The problem with his world is that too many people are getting an education…

Educated Catholics have sown dissent and confusion in the Church, claims bishop

The Rt Rev Patrick O’Donoghue, the Bishop of Lancaster, has claimed that graduates are spreading skepticism and sowing dissent. Instead of following the Church’s teaching they are "hedonistic", "selfish" and "egocentric", he said.

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Bishop O’Donoghue, who has recently published a report on how to renew Catholicism in Britain, argued that mass education has led to "sickness in the Church and wider society".

"What we have witnessed in Western societies since the end of the Second World War is the development of mass education on a scale unprecedented in human history – resulting in economic growth, scientific and technological advances, and the cultural and social enrichment of billions of people’s lives," he said.

"However, every human endeavor has a dark side, due to original sin and concupiscence. In the case of education, we can see its distortion through the widespread dissemination of radical skepticism, positivism, utilitarianism and relativism.

"Taken together, these intellectual trends have resulted in a fragmented society that marginalizes God, with many people mistakenly thinking they can live happy and productive lives without him.

"It shouldn’t surprise us that the shadows cast by the distortion of education, and corresponding societal changes, have also touched members of the Church. As Pope Benedict XVI puts it, even in the Church we find hedonism, selfishness and egocentric behavior."

Emphasis mine…so you know he’s not just talking about Catholics there.   The problem is simple.  How do you convince people that you’re better qualified to run their lives then they are, when they have brains enough to see right through you?  You can’t.

Religion doesn’t necessarily have to be an enemy of the human soul.  There is spirituality that seeks to nurture the best within us…that "better angel", and councils us to embrace our human nature, understand both its limitations and its potential, its darkness and its light, and treat them both with care and humility.  There is spirituality that encourages us and reach for the higher ground within, while acknowledging the Pit we are all vulnerable to.  But that is different from spirituality that teaches us to hate ourselves, so that others can rule over us.  Religion isn’t the only thing that can attack our souls in that way, but religions like that are out there and we have to watch out for them because they are poison.  But not all religion is poison. 

Ayn Rand said that all we need, all we should ever look to, is reason.  But we are rational beings, In Addition To everything else we are.  The modern brain is all that which makes us unique from the other animals of planet Earth, and also all that which we share with them, and have for hundreds of millions of years.  We are indivisible beings of intellect and beast, mind and body, present and past.  It is how we were created.  By one legend, risen up from the dust of the earth.  But the dust of the earth was already very old, unimaginably old, when we took our first breath and opened our eyes.  We are that vast unknowable past and the present both.  We are matter and spirit combined.  You can’t divide us down the middle without killing the human within.  We are human, precisely because we are all of these things.  We need spirituality that teaches us to treat ourselves, treat our human nature, with care, understanding, and a little humility.

But some religion, arrogantly, greedily, tries instead to pit one part of ourselves against the others, and in the process it rips our humanity apart.  Take away our minds and we become useful puppets, perhaps.  But take our minds from us and the spirit within withers and dies.  The mind needs the spirit, the spirit needs the mind.  Without one or the other we become ghosts.  Empty, tortured, soulless ghosts.  Just right for tyrants to leach their power dreams from.  Mr. O’Donoghue’s complaint isn’t that people are more selfish, it’s that they are less gullible.  When you earn your living teaching people to hate being human, so they will give you money in exchange for being forgiven for being human, you need a lot of gullible people.