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Wednesday 8 April 2015

Natural Law-Destroyed or Ignored?

Some Catholic moralists and ethicists have come up with an idea, in direct opposition to the teaching of the Church, that people in the world have moved so far away from The Golden Rule, written on their hearts, called natural law, that no one can expect people to react morally anymore.

Wrong!

Some thoughts to contradict this idea.
  1. To be human is to be rational. To be sub-human is to be irrational and live entirely on the level of the sensual, the passions. All humans by definition can reason.
  2. The soul is informed by the intellect even though one lacks proper catechesis through natural virtues, not only supernatural virtues. All people have access to natural goodness.
  3. God Himself judged harshly those who went against natural law in the Old Testament, before the great revelation of Christ, the Incarnate One. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed not merely because those inhabitants did not listen to Revelation , that is, the Ten Commandments but because as men and women, they had natural law as part of their very beings. God did not excuse them for "ignorance" of the Jewish Law.
  4. Cultures of all kinds have had the same rules for basic morality. Even the pagans understood that homosexual relations were not perfect or the basis of their societies. Some things were tolerated despite the fact that men and women knew these things were immoral.
  5. Some cultures get power from Satan, who deceives people by giving them power through his evil, such as the Aztecs. But, even those people had access to the law deep within, but refused to listen to conscience because evil gave them power. Nations, cultures, like individuals, make bad choices.
  6. To deny that natural law exists is to deny that men and women are made in the image and likeness of God. The fact that we keep the image (free will, eternal life), but lose the likeness (grace) does not deny the presence of natural law.
  7. To deny natural law is to deny God as a Good Creature, making humans to be happy and peaceful in a created order. God created order in the universe and natural law is part of that order, which is good. To deny natural law is to deny that God made humans good from the very beginning. 
  8. Those who state that natural law is hidden because of cultural norms which are now pagan forget that it is humans who created this pagan atmosphere, not God. The entire turning away of natural law is possible for a culture, an entire civilization, but this turning away is by choice, otherwise one is denying free will and the essence of what it is to be human. 
  9. Which brings me to a great heresy in these days, the denial of free will. If we have free will, it is a normative consequence to believe that God gave us means to figure out what is good and what is evil. 
  10. Natural law is reiterated in the Ten Commandments. Again, people choose to go against these, not out of ignorance, but out of sheer rebellion.
to be continued....