Dialogue with an Unbeliever

by Susan Fox

A friend of mine posted these questions online. I wrote my answers in red. I enjoyed our dialogue.

Anonymous: It's not that I don't think that I need a god, it's that there is no god that I am convinced exists. I used to. But my research shed a lot of light on the fallacy that is the Christian god.

Are you aware that the Christian religion is the only one in the world that teaches: love your enemies, do good to those who harm you, the first shall be last and the last shall be first? It’s the only religion where God expects you to forgive others before receiving His forgiveness.

Anonymous: I will never believe in him (the Christian god), though I will always be open to another. I have spoken to people who have claimed to have "felt" their own god, to have "seen" him, to have "spoken" to him and he spoke to them. The thing is, all of their gods were different.

Brother, yes, it can be very confusing when you have conflicting views of truth. However, there is only one God. God is the Father of ALL mankind. And regardless of what each person believes when they do experience God they are experiencing the same God that I do. However, their understanding may be different then mine.

For instance, I have a friend who is a Shinto. She believes in 886 gods. She gets upset if I kill a bug.  She loved my mother, and she came to my mother’s Catholic funeral. During the Mass, she badly wanted to receive Holy Communion (the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist) during the Mass. Our custom is to instruct a non-Catholic to fold their arms over their chest and then go to Communion.  The priest will bless them, but not give them Communion. However, when Yuriko got the blessing she still stood there because she wanted Communion. The priest didn’t know what to do, so he gave her Communion. Yuriko came back with tears streaming down her face. After Mass, I said, “Yuriko, what happened?” She said, “Susan, when I go to the Shinto Shrines in Japan, God comes down to meet me. That was what it was like to receive Holy Communion. God came down to meet me.” So you see, we had dramatically different understandings of God, but the God she met at the Shinto Shrine was the same as the One she received in the Catholic Church.

Muslims see their relationship with this god as Master and Slave. They understand God to be completely irrational, and the only guaranteed way to get their heaven (72 virgins) is to complete an act of martyr suicide, usually kill somebody else. Ideas have consequence so you got to be careful which view of God you adopt.

If you go to Bombay, you see lots of fat sleek well-fed cows, but the people are lying in the street literally starving to death. If you accidently hit a cow with your car, you might be killed by a mob. But you can run over a human being – no big deal, because Hindus believe that the cow is sacred. The human will have another chance to live through reincarnation, although I don’t know why anyone would want to come back to a life like that. The cow is a reincarnated human one step down from Nirvana, which means you become one with the universe, i.e. nothing. You are gone. Now my cousin Eric was very impressed with the Hindus he met in India because they were so well behaved. I said, “Eric, they are so impressive because they want to become a cow.” He was very surprised. Our family raised and ate cows.

Christians see their relationship with God as Father and child. Heaven is a relationship with Our Father. There is no laying around on a fluffy cloud and eating cheesecake. There are no 72 virgins. There is no owning your own planet with 50 wives. No, heaven is not a place, but a state of being in relationship with Our Loving Father. And on top of that we don’t lie around lazily after death. Jesus said, “My Father goes on working and so do I.”

If the Father is working, so will we. So unless you love, really love Our Father and want to work with Him, there is no reason to try and go there. There is no material reward in the next life. It doesn’t sound like a very big motive for living like we do now.

So what is my motive for being a Christian?

I fell totally in love with the Person of Jesus Christ when I was only four years old. Like Yuriko, I found myself in a terrible situation, and God mercifully came to meet me. He came to comfort me.   My beloved father was killed in a car accident. I was in the back seat. When they pulled me out, “I screamed Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” and promptly vomited. I never saw my father again.

Three days later, my mother and my grandmother took me to the Catholic chapel in the hospital and told me to pray for my father. I was angry. If I knew how to swear, I would have.  “You can’t make me pray to a God that took my Daddy!”  I thought. The chapel contained the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. Remember God so loved the world He sent His Son? Well, Jesus ensured that He never left us. He established the sacrament of His Love, the Holy Eucharist, so He would be with us until the end of time.

At the age of four, I didn’t know that. But when I went into the chapel I met a Presence. He met an angry hurting child. He was patient. He was kind. And I have belonged to Him ever since. I know what you will say, “What a cruel God that he would take that little girl’s Daddy from her.” But Brother, as I have prayed deeply over that event I realized I received so much more in exchange. I really wouldn’t change anything at all.  God didn’t cause the accident. God didn’t make the choice to drive recklessly that day. Two teenagers did. God didn’t put a middle lane in that road that could be driven either way (It was 1957). God didn’t tell my father to look at my mother lovingly just before the accident. My father just did it. And I even looked up from the back seat and saw the car coming straight for us. But I was only four years old, and I didn’t know what that meant. So God had to accept our free will.

But when I screamed, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” God my Father responded. God so loved the world He gave His Only Son. And at that moment in time, I was the world. I was the one who received Jesus Christ. He was my Gift.  And I have never been alone since. Literally I have never been alone for 56 years. I suffered the same as everyone else, but I always had Someone to bear it with me.

The same thing happened to people in the Scripture. They met the Person of Jesus. They dramatically turned their lives around. I feel especially close to St. Photina, who went on to evangelize and convert Domnina, the daughter of the Roman Emperor Nero, and her servants.

Photina or Photini  was the Samaritan woman at the well who met Jesus in the Gospel of John. Jesus begged water from her knowing He was going to give her something better, Living Water – the Person of the Holy Spirit. But while He was talking to her, knowing she had lived with several men, He asked her to go get her husband. She said, “I have no husband.” Jesus responded, "You have correctly said, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this you have said truly." (John 4:17-18)

Was she embarrassed? Did she run home crying? Did Jesus order her stoned? He knew her sins! No, she met her Maker. She met the Person of God! “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.” That was her response. Then she became an evangelist like me. She went and told everyone in her village about Jesus, and they came out to see Him. We both became evangelists because what we received was so wonderful that we wanted to share it with others. “So the woman left her waterpot, and went into the city and said to the men, "Come, see a man who told me all the things that I have done; this is not the Christ, is it?" They went out of the city, and were coming to Him.” (John 4:29-30)

I walked out of that hospital chapel in 1957 into a hot New Orleans afternoon, and I have never been the same. It was a special gift. A lot of other people didn’t know Him until much later in life. St. Augustine was into multiple women and heresy, but when he finally came to Christ, he said, “Late have I loved thee, Lord.” And then, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” He was a fourth century bishop of the Catholic Church.

Anonymous: You talk about morals being non-existent without guidance from what is told to us by God. I have always been so incredibly irritated by this argument.

Actually, YOU SHOULD BE IRRITATED by that argument. It isn’t true. Our morals do exist without God’s guidance.  He wrote His law on our hearts. We have the natural law.

Anonymous: There are rules in the Bible that we now ignore as they are simply far too brutal and insane for modern society. Well, how do we know which rules to ignore if we are incapable of morality outside of the Bible? Where do THOSE moral judgments come from? We are told to stone a woman to death if she wears two types of fabric at the same time. Then why aren't we stoning women to death?

Some Muslims do still stone people to death. Christians do not. We don’t even think we should. We would regard such actions as a terrible crime.  The Old Testament is nonsense outside the prism of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

However, which rules do we follow if any?

The Ten Commandments are identical to the natural law written in our hearts, so they are kind of wired into our being. However, the Ten Commandments are ten negatives. The same law is contained in the Eight Beatitudes. The Beatitudes are written in the positive. The Beatitudes summarize and contain the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Here they are:

•   Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

•   Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.

•   Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.

•   Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.

•   Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

•   Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.

•   Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

•   Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Do they sound too hard? If someone becomes Christian, do they have to obey these laws instantly? NO. It is a lifetime struggle. We may struggle with them until we die. But we will be happier as we work on them. If you master one, the rest are yours.

Anonymous: Then why aren't we stoning woman to death? Because we have empathy, Susan. Empathy and altruism. These two traits are not exclusive to humans. No, we see them in all types of animals. We are animals, Susan. Good, evil, and the purpose of life are a philosophy created by us. It does not exist in the universe outside of our own minds. It was born with us and it will die with us. And the universe will keep on spinning and not even know we were there.

I agree that we are animals with empathy, but we have the empathy from our Maker, Who is Love. We are made in the Image of God, and that’s why we see so much beauty in nature, science and other human beings, and in animals, who are not made that way because they cannot reason, cannot make a moral decision, and usually can’t speak intelligently although some dogs are pretty nifty. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.” (Matt.24:35) To last for eternity, cast your anchor onto God. He will not pass away.

Anonymous: Maybe evolution is the creation of God. Why not? Would you ever accept that theory - that God created the wonder that is evolution? I love that idea. It's harmonious.

I don’t really have a problem with the idea of evolution taking place in big steps, but always as part of God’s plan. God is a mathematician. He creates that way, logically. Actually when you admire science and nature you are admiring His work. I think you’d like Him, if you tried to know Him.

Anonymous: I do not like Mother Teresa in the slightest. She was an incredibly cruel woman. The many accounts I have read about her infuriate me. She was a horrible, greedy, hypocritical, and deluded woman who was knowingly responsible for the suffering of countless people.

Regarding Mother Teresa of Calcutta: We can’t judge other people. We can’t see what is inside their hearts. We can’t see what’s inside their heads. What is inside is a mystery unless they write something.  Then we can catch a glimpse. A great book for knowing Mother Teresa is “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta.”  It’s available at Amazon.com. Reading it would give you an opportunity to judge her words yourself, instead of relying on what someone else has said about her, which may or may not be true.

Anonymous: Also, I find that whenever presented with a question about God's actions, Christians rely heavily on the "god works in mysterious ways" reasoning. I've always found that to be a cop-out, and an easy way out of explaining anything. Whenever a Christian is cornered, they use this argument and the discussion ends. Easy.

I never have used that argument. Sounds like something someone’s mother said. Mothers don’t like to answer questions, when the kids ask them endlessly.

The Dialogue Continues at Are We Meat Puppets? 

The Life of St. Photina

My Apostolate to the Immodestly Dressed Woman

by Susan Fox

Well, sisters, this was the way it was. 

Cone-shaped lamps mounted on a fake brass pole spread their light over our cozy 1960s living room in Southern California. My grandmother was visiting and telling us about her trip to the beach.

She was wearing her usual shapeless grey dress, and only women were present (my mother and I), so she felt emboldened to tell us the shocking tale. Women were going to the beach in something called a bikini. “Grandma,” I said innocently, “What is a bikini?” Sort of like, “Grandmother, what big teeth you got.”

But this was no wolf in Grandma’s clothing; this was the real enchilada, my Grandmother. So she cut a line on her shapeless grey dress to show me exactly what was and what wasn’t covered by that little piece of cloth called the bikini.

My mother and I were truly shocked. (Although I am laughing at this moment.) And we had no idea someday I would have a son, and he would have to quit going to the pool – by his own choice -- because of that inviting piece of cloth!

But really, nowadays the poolside attire has moved into the Catholic Church, and my son and husband must hang their heads and cover their faces when they attend Mass or stand in line for Confession, which we do weekly. 

Shocking, but true. And if I had never married I would have no idea that anything was wrong.  Maybe other women look at women’s clothing, but I mostly think  ... about other things. But that was before I was married. My husband taught me that men are sight-oriented and if they are chaste, they don’t want to see women in the current “bikini” styles.

I love to eat out, and unfortunately, some of the restaurants with good food also have female waitresses with extremely short skirts. My husband would not go back there.  Life with a chaste man is difficult when you are a glutton.

Now, decades after my husband got me to stop wearing Southern California attire to daily Mass (long modest shorts and sandals) -- now I notice it all.  I was standing in line for Confession a couple of years ago and I noticed a man with two gorgeous women standing in line behind me. I thought they were his daughters. Little was covered in their attire.

My conscience bothered me. Should I say something or shouldn’t I? Luckily, I was in line ahead of them, so I asked the priest. He gave me an answer I didn’t understand at the time. He said, “You must follow your conscience.”  That’s the same thing Pope Francis said recently, and I noticed that many traditional Catholics were upset, thinking that he was promoting relativism.

Luckily, my husband is studying theology so I have since found out that St. Thomas Aquinas was the one who said that originally.  He said we must always choose the good, and he assumed we had a well-formed conscience. Well, the priest just heard my confession so I guess he concluded I had one of those.  But at that point I didn’t understand it, so I said to Jesus, “Well, he didn’t tell me I couldn’t do it.”

Back I went, looking the father in the eye because I knew he knew they shouldn’t be dressed like that. And I said, “Sir, you have the most gorgeous daughters I have ever seen.” Wow, was that ever the Holy Spirit! Only one was a daughter, the other was his wife!

Anything, I said after that was going to be okay with the Missus, and she apparently ruled the roost. So I told them they needed to cover up because there were chaste men here and it was hard for them to keep their focus on Jesus with them dressed as they were. They nodded smiling.

But really, it’s more than that, sisters. Sometimes it’s seems like today’s fashions use the same lures as the clothing of the hookers on the street corner. We have to remember that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. “Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.” (1 Cor 6:18-20)

I’m not recommending this apostolate to everyone, especially if you look down on our immodestly dressed sisters. I can’t look down on anyone because I had no father, and no one told my mother how I should dress when I was in high school. That was the early ‘70s.  I wore a mini-skirt with my hair down to the end of my skirt. But one Sunday, I distinctly remember wearing it in the Communion line on the way up to receive Jesus, and I felt ashamed. I never wore it again.

So for the guys, let me explain. Women do not understand what they are doing ... when they dress like that. They can’t. I’ve seen them as Eucharistic Ministers, handing out Communion, wearing the new princess style -- a see through skirt – long in the back and very short in the front. There is a mini-skirt sized slip underneath, so don’t worry. It covers the essentials.

Male and female, God made us to complement one another.  My husband and I recently discussed marital relations, and I asked him what it meant to him, and he answered “bone-deep consolation.” Well, it isn’t that for the woman, it’s attention. Men are wired to look, and women are wired to be looked at.

So women dress, wear perfume, put dangly earrings on, pink hair clips, and even late in life religiously get their hair done for male attention. They bat their eyes for the same reason, and move their hips. Notice me! That is being female.

Unfortunately, in the fatherless society that we live in, that makes life hard for the chaste male. And women don’t even realize the great harm they are causing others, and themselves if their dress makes an unchaste male draw the wrong conclusion about their character.

  

I think I might just print a copy out of this article and keep it in my purse to hand it out next time I run into a sister who has not been informed of the dangers of immodest dress. It will save me and my dear sister a lot of personal embarrassment.

In fact, I think I’ll start by giving my pastor a copy.


FANTASTIC VIDEO: Actress Christian Jessica Rey gives a beautiful perspective on modesty.
THE TRUTH ABOUT BIKINIS

WATCHMEN Protect Cathedral against Pro-Abortion Feminists

by Susan Fox

"How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news!" (Isaiah 53:7)

The world is fast sinking into barbarism, and yet we look around and see that many in the Catholic Church are asleep. Wake up Church! The barbarians are already at the gate.  Where is St. Augustine, the great bishop of Hippo, prepared to defend the City of God?

On Nov. 24, 2013, a mob of half-naked pro-abortion feminists molested and abused a group of Rosary-praying men trying to protect the Catholic Cathedral in San Juan de Cuyo, Argentina, according to LifeSiteNews.com

The men linked arms to prevent the women from entering the church. The same groups have recently defaced other cathedrals in Argentina. The women spray-painted the men’s crotches and faces with swastikas and performed obscene sexual acts in front of them while chanting “get your rosaries off our ovaries.”

The overweight and badly-dressed “women” also sang, “To the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, who wants to get between our sheets, we say that we want to be whores, travesties and lesbians. Legal abortion in every hospital.”

Argentine lesbian protestors on Nov. 24, 2013

I say “women” because they acted more like beasts:

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.  They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.” (Rom 1:21-26)

But yet I am deeply moved by the witness of the watchmen who surrounded and protected the cathedral church.

Who would guess that the white-robbed army of martyrs would arrive in Eternal Life with spray paint on their faces, shirts and pants? White martyrs they were, for none of them died, but they did accept tremendous suffering for the sake of the City of God on earth, the Catholic Church.  Besides defending the cathedral church, they also stood up for the virtue of chastity – even the chastity of the women attacking them.

The white-robbed army of martyrs. 

Some men were visibly weeping and others helped support one another by covering the eyes of the men on the front line. Many men were looking up so they couldn’t see the obscene acts occurring in front of them.  None of them retaliated against the abuses heaped on them.  You can tell these men showed heroic restraint because my husband’s response was “I’d kick their teeth!”

Archbishop Alfonso Delgado of San Juan de Cuyo barricaded himself inside the church with 700 of his congregation, who prayed during the entire ordeal.  When the feminists couldn’t get inside the cathedral, they burned Pope Francis in effigy.  “If the pope were a woman, abortion would be legal,” they shouted.

How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace and brings good news of happiness, who announces salvation, And says to Zion, "Your God reigns!" Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices. They shout joyfully together; for they will see with their own eyes when the LORD restores Zion.(Isaiah 52:7-8)

And these watchmen raised their voices praising the Blessed Virgin Mary with the words of the Holy Rosary. How St. Ambrose must have been smiling.

 

St. Ambrose 

By their actions, the archbishop and his congregation demonstrated the same heroic behavior of Bishop St. Ambrose and St. Monica in defending the Portian Basilica  in Milan about 383 A.D. against a takeover by Arians. The ruler at the time -- Empress Mother Justina -- preferred Arianism to Catholicism because it made the Father more important than the Son, and since the bishop was identified with the Son, the Emperor could rule over the bishop by representing the Father. In short, it was an Arian power grab, but a power grab that failed because the people wouldn’t budge. Stubborn St. Monica, who would not give up on her wayward son, St. Augustine, was among the parishioners who occupied the Church during that similar confrontation. According to the latest film on Augustine's life, Monica's still-as-yet unconverted son Augustine was with the Arians trying to get into the basilica. In Argentina and Milan at two separate points in time, Catholic watchmen and the People of God prevented the takeover of the church.

We are witnessing the literal fulfillment of this passage in Scripture: “But nothing unclean shall enter it (the City of God), nor any one who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” (Rev. 21:27)

Praising the men who defended the church, Fr. Romulo Campora said, “San Juan loves its God, loves its faith, loves its family.” He lamented the damage done to the cathedral and concluded that “if they don’t respect life, we can’t expect them to respect the buildings.” 

The event was organized by the National Women’s Encounter sponsored by the Argentinian Department of Culture. The site ArgentinosAlerta.org said, “These encounters of women represent today’s civilization that seeks to impose its own rules. On one side they try to impose a political agenda that international organizations dictate: population control, abortion, contraception, homoseuxalism. On the other side they become barbaric in the most literal sense.” In our humble opinion, the international organizations (read United Nations) are greatly influenced by the U.S. State Department.

Ironically, The Argentina Independent wrote about last year’s “Encounter” in Posadas with the headline “Pretty is the Woman who Fights.”  They got that wrong. Handsome is the wearied spray-painted male who wouldn't budge. How could our society have devolved to such a conflict between good and evil, between male and female?

But we have to hope and pray that the heroic witness in San Juan will bear good fruit in the hearts of the females who participated in this horror.  The Catholic Church is full of martyrs,  whose deaths gave birth to new saints. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." (Tertullian)

St. Paul watched and agreed with the stoning of St. Stephen, who prayed for him as he died. Shortly afterwards, Paul met Christ on the road to Damascus to arrest Christians living there. “Saul, Saul why do your persecute me?” Jesus asked, and Saul’s name was changed to Paul. He turned his life around and became an evangelist and servant of Christ, writing a number of epistles in the Bible.

St. Monica and St. Ambrose together worked to bring about the conversion of St. Augustine, who struggled for years with sexual addictions and heresy. In the movie, "The Restless Heart,"  he appears outside the  cathedral aiding the Arians while Monica his mother was barricaded within. Some of the watchmen were killed. 

But most stunning is the example of 11-year-old St. Maria Goretti, who refused the sexual advances of Alessandro Serenelli and was killed by him in 1902. Her deathbed forgiveness led to the later conversion of her murderer who had been addicted to porn. Alessandro may himself someday be canonized a saint.

Certainly St. Augustine would not look down on the ladies outside the Cathedral of San Juan de Cuyo. When the Vandals (real barbarians) came to destroy the city of Hippo in North Africa, St. Augustine met them privately and very kindly. He died before they burned the city to the ground. He hoped for their conversion.

“To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.” (St. Augustine of Hippo)

Graphic video of the event here:

Mob of pro-abort feminists attack Rosary praying Men