"Our Mother"

Off my "lists" for a couple of days, and back to religion/theology/philosophy.

I ,at times, tussle with a young catholic convert who loves the term "holy mother church." Now I have been around many catholics all my life and never heard that term except from yesterday's convert. Older catholics, cradle catholics, never use this term.

But there is some wisdom in the "holy mother church" moniker. The Catholic Church is huge--over a billion members. Included are some of the greatest minds in the world, the simplest minds, and, yes, the great middle group. And there's the rub.

This is the year of Darwin and his discovery of the fundamentals of evolution. The 'great' mind group has no trouble with this doctrine in relation to Catholicism. The 'simplest' really don't think about such things; but Oh, that middle group. They're read a few pages on evolution, listen to a few crank scientist ( apparently only two) and decide to make their own judgment. So the Church, with children of all levels of knowledge, and especially under B16, wants to satisfy every member to a degree. So what does the Church do. Well it affirms evolution as a scientific fact, but then to throw a few crumbs to the "I have an opinion, and it's just as good as yours based on my 2 pages of information" group the Church's representative says: "Each human person is the object of a singular creative act by God, who also inserts himself naturally in the homo sapiens species, and appears at the end as the culmination of an immense evolutionary process about which some secrets are now being discovered." WHAT???

In this century A.J. Ayer wrote "Language, Truth, and Logic". Basically it dealt with the three 'levels' of statements. First were statements of fact, that is things we can verify. E,G, Dallas is in the state of Texas. Second were 'emotive' statements, e,g, "I hate country music." Such emotive statements tell us something about what the speaker feels but not anything about country music. And third---look at the quote above beginning with "Each human person....."statements that are meaningless. 'Meaningless' does not mean false, nor true, but since such statements are not verifiable, they give us no real knowledge. They are just words; there is no way to test the statement's truth or falsity. Yes, we argue about them, but our arguments really go nowhere. The statement is not subject to any test that would show its truth or falsity.

So, maybe "mother church" is wise. Affirm what science shows and knows, but throw a meatless bone to the pompous, self important, group to keep them in the fold. The Church is our 'Mother' and sometimes we need to say yes to our 'youngest,' in knowledge and reason, ' children'.