools from kindergarten through university graduate programs condition our children to see the world through subjective lenses. Schools throughout the world have been turned into moral relativist training camps. Long ago our system of education in the West abandoned a proper Theology and even jettisoned the perennial philosophy, the two anchors tying an educational program to reality. Our children are not trained to use their minds properly, but they are instructed to self-reference and allow personal experience and subjective feelings to drive assumptions to conclusions. Tolerance, liberty, and self-esteem are the three highest virtues replacing the good, true and beautiful, as the driving principles of a now nearly universal and bankrupt form of education.

It seems that our institutions of learning are sacred cows. We are reluctant to question them when we ought to be up in arms about the treachery perpetrated upon our children at the behest of “educrats” in the service of darkness. If we are not worried about the effects of modern educational programs on our children, perhaps a look at this video will wake us up to the truth that our modern schools are working to confuse our children, not educate them.

[youtube id = “-4S0gHlKiho”]

One of the most basic and self-evident truths about the human person is that there are males and females. The way these students convey their beliefs about gender and sex is a sign of societal derangement. This video is a model of institutionalized insanity. If our college students can’t get this most basic tenant of reality right, what does this mean for the future of our civilization?

Our schools and the Mass Media have been grooming our children for generations to believe the unbelievable. More frightening still is the fact that using common sense and reason no longer resonate with our youth or their teachers. Our children can no longer trust their own eyes and ears but rely instead on the terrible opinions of professors who long ago abandoned search for truth and instead descend to make a name for themselves. Sadly, even many Catholics have been taken in by the pathological grip of this ideological Trojan horse. This is impermissible, but our duty to speak the truth with charity is exponentially more difficult now that the consequences for not supporting the agenda are becoming more severe.

The Real Issue

The root misunderstanding propagated by the social engineers, our teachers and LGBTQ advocates is a basic misunderstanding of the human person. We lack an understanding of the most basic definition of man. We have lost sight of the nature of a definition as well. If we begin at the root of the problem we will recover the truth that a definition does not merely name a thing, it conveys its essence. When we define a thing we are supposed to do much more than just label it, we are duty bound to describe its nature in all its causes; material, efficient, formal and final. To define the word “anthropology” is to describe the essence of what it means to be a human being. The opposite is to proffer a self-referential, self-serving and arbitrary definition to the most basic philosophical category, the human person. The difference between the two approaches in defining anthropology is that one we discover by reference to our creator, and the opposite is to invent our own definitions for ourselves in order to create our own reality.

In good keeping with the first principle of all reality known as the principle of non-contradiction, there are only two possibilities when it comes to defining the nature of man, we either get it right, or we get it wrong. As Catholics, we are to ascribe to the Christian idea of man grounded in Aristotelian metaphysics and fully fleshed out by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa expounded[1] upon by Chesterton. Man is a composite of body and soul. We acquiesce to the truth that the body is the physical manifestation of our God-given souls. Although we recognize that there are many defects with which we may be born, including rare issues of indeterminate sex, it is generally true that a human is born the very sex of their soul. To say otherwise is a little like saying that an orange from an orange tree could become an apple. It is absurd. Body and soul are a single entity indivisible except by death, a defect inherited by mankind because of the Fall. The world is making the claim that we are at liberty to invent ourselves based on our subjective feelings. The LGBTQ would have us believe that there are dozens if not more different genders, but in reality, there are only two.

The modern confusion on sex and gender, the idea that one can be whatever ever gender one feels like, finds its philosophical roots in Rene Descartes’ mind/body problem. Descartes asserted that there are two different and separate kinds of substances, material and immaterial and that there is no real relationship between them. This false proposition supposes that a thing is made up of separable causes and this is justified by the minds ability to abstract. This of course leads to the false conclusion that a man can think he is a woman and therefore he is. If there were any truth to this erroneous notion, the transgender movement would have been self-evident and intense from the beginning. However, this is not the case, it is only a popular fad based on bad philosophy and false notions of freedom.

The Catholic Position

Contrary to the proclamations of our elite mind molders, we Catholics are not at liberty to invent our own reality. By the right use of the intellect and by submitting our wills to the revealed Truth of God, we are able to discover by common sense the self-evident truths about the essence of the human person. Aided by grace, we can come to know the image and likeness of God imprinted on every human soul. All human souls have the freewill to accept or reject the integrated tapestry of revealed, philosophical and scientific truth accessible to all who seek to know. However, we are not free from the consequences of our free choices. In choosing a position we become bound to what follows our choice. To choose against the revealed word of God is to be bound to error, no longer free. We can only be truly free is we abide in the word of Christ who made us, knows our true ends and fully knows us. Our only real choice is in whether we arrogate to ourselves the license to be the arbiter of truth or if we acquiesce to the True Arbiter of Truth Christ Our Lord; the rest is bondage to the consequences of our choices.

The plain, simple and self-evident Catholic position is that God created us in His image and likeness. “Male and female He created us.” Male and female are not arbitrary socially constructed terms, they are the obvious categories into which all humans fall. As Catholics we believe in the sanctity of sacramental marriage that requires, without exception, two eligible persons, one male and one female, to join in gloriously complementary union to become one flesh. This Trinitarian configuration is the only possibility to participate in the creation of new human souls which are an expression of the love between a man and a woman.

The current gender/sex crisis is ideology conveyed by intolerant sentimentalism and designed to distract us from the real agenda of destroying the family. The LGBTQ agenda and Catholic Truth are incompatible. Our duty to God and neighbor is to speak the truth with charity. If we truly love our brothers and sisters, as is our duty, we will not participate in their sins but rather pray for them and preach Christ crucified. We cannot stand idly by while our country descends into moral disorder. We must defy our public schools, the Mass media and LGBTQ agenda who have made the Trojan horse at our gates. Let us reject the pathological narrative that says we are what we feel we are. Let us teach our children not to judge by appearances, but to judge righteous judgement by referring to the objective standard of Truth, the revealed Christ. Male and female He created us! He does not make mistakes, we do.

Source URL: https://integratedcatholiclife.org/2016/06/steven-rummelsburg-judge-not-by-appearances/

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