Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
For better or worse, when the mind is in conflict with the heart, our thoughts are often drowned in a deluge of emotion. While each of us do have our moments of determined lucidity, when facing critical choices our passion typically trumps our reason.
This is why so many of us have been willing to risk their all to fight for things that transcend mere reason, such as friendship, faith, and freedom. It is also why demagoguery, rhetorical and emotional manipulation for political gain, are so dangerous.
For example, our homeworld is ninety-three million miles (eight Light Minutes) away from the Sun that it orbits. Alone, this constitutes merely one small bit of our scientific understanding. By itself, it has no power to inspire us.
However, this fact implies certain things about the nature of human life and the physical universe we inhabit. Heliocentricism places the Sun at the center of our local planetary system, not the Earth.
Copernicus and Galileo’s understanding of a Sun-centered model of the heavens is clear: ours is not the only world. Earth is not the center of Creation, with Hell literally beneath our feet and God’s Heavenly illumination peeking through a crystalline sphere as starlight.
While this was not intended by these astronomers, their theory raised questions about Christ’s incarnation. Christians believe that Christ came to reveal God to us as well as to die for our sins so that human beings might have a chance at eternal life.
Jesus’ revelation never rested on the premise that the Earth was flat, orbited by the Sun. However, Jesus lived in First Century Roman Judea, among people who took both assumptions as self-evidently true. Jesus had to speak with his contemporaries in a manner that they could understand. The Gospels were never intended to be about revealing contemporary knowledge to ancient people.
Could other worlds produce different people? We human beings might not be God’s only sentient creations. Others on alien worlds might be made differently, but still in God’s image. Would alien prophets receive revelations particular to their own planet, shape, society, and nature? Would the Son of God have to become incarnate for these others as a part of their history? Would Jesus have to die for their sins, and be resurrected to demonstrate God’s
redemption to them? These musings touch on the uniqueness of Jesus as the proverbial Hinge of History.
In conjunction with Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation and Ferdinand Magellan’s Circumnavigation, notions that called into question the uniqueness of our existence undermined our society’s unified Medieval Christendom. One hundred fifty years of war resulted. Afterward, the West was no longer one society. Humpty Dumpty had shattered. Modernity was born.
None of this happened because the Sun is a certain distance from the Earth, or any other single fact. Western Civilization ripped out its own guts because solid traditions about the fundamental meaning of our lives were being called into question. Millions felt that their ways of life were under assault.
To us, what is worth living for, dying for, and even killing for always results from a rationality that has been infused with passion. Faith is not merely dogma. It is a willingness to risk one’s personal everything on an unprovable proposition. Demagogues have always exploited our susceptibility to deep emotion by trying to beguile us into a human stampede that will benefit them.
The 2024 Democrat Convention employed such demagoguery. Democrats have implemented revolutionary doctrines of equality-of-result over equality-of-opportunity, deterministic racial identity over meritocracy, collective economics over the free market, homosexual normalization over traditionalism with tolerance, censorship over free expression, feminism over families, anarchy over law enforcement, compulsory ideology over personal conscience, government over God, open borders over national sovereignty, environmental regulation over property rights, and transgender activism at the expense of the safety of women and children.
Regardless of their recent pretenses of moderation, today’s Democrat Party detests traditional mainstream America. They intend to replace it, and us, with their utopia: a dystopian human hive which has turned people into drones. To this end, Democrat demagogues employ irrationalism as energetically as any Fascist, National Socialist, or Communist. On the one hand, they deconstruct all traditional truth. On the other, they insist that any deviation from their doctrines deserves destruction. Believers must always feel and never think.
Thoughtful people who cultivate reason and passion must be antibodies against this Woke Mind Virus. We must restore balance between a thoughtful and curious objective rationality with our passions. Only then will we continue to be capable of independent judgment. Only by doing so will we be worthy of freedom.
