In this third and final part of part of his commentary on last week's Intelligence Squared Debate (for Parts 1 & 2 see here and here, the Vatican's very own Papal Nuncio to Hitchens Watch, TOMAHAWK, looks at the Q&A session, where just when he thought things couldn't get any lower, Christopher proved him wrong by announcing to rapturous applause that he has made a lifelong habit of following the promptings of his male member. — Greywolf.
OUR PASSIONS FORGE OUR FETTERS A Hasty Commentary Re. a Debate on the Catholic Church (Part 3) by TOMAHAWK
As if all this wasn't dispiriting enough, the Q&A that followed managed to drag the tone down further. A large portion of the questions related to sexual questions with one young chap simply saying he didn't want anyone interfering with his sex life. A question about the 10 Commandments brought forth some interesting replies. Hitchens appears incapable of recognizing that the Catholic Church holds that the Commandments embody truths of the natural moral law accessible to all. For Hitchens and Fry and the largely benighted (but sadly not humble) audience, to assert the former is to make the commandments irrelevant. But the commandments are understood as a gift given to strengthen confidence in the ability of man to live by rational rules and which assist him in the living out of those rules. Sadly, nobody took this up—again the proposers failed.
The 10 Commandments question allowed Hitchens to achieve his low point of the evening. He told the audience that he agreed with some of them, which was nice, but that he didn't think much of the one on adultery. This came along with his announcement that he was "obsessed by sex" and took and continues to take pleasure in following the promptings of his male member from a young age. The shallowness, egotism, etc., were there for all to see. I was tempted to ask whether after dumping his first wife (pregnant at the time) for a younger model following the promptings of that member he likes to talk about, she might have thought about these things rather differently. Perhaps she didn't find this kind of thing funny. Hitchens also objected to the very idea that one might have bad/evil thoughts (e.g. lusting after someone not one's wife). It was telling that he regarded any idea of moral virtue in relation to the inner life as "thought-control" by a "dictator". To the troubled conscience such thoughts may be consoling, but is he seriously suggesting that it is morally irrelevant whether or not one's thoughts towards others and oneself are hateful, prideful, lustful etc.? Apparently so. Hitchens the materialist seeks to abolish the inner life—yet still wants to talk of what counts as "good" having done so. It became evident that for Hitchens it's HE who sets the rules of morality, no external authority. He is an adulterer - ergo adultery isn't really a serious sin. This is Enlightenment thinking apparently.
Fry did make a point that if the Church is seen as not much better than what is outside the Church (oh - he obfuscated the meaning, as understood by the Church, of Extra Ecclessia Nulla Salus—but he got to say something in Latin and sound learned I suppose) then what is the point of it? The weakness of the proposers lay in the fact that they did not answer this as a Catholic should.
So, a dispiriting evening all round. Fry came across as a tortured soul who, as I said, didn't seem at ease doing what he is doing (after the debate he "twittered" that he felt "slightly guilty"). Hitchens does his friend no good at all. The latter finished by proposing contraception as a solution to many of the world's problems. This base materialist, at the end of the day, doesn't want more 'mammals' and he calls it “compassion”. So, sterility, sexual wrongdoing and copious amounts of dishonesty, irreason, etc., are, apparently, forces for good in the world. When, towards the end, a smiling African nun stood up and said without guile that what we really needed to do was to love and follow the example of Jesus Christ (the real one - not the Fry-approved version) the silence was deafening.
Why, it might be asked, did so many people, in England, turn up to a debate on the Catholic Church—a Church that has an absolutely minuscule influence in the public life of this country? Who knows? By the end of the Q and A session one almost felt one was back in Reformation times, except this time with an outright atheist audience with moral views that would have disgusted many of the so-called “reformers”. Those who live disordered lives similar to Mr Hitchens’s doubtless find solace in him beating up on the Church. While Fry and Hitchens mouth platitudes about the poor they want the Vatican to sell palaces to help. Yet it seems they, like the Bolsheviks and Jacobins, are far more interested in destroying the Church for Her teachings on the moral law than they are on helping the poor (rather like the old-style Reformers who destroyed the best help the poor had). Aldous Huxley once noted that, "As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." And that truth goes hand in hand with another—lust darkens the mind. And last night saw many darkened minds indulged by the passionate irreason of two carnal rejecters of Logos.
Finally, a foreign friend of mine noted that the debate was a typically English one–taking place in that country that had “emancipated” itself from the Catholic Church and helped give birth to untrammelled ‘Capitalism’. Fry and Hitchens are the followers of the thugs who looted the monasteries in the 16th century and enclosed the common lands, driving the peasants off the land and creating a rootless proletariat. The sexual libertines, like the looters, share a hatred of the Church as the witness for the moral law. And they’re passionate about it.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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