Foreword

Soon, what has hitherto only been considered in fiction will seem to be presented to you in reality. This presentation, however, will not be to your benefit — though benevolence will be the guise. It will also be a lie, as those proffering it will have no regard for Truth. For what shall be presented to you will be precisely the false and seductive marvels wrought by the devil’s minions; false marvels prophesied for the times of distress upon the threshold of which we now stand. False marvels that will win over to the dark side those who do not take both Faith and Reason completely seriously.

I would like to warn you in advance about this coming diabolical invitation you will soon receive in hopes that, being forewarned, you will be more likely to realize it for what it is and reject it.

This article is dense and very long; it is more of an eBook that I am publishing here and now for free than it is a blog post. I present it, therefore, as more of a reference work that you may wish to consult portions of when the need arises, as opposed to an exhortation or announcement that is urgent to immediately read in its entirety. I have also added some particularly important points in red, in hopes of grabbing the attention of those who prefer to skim. I will add a dedicated link to this post on the sidebar, so that you can easily find it just by going to dsdoconnor.com. I might also update this post in the future. You may click here to download this post as a PDF. And I encourage you to do so, in case I get censored.)

Towards the bottom of this post, after the “33 Truths” that are this post’s focus, you will find several Appendices, each with a large heading to facilitate skipping directly to them:

1. Science vs. Pseudoscience vs. Preternatural vs Supernatural,
2. Seers mustn’t be treated as oracles (In this appendix, I address the question that has deluged my inbox for the last couple months, regarding my stepping down from a certain apostolate)
3. On Science Itself
4. On Conspiracy

Then, you will find an “Addendum on Disappointment,” to which you should turn if at any point reading this article you find yourself… disappointed.

Finally, I present a list of all my other writings, most of which I have not published until now, which are linked to at various places within this post:

• There Are No Aliens: On the non-existence of Extraterrestrials (published March 2021)
• The Logical Bankruptcy of Neil deGrasse Tyson
• On the Nature of Time
• On the Impossibility of Mind Reading and Mind Control, (and, along with this, a refutation of Dr. Charles Morgan’s viral video)
• On Being Overly Concerned with Food, Medicine, etc.
• On the Impossibility of Major Man Made Earthquakes (and the impossibility of HAARP creating an earthquake)
• “A Lesson from Tura”
• One example of a popular doctor who should be approached with caution

The Diabolical “Quantum Leap”

As readers of The Crown of Sanctity’s Preface may recall, I spent my first engineering job after graduation running experiments testing the quantum emission of electrons off of a carbon nanotube surface. Those tests now come to my mind as I write this article, for what I made these little electrons do in the machine before me, under enormous voltages and a near perfect vacuum, is precisely what the Antichrist — either acting explicitly after his public appearance or even sooner through his tentacles now spread throughout the world — is going to strive to seduce your minds to do very soon. He will use the “voltage” of his electrifying influence over the world and the “vacuum” of today’s Dictatorship of Relativism, where both Faith and Reason are despised, to seek to cause a “Quantum Leap” of mankind’s thinking into his own Diabolical domain; a realm duly adorned with sparkling sheep’s clothing. Tragically, he will likely succeed in the minds of most. Do not be one of “most.” In helping you to remain among the few, I present the considerations below.

Before proceeding, I should add that if your own eschatological speculations pin the Antichrist as only arising after the Era of Peace, immediately before the end of time (and therefore not imminently), this should in no way dissuade you from heeding the admonitions I present in this article. Put bluntly: a really bad man is going to soon make his public entrance onto the world platform. He will exert enormous influence, presenting himself as a savior of sorts in the midst of great worldwide trials. The price of accepting his “solution” will be some form of apostasy. At the end of the day, whether we call this fellow “an” antichrist or “the” Antichrist is little more than semantics. We must resist him, either way.

Furthermore, these Truths I here present are perhaps even more important now than in the time the Antichrist himself makes his public entrance. For I do think that the faithful remnant will likely be protected in refuges during his actual reign, and much miraculous protection — both physical and spiritual — will be afforded to the remnant during that time. On the other hand, the days we must now endure do indeed see the snares of the Antichrist being disseminated throughout both the Church and the world (and I do not doubt that many of these recent snares are indeed from the man of sin himself), and we must resist them with the more or less “ordinary” graces at our disposal in these days of pre-Illumination of Conscience trials.

Nevertheless, apart from considerations of individual Antichrists/ the Antichrist himself, we above all know, from Scripture (cf. 1 John 4:3), that the Spirit of Antichrist pervades the world. This unholy spirit certainly operates in proportion to the degree of sin in the world; therefore, eschatological speculations and individual prophecies aside, we know that the Spirit of Antichrist is today more operative than ever before, with due regard to the fact that the world is more steeped in sin than at any point in the past.

In this post, I will be going beyond my usual admonitions. My readers already know that I am incessantly harping on the need to, in the Catholic Faith, remain on the razor-thin straight-and-narrow way of Our Lord during these days of unprecedented confusion, heresy, apostasy, and schism inundating the Church. [But, true to form, I will again repeat: 1) Read your Bible, read your Catechism, and submit to the truths contained therein, irrespective of what your local Bishop’s Conference says, and regardless of what Pope Francis himself says non-Magisterially — understand that True Magisterium cannot contradict True Magisterium, so whenever in doubt, stick with what is clearer; clarity enjoys superiority to ambiguity in Faith and Morals; mere recentness, however, has no special status over age 2) On the other hand, be not sucked in by the dangerous borderline-schismatic movements out there that categorically reject Vatican II, seek to condemn the Pope categorically, encourage joining groups in de-facto or actual schism, claim the Pope is not actually the Pope, or even label him as the False Prophet or Antichrist.]

Today, I’d like to remind you to not only remain faithful to Catholic orthodoxy, but to also keep your head logically screwed on straight. For the times we are entering will see not only unprecedented attacks on Faith, but also unprecedented attacks on Reason.

Two theological and philosophical forewarnings

It is fair enough to acknowledge that Church Teaching generally does not concern itself with dogmatic proclamations on matters not strictly pertaining to Faith and Morals. But it does not follow that certainty is reserved solely for the Ex-Cathedra proclamations within these two categories.

First of all, even a 7 year old should be able to realize that if ____ is definitely true, then anything which would implicitly contradict ____ must be false. Similarly, while the Church does not have and will not have direct dogmatic teachings on many of the primary realms of confusion bound to soon dominate headlines and conversations, this does not mean that a Catholic should pretend that he may legitimately come to any conclusion he wishes on them, or that he may entertain absurdities in his mind as “possibly true.” For example: I know of no clear Church dogma on the precise details of the depth and breadth of the physical universe. But I do know that the Church is clear that God is absolutely supreme over all that is, and that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God. How, then, should a Catholic with his head screwed on straight respond when a clown of an astrophysicist claims that there are actually infinite universes enfolded within infinite dimensions, full of all sorts of other races of intelligent life, each perhaps with its own “god” and its “own truths”? That we could someday learn “new, deeper, better” truths from the “Gods” of these other universes? The answer is simple: to laugh. There is no use even engaging in that conversation or even entertaining that thought. Although it may not directly be a matter of Church Teaching one way or the other, these absurdist theories do, at least indirectly (but no less truly), imply a contradiction to a Church Teaching.

Secondly, Catholicism must not be turned into a Romanized version of the Protestant “sola Scriptura” heresy, wherein it is claimed that all that matters is what is found clearly taught in a given set of books (even if our set, what with Sacred Tradition and Magisterium, constitutes a larger array of material); and that, so long as we’ve got these books, we’re all set and “have it all figured out.” Tragically, that is precisely what we do as Catholics when we pretend that all that matters is that we submit to Public Revelation’s Deposit of Faith. In truth, such submission is necessary, but not sufficient. I often point out that it is precisely this Catholicized version of the Protestant sola Scriptura heresy which seals off so many Catholics to the graces contained in authentic private revelation, as they flippantly reject it on the erroneous grounds, “It’s not public revelation, it’s just private revelation, so I can respond however I feel like, thank you very much!” (See The Crown of Sanctity pages 48-64) The dangers of the Catholicized sola Scriptura heresy, however, don’t end there; the dangers also include failing to take the extra-Magisterial conclusions of reason seriously enough. Indeed, the Church itself teaches a radically different story than this know-nothing approach: “In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right.” – Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1778. It does not say that such obligation is restricted to those occasions wherein its object happens to be an explicit constituent of the Deposit of Faith! Man is always obliged to use his God-given intellect and submit to the conclusions he reaches through the proper use thereof. It matters not if these conclusions do not enjoy the additional status of being directly revealed truths confirmed by the Extraordinary Magisterium of the Church. Contradicting these true but extra-Magisterial conclusions will not, of course, constitute formal heresy; but so what? There are plenty of other ways to destroy your soul and your life other than succumbing to formal heresy. And we can rest assured that, come the days when the Diabolical Quantum Leap is foisted upon us, there will be many learned theologians we thought we could trust who will calmly assure us that we can submit to its diabolical tenets, since these tenets “do not constitute contradictions of the Faith.” Yes, it will be precisely the scholars, both inside and outside of the Church, that the Antichrist will have (and, largely, has had) the easiest time deceiving. 

As Venerable Holzhauser, in the 1600s, prophesied of our times:

“During this period, many men will abuse of the freedom of conscience conceded to them. It is of such men that Jude the Apostle spoke when he said, “These men blaspheme whatever they do not understand; and they corrupt whatever they know naturally as irrational animals do”…During this unhappy period, there will be laxity in divine and human precepts… Everyone will be carried away and led to believe and to do what he fancies, according to the manner of the flesh…They will ridicule Christian simplicity; they will call it folly and nonsense, but they will have the highest regard for advanced knowledge…clouded by senseless questions and elaborate arguments. As a result, no principle at. all, however holy, authentic, ancient, and certain it may be, will remain free of censure, criticism, false interpretation, modification, and delimitation by man…These are evil times, a century full of dangers and calamities.. Heresy is everywhere, and the followers of heresy are in power almost everywhere…”

The Devil and his Minion, the Antichrist

The devil also knows that many Catholics simply will not ever go directly against a Church dogma. The devil is not stupid, and he’ll do everything he can to tempt even these staunch Catholics into his clutches; as winning over a soul like that will be, for him, a prize of far greater value than merely luring an already worldly person ever deeper into his domain. What, then, will he do? Besides his ordinary efforts tempting them into moral fault, he’ll also use the times to come and the false marvels he will work through his greatest minion, the Antichrist, to try to sneak around Church Dogma by emptying it of its actual value even without seeming to contradict its face value.

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money… lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of religion but denying the power of it. Avoid such people.”

-2 Timothy 3

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.”

-2 Timothy 4

“But I have this against you, that you toleratethe woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice immorality”

-Jesus to the Church in Thyatira. Revelation 2.

(Recall, cf. 1 Kings, that Jezebel, wife of Ahab, persecuted the true prophets, protected false prophets, and incited the faithful to idolatry. Jesus here condemns so much as tolerating such a person.)

Indeed, the Antichrist and his system will tolerate the form of religion when useful for their ends, but not its power. And we must not tolerate him or his lies, even if and when the lies precede the explicit public entrance of the man of sin himself. He will seek to replace the power of religion with myths more suited to people with itching ears; people who, in their heart of hearts, never really gave Christ absolute primacy, but preferred daydreaming about and placing their concrete expectations in some worldly promise.

The Antichrist, or his minions preceding him, will at times say:

“Ah, yes, those Dogmas you hold dear are so wonderful! But let me tell you about something more. There’s so much more you do not know! You do not know about the Andromeda peoples and their deity. You do not know about the New Souls who walk quietly among you, who are so wise and good thanks to their AI fused intelligence and their meta-morality. You do not know that there is another reality I can awaken you to — so much more real than this mere dream you have hitherto called life – if only you hand your minds over to me so that I may direct them. You do not know that all the things you think have already happened are just one string enfolded within the multiverse that can be manipulated as we like. You do not realize that all those occurrences in the world you once thought were acts of God are actually phenomena that we can create, if only you join with me! You have been told that your soul is spirit, but your mind is really right here, within the reach of science, and can integrate with technology, opening up to you entire new realms! You do not know that your rigid adherence to logic and reason and your insistence that you have these figured out is causing you to miss out on all the new enlightening things I can show you. I can show you real magic, good magic! All the fantasies you’ve daydreamed about and wonders in what you thought was just science fiction can actually be yours! I can show you how to tap into the energies and vibrations swirling about you but which you’ve not yet taken advantage of! Yes, this Jesus you revere in Christianity was a great teacher, but I wish to show you the teachings of the rest of the race from which he came; a race that Jesus was only the introduction to! Come with me!!”

-The Antichrist

With these and similar seducing words, the Antichrist will actually be doing his absolute best to, with candied poison, foist existential crisis after existential crisis upon the Faithful; crises the Faithful could have been saved from by their Faith and by reason, if only they gave full reign to the power of these Divine gifts. His aim will be to thus substantially, even if not nominally, destroy the Faith of those whom he cannot persuade into explicit heresy or apostasy. And he will do this because he knows that the groundwork has already been perfectly laid for it.

You see, the modern world’s decades long and ever deepening (and darkening) obsession with science fiction, psychological thrillers, existential horrors, and fantasy “universes” has helped create entire populations — including people therein from the high school dropouts all the way up to the scholars — who can no longer employ sound reason, or even common sense, to discern what is absurd and thereby reject it. Almost a decade of teaching and over four years of teaching college philosophy has convinced me of both the truth and the gravity of this sad scenario: whenever some philosophical truth must be conveyed in class (which requires contradicting the popular falsehoods that are opposed to the truth in question), I can often count on some students protesting that what I’ve said cannot be so, since some TV show, or movie, or Netflix series, or novel, or science fiction website (which they have confused for actual science) says otherwise. More generally, ask a student today to provide an example demonstrating just about any concept whatsoever, and many will immediately provide an example from a work of fiction, as if fiction by itself proves something about reality. Indeed, today’s Crisis of Fact runs so deep, and so many minds are so thoroughly saturated in the absurdities that have long inundated us in popular fiction (especially overwhelmingly from the Star Wars and Star Trek movies onward), that very little additional brainwashing will be needed to convince the masses to willingly sign up for a regimen, the promotion of which will make the Communist propaganda posters of the early 20th century look truthful in comparison.

The Antichrist knows this and will leverage it to his full advantage in advancing his diabolical Grand Delusion. Don’t get me wrong; plenty of individual titles within these genres are not thoroughly rotten, but are, rather, benign entertainment and some are even downright excellent works of art (e.g. The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy and Chronicles of Narnia); but either way, when certain themes in these fictions are invited into realms of our mind they do not belong in — especially those wherein we consider what is actually plausible, possible, and licit in the real world and form our understanding of the same accordingly — then they become dangerous and destructive. Combine this reality-disregarding fiction obsession with, 1) The Great Apostasy in general which has now permeated the whole Church, 2) The near universal dominion of Modernism (which is the “crown and completion” of all heresies), 3) The near total death of good Catholic philosophy in education, 4) Empirical science being regarded downright Messianistically, approached by almost all as being that which alone will save us…. And thus, you have a “perfect storm” that renders all other recipients of this superlative a mere gentle breeze in comparison.

Many will succumb. Many voices you thought you could 100% trust will succumb. Bishops, priests, authors, theologians, and perhaps even seers whom I myself have quoted approvingly will succumb.

Will you succumb?

Set your face like flint right now to never succumb — no matter who else does.

Let me get the ball rolling right now and remind you of some truths which, even if they are not directly settled Dogmas, must nevertheless not be doubted.

(I feel I must say two more things before diving in. First, I am going to offend just about everyone at some point in this list. Please bear with me. I have no motive at all in writing this other than to try my humble best to protect my readers against what I see as harmful deceptions that are already here or may be coming soon. Even if you can’t bring yourself to agree with me on one or two things I write here, please do not reject this whole post on account of that; please, instead, remain open to what I am saying. Secondly, though time prevents me from presenting lengthy arguments for each item here, you can rest assured I have examined them all — carefully, prayerfully, rigorously, and studiously — hence the degree of conviction with which I assert them is well founded. I am aware that many of the positions I express here are considered “controversial” or “not in keeping with empirical evidence.” I have already read these contradictory views, and I consider them fallacious; I have already considered the empirical evidence, and find it lacking.)

33 Truths You Must not Forget

                                                                                          I. ON TRUTH ITSELF     

There is Truth. You can know the Truth. You must always believe the Truth. Anything that contradicts the Truth is false. You must always reject what is false.

Speaking what is false with the intent of eliciting belief in the falsehood is a lie. A lie is an intrinsic evil: that is, under no circumstances, and for no motive, can it ever be licit. Decide now to die rather than to ever lie again.

Only God can know all Truth (we will continue learning not only for our whole lives, but also for all eternity!), hence our need to remain ever humble and cognizant of mystery. Nevertheless, when we know a Truth, we know a Truth, and the domain of any Truth is categorical, absolute, and universal over the content that it applies to – neither space nor time have any effect on it. Therefore, this right and just intellectual posture of humility and wonder must never be employed to pretend we do not know what we do in fact know or to pretend that what we do in fact know may some day or somewhere be rendered untrue.

There are not “multiple truths.” There is not a “truth of religion” and a “truth of science” and a “truth of mysticism” and a “truth of culture.” There is not a “truth for Christians” and a “truth for non-Christians.” There is not a “truth for the middle ages” and a “truth for the 21st century.” There is just Truth. And individual Truths can be known by Faith or by Reason (or both). So long as we are careful to ensure we are defining our terms in the same way when dialoguing (i.e., not miscommunicating), we must not ignore contradictions when they arise by pretending that the various subjects to which they belong can each be granted a relativistic autonomy. Instead, we must always reject at least one assertion of any two contradictory ones as false.

God’s Existence is a truth not only of Faith but also of reason. Do not believe that empty platitude one often hears today, which holds that His existence simply need be taken on Faith — this is nothing other than a subtle poison to try and lower the reality of God’s existence to the same level as some ridiculous and unprovable “scientific” conjecture (e.g., the “multiverse”) employed to pretend to explain what only supernatural explanations can succeed in. (On March 22nd, 2021, an MIT physicist writing for The Atlantic attempted just that). Everyone is capable — with absolute certainty and with reason alone — of knowing that, 1) God exists, 2) God is good, 3) God is all powerful, 4) God is One, 5) God is all knowing, 6) God is not material, 7) God created us (and, in accordance with #2, also cares for us and has a Will for us), and 8) When what is physically impossible nevertheless happens (e.g. a man rising from the dead the third day after being crucified), God Himself is at work, and reason compels us to trust — with a faith that is itself reasonable — what such a man says. Therefore, the entire Catholic Faith and all the teachings of the Church – even if not always directly provable with reason alone (e.g., the Trinity) – are nevertheless reasonable and are indeed indirectly provably with reason, though the indirectness in no way mitigates the certainty, which remains absolute.

II.  GOODNESS: Always possible, Always necessary   

There is Goodness. You can always do the Good. You must always do the Good.

Whatever contradicts the Good is evil. You must always hate what is evil. Evil is never necessary. You must never even formally cooperate with evil; not even by way of the proverbial “mere pinch” of incense before an idol.

The degree of culpability for a sin (and therefore guilt incurred by its commission) is indeed often mitigated by circumstances, and God alone can judge a soul. But there is no such thing as a situation wherein one “cannot not sin.” Refraining from sin is always an option, and more so it is always an absolute demand; furthermore, God always gives sufficient grace to heed this demand. Yes, unfortunately, we will all likely continue to fall. But if we blame these falls on anyone or anything but ourselves, then we cannot even be forgiven for them in Confession, as we then will have no remorse (not even imperfect), which itself is the very matter of the Sacrament of Confession and is therefore absolutely necessary for absolution’s validity. Therein lies the diabolical poison in the modernist line of argumentation one often hears which relegates the Commandments to the status of mere ideals – especially in the effort to pretend that unrepentant adulterers/fornicators/homosexuals/etc. may validly be absolved and may licitly receive Communion. By tickling their ears with this comfortable sounding drivel, today’s pastors are just pushing these souls into hell.

III. BEAUTY: Real, Objective, Essential

Beauty is objective, and it is real. There is of course room for individual preferences, but beauty itself is not “merely in the eye of the beholder.” Though reason usually fails to completely grasp beauty’s full nature, beauty is nevertheless no mere subjective projection that we humans imagine and merely pretend has reality. Beauty is that which pleases when beheld by a healthy soul. It displays order, harmony, symmetry, radiance, integrity, and proportion. It strengthens the will to choose the good. It inclines the intellect towards the truth. It is, therefore, known not only by its cortex, but also by its fruits. It is an attribute of God Himself, and woe to those who fail to recognize this. 

If we find ourselves attracted to what is objectively contrary to beauty (for example, anything lustful, anything that glorifies sin or error, certain music — e.g., most modern music; certain types of modern “art” — e.g., the Vatican’s 2020 Nativity Scene!), then we have a disorder that we must — and can! — remedy through exercising more care, caution, and discernment in what we choose to expose ourselves to. “I will set before my eyes no vile thing.” (Psalm 101:3) The Antichrist will have a superficial (and even electrifying) beauty about him, but those who have formed their souls in accordance with real beauty will find — deep within their hearts if nowhere else — a deep disgust of him and his minions and his antics.

Before moving on, it must be said that interior beauty, of course, infinitely surpasses exterior beauty (a saint, no matter how physically disfigured, is far more beautiful than a supermodel), and in this fallen world beauty often fails to display itself, even when there is no moral fault whatsoever. It will not be so in Heaven, and we mustn’t work against Heaven by praising as itself being beautiful that which simply is not beautiful. For example, in Heaven, even one who while on earth suffered the most severe facial disfigurement will be far more beautiful than any beautiful face now adorning a magazine cover. Do not subtly blaspheme God by asserting that those defects in beauty which His permissive Will now allows are actually directly wanted by His ordained Will. Crosses are to be borne with resignation, peace, and joy – not pretended away with some psychological trick we try to play on ourselves.

IV. INFALLIBILITY, Faith and Doubt     

The Church’s moral teachings are just as infallible, unchangeable, and universally binding as are the Church’s teachings on elements of Faith. One can become guilty of transgressions of the moral law by deed, word, or thought — and by commission or omission.

The Faith is a one-package deal. To reject one truth of the Faith (moral or theological) is to reject the Faith, plain and simple.

Doubt is the opposite of the Supernatural Virtue of Faith, just as hate is the opposite of love and despair is the opposite of hope. It is never, ever, ever, a good thing. Do not believe anyone who advocates for having doubt as if it were some sort of a hallmark of genuine Faith. It is no more a hallmark of genuine Faith than adultery is a hallmark of genuine marriage. Praising doubt as good is a lie from the pit of hell. Faith, as a supernatural virtue, is by definition absolute, invincible (when authentic), and admitting no dialogue with its opposite. We must all have it, and we must all have it in its fullness. To willfully entertain its opposite is a sin.

Temptation to doubt is one thing: temptations are not acts of the will, thus we do not answer for them; we answer only for how we choose to respond to them. God indeed often allows various temptations for very good reasons: e.g., so that, in fighting against them, we can become even stronger in the virtue opposed to them. Temptation to doubt can often lead us to better investigate just why we know the Faith is true, and thus strengthen our Faith. But, again, doubt in and of itself is evil and must never be willfully entertained. 

(Relatedly: Being “angry with God” is never okay, either. It is never good, it is never virtuous, it is never acceptable.)

V.  REALITY IN A NUTSHELL, and Death     

You really exist, and so does the world that you perceive around you. This is real. You are not dreaming. You are not in a simulation. You are not merely perceiving/thinking what some secret government project is sending to your mind with “electromagnetic waves.” You are not dead. You are a person with an immortal, indestructible, immaterial spiritual soul — with its three powers of Intellect, Memory, and Will. Your soul will, in the twinkling of an eye, and based only upon your free choices — not at all on any external factors outside of your control — find itself eternally in either Heaven (perhaps with a stop in Purgatory) or hell; there is no third possibility, and no person/place/thing can force you into either. There are also no second chances. No do-overs. No reincarnations. In choosing wisely your eternal abode, it is truly now or never. No one in hell will ever leave hell, no one in Heaven will ever leave Heaven, and everyone in Purgatory will eventually wind up in Heaven. This life, and this life alone, is the theater of eternal destinies.

Whenever anyone dies, we must always assume that soul is in Purgatory, and proceed to pray for him. Outside of some sort of clear Divine revelation settling the matter (or a Beatification), never assume the soul is in Heaven and thus not in need of prayer, or that a soul is in hell and thus cannot benefit from prayer. It matters not how holy someone seemed — we cannot see the heart, and there may well have been plenty of hidden imperfections in need of purification in Purgatory. Similarly, it matters not how lost someone seemed — God can effect the salvation of absolutely any soul at the moment of death, without any observable evidence of this happening.

However, know that many, many souls are in hell — and will be there forever. Do not believe the lie that we can reasonably hope that all are saved; it is not reasonable to hope for the impossible, and it is only a perversion of hope which anticipates the possibility of the opposite of what God has said is the case. To acknowledge “hell is not empty” while at the same time insisting “we can reasonably hope hell is empty” is schizophrenia — last time I checked, it was a mental disorder, not a virtue. Many souls, likewise, are treading the path to prediction, and nothing is more pressing than praying, sacrificing, and working to divert them from this path.

Do not waste time praying for past events; what has already happened cannot ever change. Although it is possible for God to suspend the passage of time for a given soul at the moment of death (whether or not God ever does this, I have no idea) in order to await further prayers/sacrifices offered for that soul’s salvation, it is not possible for prayers said now to change an objective event of the past. If a soul has already experienced its Particular Judgment, then its eternal destiny is absolutely unchangeable.

Should you at least pray for the salvation of a soul who has already experienced his Particular Judgment on account of the fact that God sees the future and could consider your prayers in determining this soul’s eternal fate? No. Because, again, what has happened, has happened, and nothing done or not done now can alter that. Instead, simply trust that God held nothing back in that soul’s final moment of life, in securing that soul’s salvation, and assume that this soul is in Purgatory, and proceed to pray for him for that reason.  (Or, if you really feel you must pray for his salvation, then do so only on account of the possibility that God suspended the passage of time for that soul the moment it departed the body in order to await further prayers and sacrifices offered for that soul, before commencing the soul’s particular judgment.)

VI.  THE SOUL, THE SENSES, and Certainty        

Although we are fallible and fallen creatures whose memory sometimes forgets, whose intellect sometimes succumbs to fallacy, whose will sometimes is prone to weakness, and whose senses are occasionally subject to illusion, we nevertheless know that God has created these powers, given us these powers, and directed them, intrinsically, to the truth.

The clear, distinct, and unanimous consensus of our senses actually grasping a given situation, confirmed by the mind understanding it, must never be doubted. Even the physical senses themselves cannot ever be considered categorically misleading or capable of being systematically deceived, as so considering would constitute implicit blasphemy of the goodness of their Creator. Radical skepticism regarding what man can know — entertaining the possibility that valid reason may be wrong, that the consensus of the mind and senses might be detached from reality, that our perception might actually just be a delusion, that Divine Revelation can contradict itself, etc. — is indeed blaspheming God’s goodness, and it is precisely what leads to rejecting many of the truths in this list. Do not waste one moment of your life entertaining the possibility of or meditating on the implications of Radical Skepticism.

You know what you know that you know. Period.

More must be said, however, about the notion of certainty, for it is precisely a false humility that pretends what is indeed certain may not actually be certain that opens people up to entertaining the possibility of, and then eventually succumbing to, delusions.

Someone who, for example, was daydreaming during his High School geometry classes and did not attentively follow the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, might be open to arguments that this Theorem has been — or could be — disproven by some new theory or overturned by some new technology. But anyone who has followed the proof knows, with absolute certainty, that such a thing could never happen. Such a person, indeed, knows each premise with certainty, knows the logic that applies to them with certainty, and therefore he also knows the conclusion with equal (again, absolute) certainty. It has, in other words, “clicked” for him.

Such a person — with respect to this particular truth, at least — is not a reed swayed by the breezes of fads; if a critic sends him article after article (and with Google one can find them along with articles “giving evidence for” any other absurdity he wishes to believe) claiming that the Pythagorean Theorem actually has exceptions — perhaps due to “duality” or “fractals” or “general relativity” or “infinite slopes” or “non Euclidean space” or whatever else — he will feel sorry for this critic who is so ungrounded as to suppose that what is certain and absolute may actually have exceptions. This critic never bothered to make full use of his God-given gift of reason, and there will never be any lack of salesmen masquerading as scientists and engineers out there ready to take advantage of this sloth.

Now, rejections of the absolute certainty of the Pythagorean Theorem are relatively rare, and even in heeding those cases one merely risks damage to the body; perhaps by building a staircase that will not hold weight. But rejections of many other things I discuss on this list are anything but rare, and heeding these rejections risks an infinitely more tragic scenario: damage, maybe even mortal damage, to the soul.

Indeed, the human mind’s miraculous ability to hold conclusions with certainty on account of the intellect’s inherent and fundamental grasp of the nature of reason is one of the primary ways in which man is made in the Image of God. Rejecting this ability is more lamentable than chopping off limbs.

When I started this blog in the year 2008, I only linked to a few articles. Charles Krauthammer’s “In Defense of Certainty” was one of them. Though it is a political, not philosophical, article, I recommended it then and I recommend it now (unfortunately, I can no longer find the whole article; what I’ve linked to here is only part of it).

VII. LOGICAL DEMONSTRATION: A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, but a rope is at least as strong as its strongest strand.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. That is, no conclusion must be held with greater certainty than is enjoyed by the weakest premise it requires, no matter how far distant this premise is in the conclusion’s logical demonstration. Additionally, a conclusion thus weakened by a flimsy, though requisite, premise, must not be erroneously regarded as strong just because much has been built on top of it. Building a structure upon a weak foundation does not render this foundation strong! A quintessential example of this fallacy is the radiometric dating of allegedly extremely old archeological finds of human remains; the dating itself requires an incredibly weak premise, but this has not prevented the modernist scholars from building entire generations of and “professions” of Darwinist drivel off of this weak conclusion. But, in supreme folly, they then point to the mountains of drivel as if it proves the validity of the weak conclusion that the drivel is built off of! (See pages 526-532 of The Crown of Sanctity)

A rope, however, is at least as strong as its strongest strand. That is, if a certain conclusion is demonstrated by an independent line of reasoning, then this conclusion must never be regarded as any weaker than this line of reasoning itself. It does not matter how many other lines of reasoning, also supporting the same conclusion, are weakened, or even refuted. For example, the existence of God and the truth of Christianity and of Catholicism are each truths that are fully demonstrated by multiple, independent, absolutely bulletproof lines of reasoning. Invariably, the attacks on Christianity and Catholicism concern themselves with merely auxiliary lines of reasoning that are in no way necessary for the conclusions; but this does not prevent the attackers from absurdly pretending that they have thus refuted the conclusions. Do not be fooled by their antics! (See pages 24-47 of The Crown of Sanctity)

When exploring a given line of reasoning related to whether or not to believe a given conclusion, therefore, we mustn’t forget the level of confidence we already have in this conclusion from other lines of reasoning. Whenever a conclusion logically follows from a given set of premises, that conclusion must forever be held with at least as much confidence as is merited by the serial consideration of those premises (since logic itself is never in question). Treating each line of inquiry in total isolation is a great way to ensure you never come to any solid conclusions, and succumb to the fate of Buriden’s Ass (the proverbial donkey who, finding himself situated perfectly between two bales of hay, starved to death due to his inability to choose one over the other).

                                                                                   VIII.  Science is a mere tool

“Trust the science” is among today’s most mindlessly repeated mantras, and it is precisely this blind trust that we have to blame for so much of the mess we are in. (Note: traditionally, “science” just means careful reasoned investigation – but today, the term refers to the empirical scientific method developed by Francis Bacon, et al., therefore I am adopting the modern usage of the term for this article.)

A scientist is even easier to buy than a politician; at least the latter, in theory, are answerable to their electorate. Even the slightest threat to tenure, or losing any respect from peers, or being seen as an outsider, or losing funding, and on the list goes, is enough to make most scientists flee in the opposite direction with their tails between their legs. And tragically, today’s most famous scientists (just two examples: Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and the late Dr. Stephen Hawking [pp 28-30]) are precisely the most inept at understanding truth, reality, morality, God, faith, and, in a word: all that really matters.

As I describe in greater depth in Appendix 3, science — like economics, finance, medicine, etc. — can only improve quality of life if 1) it is carefully circumscribed within the boundaries of principles that are superior to it and not derived from within it, and 2) it is both inspired by and directed towards that which is superior to it and not derived from within it (e.g. Goodness, Truth, Beauty, God, Morality, Revelation, etc.). Very rarely in modern science are these criteria respected, which is precisely why “Trust the science!” is a mantra that will only hasten our destruction.

So, don’t trust the science. Trust Reason. Trust Common Sense. Trust Tradition. Trust your gut. Trust Scripture and Magisterium. Trust the Faith. Trust Heaven. Trust God. And, when “the science” fits comfortably with all of those things, then, yes, go ahead and trust it. But not otherwise.

IX. Decisions should never be “data driven”

Today, it is all the rage to insist that everything we do as individuals, as nations, and everywhere in-between must be “data driven.” This is ridiculous. Decisions should always be wisdom-driven, never “data driven,” as the latter implies that what both motivates and directs an undertaking is not reason or faith.  Everything that is “data driven” is doomed to destroy both itself and whatever it touches. Those who brag about their “data driven” operations should put aside pretense and just say it like it is: “Our operations are driven by a more or less random collection of an utterly miniscule amount of information which we cannot even be certain of the validity of and that might or might not be relevant to what we are even after.”

“Data” comes in all shapes and sizes, but what all data has in common is its radical limitation — that is, just how miniscule a portion of reality it actually describes (when it describes reality at all).  Capabilities of modern technology have not changed this fact. Nor will this fact be changed if, in the future, we can develop quantum computers and sensors capable of acquiring, storing, and processing trillions of times more data than we presently can manage.

Consider what consistently rank among the world’s most powerful supercomputers with the largest datasets: those dedicated to climate modelling. The sheer quantity of data stored and processed therein is scarcely fathomable. And we still have no idea what the weather will be one week from now. Nor will all the data, that even an extremely powerful computer can store, tell us something so simple as how a roll of the dice will transpire.

Consulting data can at times be a great aid in the optimization of the details of a solution for which the foundations, constraints, and motivations have already been determined by superior methods. But blindly submitting to “what the data says” when considering what is right, what is true, what is good, what is just, what is wise, what is possible, what is reasonable, what is realistic, etc., is a recipe for disaster.

Indeed, all decisions must, instead, be wisdom driven, and at most advised by data. So, the next time you hear someone brag about their “solution” to some problem being one that is “data driven,” run in the opposite direction.

Let me give just one example of a “data driven” decision; the classic case of precisely what the lowly Mathematician Abraham Wald had to deal with in the 1940s. Abraham had to oppose his scientist peers in their insistences – data based! – regarding how to further strengthen the armor of America’s World War II bombers. These scientists had meticulously gathered all the data about where the bullet holes were located on the bombers after they returned from a mission. They compiled this data and developed a strategy, driven by this compilation, of where to beef up the armor: the wings and the tail gunner. Thankfully, before these scientists succeeded in moving forward, Abraham stopped them. He told them how foolish they were in this data-driven nonsense. Having all of that data is useless, he pointed out, if we do not consider what it actually means and teaches. For that data was, by definition, only gathered from the bombers that successfully returned from a mission. The location of their bullet holes is precisely where the armor needn’t be strengthened, as those bullet-holes indicated precisely where a bomber could be hit and still fly. Instead, Abraham insisted thanks to his common-sense: strengthen the armor under the cockpit! So they did, and if they had instead taken the data-driven approach, we’d perhaps all be speaking German right now, as the excess weight from beefing up the wings and tail gunner armor at the expense of the cockpit, they would have ruined the missions.

But this is only one of nearly infinite examples of the Fallacy of Survivorship Bias, which itself is just one of nearly infinite ways that data-driven decisions utterly fail. “Data driven” decisions are usually the very worst decisions, inasmuch as they seek to be guided solely by this intrinsically deeply limited “data” while leaving aside common sense, wisdom, tradition, morality, philosophy, religion, etc.

X.  Philosophy has no right to contradict common sense

Do not regard this article, particularly the preceding two points, as some sort of blind exaltation of philosophy; an attempt from a philosopher to give carte blanche to his own field. Though I am a philosopher, I disdain what philosophy has become as much as any anti-philosophy scientist or fiction writer might disdain philosophy itself.

Since the days of Descartes in the 1600s (or perhaps the nominalists before him), philosophy largely stopped being philosophy. For whenever a given undertaking doubts — or perhaps even rejects — its own foundations, it is no longer anything meaningful, much less can it still lay claim to its original title.  From Descartes, to Hume, to Kant, to Locke, to Foucalt, to Sartre, to Spinoza, to Hobbes (not in order), until the present day, we continually saw the very bedrock foundational starting points of philosophy itself rejected within mainstream philosophy.

Just as I here admonish laughing off any scientist who dares claim that his own findings have the right to contradict common sense, reason, faith, etc., so too I recommend laughing off any “philosopher” who denies the authority of the senses, the absolute validity of first principles (such as the existence and nature of causation), the existence of truth and our ability to know it, the immutability of logic, moral absolutes, the reality of reality as we perceive it, and any other tenet of basic common sense. All these things are superior to philosophy and philosophy has no right to contradict any of them. When it attempts to do so, it is no better than a doctor rejecting the principle that health is preferable to sickness.

Tellingly, most modern philosophy curricula skip straight over what is by far the very best era of philosophy: medieval philosophy. These curricula ignore two thousand years and go right from Ancient philosophy directly to modern philosophy. (And even ancient philosophy is usually approached as nothing more than an interesting history lesson.) But in Medieval philosophy, we saw the pre-Christian genius of the ancients combined with the infinitely superior grace of Divine Revelation, and what was produced was a weapon of mass destruction against the snares of the devil seeking to lure mankind into error. It is, therefore, unsurprising that contemporary philosophy is desperate to pretend that the Golden Age of Philosophy doesn’t exist. Contemporary philosophy does so not only to the detriment of the world, but also to its own detriment: I cannot count the number of times I have read a contemporary philosopher thinking himself a hero for stumbling upon some true conclusion which was practically taken for granted by the medieval scholastics.

If you want a short, no-nonsense, entry level introduction to Philosophy that is not bogged down with excessive technical terminology or analytics, I recommend Dr. Peter Kreeft’s Summa Philosophica (though I disagree with a few items he includes in there). While the coming Diabolical Quantum Leap will be introduced to us more by scientists than by philosophers, the latter will surely have a role to play. When, therefore, you see this Diabolical initiative defended by philosophers who claim that the senses must be rejected, logic must be called into question, Faith must be relegated outside the domain of certainty, etc., know full well they are not speaking of philosophy at all, but only of a popular corruption of philosophy.

XI. THE NATURE OF TIME: It is nothing but the measure of motion, and there is no such thing as “time travel.”

These facts are altered neither by the Theory of Relativity nor by Quantum Theory. Time is not some magical quasi-substance that can be reorganized like chess pieces or traversed haphazardly like spatial distance. Do not believe any astrophysicist who says otherwise, for he likely does not even realize that the methodology of his own analysis on this question — from Physics 101 as a freshman up to his doctoral thesis and beyond — is logically bankrupt: both question-begging and category-confusing. Speaking of “time travel” as if it were in any way analogous to traversing spatial distance thus allowing past events to possibly be changed or the future to be entered into is as nonsensical as speaking of “triangle travel” as if such a thing could exist and could allow for the Pythagorean theorem to be changed. Although “time travel” means various things in different contexts, what is certain is that there is no such thing as past-changing or future-entering time travel; what has happened, has happened. What has not happened, has not happened. The past is set in ontological stone and the future does not exist until it becomes the present or past. (God, of course, knows the future and is free to reveal its contents whenever He wishes, but naturally speaking the future has no actuality, therefore “entering” in any way into it is an utterly meaningless notion). Nothing and no one — no man, no technology, no angel, and no demon — can ever change these facts. Jesus Christ — God Himself — really became Incarnate. He really rose from the dead. He really did establish His Church solely on Peter. This Catholic Church really does exist to this day under the headship of Peter’s successor, and always will, until the end of time — wherein God’s Victory is absolutely assured. And everything else, too, that we know by faith (or reason) to either have happened or have not happened is set in stone. I am not exaggerating or employing hyperbole to say that these truths, though concretely historical and entirely non-abstract, are still no more changeable or open to doubt than even the most basic laws of mathematics or logic.

God, indeed, is eternal — outside of time. For Him, there is only the Eternal Now; there is not past, present, and future. But it does not follow that logical absurdities related to time may be entertained. God is also pure spirit, therefore He is outside of space, matter, quantity, etc., as well; but it does not follow that 2+2 might not be 4 or that a square might actually be a triangle or that 1 gallon may be less than 1 pint.

For a basic introduction to the Philosophy of Time, click here

 XII.  THE NATURE OF BODY AND SOUL: Intellect, Memory, and Will are Untouchable Immaterial Powers        

We are incarnate beings whose souls really are united with — not merely connected to — our bodies. But our souls are also spiritual; thus subsistent — truly distinct from the body, existing without matter and apart from the body, and capable of operating without the body. (Consider that of all the saints in Heaven, only Mary now has her body; but this does not at all prevent the rest of the saints in Heaven — who currently have only their souls — from loving, enjoying, thinking, willing, remembering, interceding, etc.) Although before death whatever our souls do usually have corresponding neurochemical phenomena (on the basis of which some atheist materialist scientists erroneously claim to have actually found thoughts/memories themselves within the brain — rest assured they haven’t, and never will), our soul’s spiritual operations themselves are entirely and intrinsically immaterial.

In particular, I must emphasize that your memory — a God-given spiritual power of the soul(not a merely physical phenomenon of the brain) — though no more infallible than your intellect, is also no more fallible than your intellect. Therefore, just as when you know some intellectual truth (e.g., 2+2=4) — and know that you know it — you are thereby certain of it, so too when you remember something — and know that you remember it — you are absolutely certain of its occurrence, and you must never let anyone convince you otherwise. It is categorically impossible (and philosophically and theologically bankrupt) to fret that memories might have been, or might one day be, “implanted into you.” If you remember something, and know that you remember it, it’s because it happened. Simple. End of discussion. It is not even possible for a memory to be removed from you; though, due to neurochemical phenomena, it is obviously possible to forget things, which entails nothing other than temporarily losing practical access to a given memory (again; the brain is now involved in accessing memories, but does not itself contain the memories).

There is absolutely no such thing as mind-reading, and there is certainly no such thing as the even more absurd notion of mind-control. As Aquinas rightly taught – and the Faithful have always known for the entire history of Christianity – God alone has access to man’s mind; not even the angels and demons can probe it:

“God alone can know the thoughts of hearts and affections of wills. The reason of this is, because the rational creature is subject to God only, and He alone can work in it Who is its principal object and last end … all that is in the will [is] known to God alone…Hence the Apostle says (1 Cor. 2:11): ‘For what man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man that is in him?’”

-St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. First Part. Question 57. Article 4.

Again, for much more detail on this very important matter, click here to see my new post on it.

On the other hand, do not ever suppose that your being can be “spiritualized” such that what your “body does” is regarded as irrelevant to morality and meaning. You are neither an angel nor a beast, nor a miscreation monstrously combining the two; you are, rather, a unified human person; body and soul, yes, but an individual substance. In a certain sense, you are your body. (Though this sense must not be understood in a way that would contradict the immateriality of the human spiritual soul and the corresponding implications of this fact, some of which I delineate in this article.)What you choose to do with your body, you thereby choose to do with your soul. What you choose to convey with your lips, you thereby assert with your soul. What you choose to work with your hands, you thereby will with your soul.

Among the faculties of the body, the procreative one is the most sacred. This faculty may never be used outside of its only legitimate function: the open-to-life union of man and wife. For, in any other use whatsoever, it is a blasphemous lie that you speak, with your soul, using your body. Using the sexual faculty is always a vow to the one with whom you use it that you will stay faithful to that person forever and wish to raise children with that person if God were to bless the embrace with fecundity. The degree of blasphemy of that lie, therefore, is only redoubled when it is made to a pornographic image, to no one at all, or to one intrinsically incapable of procreation with you, i.e., a person of the same sex. (On the other hand, one rendered infertile by age, injury, etc., is not intrinsically incapable of procreation by nature, but only accidentally incapable by circumstance, and there is obviously no sin in the union of man and wife even if one or both of them are thus accidentally incapable of procreation.)

 XIII. THERE IS ONE AND ONLY ONE CREATION

The beginning of the world, the only (temporal/material) world, which is none other than this world (this cosmos) — when God said, “Let there be Light” (Genesis 1:3) — was the beginning, in absolute terms. There were no other creations with other truths and other goods and other “gods” before this; nor are/were there other creations/realities buried somewhere in a “‘multiverse” or “another dimension,” or anything else. When Genesis (and the Gospel of John) says “The beginning,” guess what it means?  The beginning.  Nor are there any existentially meaningful gaps in our Faith’s teachings regarding what has transpired since then. In other words, Salvation History is not missing any chapters, so never believe anyone who claims to provide a hitherto “missing chapter.”

                                                                               XIV.THERE ARE NO ALIENS             

(This matter is dealt with in depth in a post I wrote in March 2021)

There is one and only one humanity. Furthermore, Human Beings are the only intelligent incarnate life form that exists anywhere (the only other intelligent beings are Angels — or Demons — and the Three Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity). When you hear of voices you thought you could trust saying that there are now extraterrestrials (aliens) among us, stay far away from these voices, for, though many will be “good Catholics” — even learned theologians, even prelates with home addresses in a certain city-state within Rome — they have succumbed to the Grand Delusion. And when they encourage collaboration with these “friendly, more evolved extraterrestrials,” they are actually just encouraging collaboration with demons. Recall the theme of many points in this article: the Antichrist will waste no sci-fi fantasy; knowing as he does that these fantasies are well ingrained in modern man’s imagination and often generate subtle aspirations within men’s secret hopes. The Antichrist will use these fantasies to try and compel the faithful to welcome his diabolical “quantum leap” and “paradigm shift” in understanding of the universe and mankind’s place within it.

Catholic Church teaching is clear: all rational physical creatures are descendants of Adam and Eve (cf. Humani Generis).

The Catechism itself is clear:

“Of all visible creatures [i.e., non-angels], only man is able to know and love his creator… he [man] alone is called to share… in God’s own life.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 356)

After I explained this in depth this past March, I had people (Catholics!) complaining that I was applying Church Teaching “too universally.” I was asked, essentially, “how can one expect the teachings of this finite and limited Church to apply to such an out-there possibility of aliens that is so beyond anything Church teaching explicitly deals with?” How I can expect this is simple: I am a Catholic. As such, I recognize that the Holy Spirit, Who is infinite, is the Soul of the Church (Cf Catechism of the Catholic Church §797), that the Church is the Bride of Christ, and that her teachings therefore do not suffer from the limitations of the human beings who hold the pen that writes them. Her teachings are absolute, universal, and infallible. I do not know where this strange [and heretical] notion came from that these eternal and absolute truths somehow only apply to a certain volume of space containing the mere fraction-of-a-trillion cubic miles that constitutes planet earth. Church Teaching, rather, is true now, was always true, and will always be true. It is true here, it is true on Mars, it is true in galaxies we still haven’t even discovered, it is true in Heaven, it is true in Purgatory, and it is true in Hell. It is true whether or not scientists and sci-fi writers agree with it, and it is true no matter what theories are posited about tomorrow’s “UFO” reports.

Footnote on this point: Are you disappointed that there are no aliens? Well, scroll to the very bottom of this post and read the addendum. You can also consider this brief Lesson from Tura if you are tempted to regard Planet Earth and its history as too small a thing to be satisfying.

XV.THE LAW OF NON-CONTRADICTION: Two contradictory assertions cannot both be true; Qualitative vs. Quantitative

While we touched on this in point #1, the Law of Non-Contradiction also needs its own entry here. When faced with contradictory assertions, at least one of them must be rejected as false. If we know that one of two contradictory assertions is true, then we are not being humble by refusing to reject the other; we are only being cowardly and setting ourselves up for succumbing to soul-destroying error. Now, we mustn’t become Pharisees; insisting upon seeing contradictions where none exist (see page 16 of The Crown of Sanctity). But we also mustn’t become relativists, absurdly pretending that “each is entitled to his own ‘truth’.”

An assertion we know to be true, by Faith or by Reason, cannot ever be rendered false by some scholarly “study,” scientific or otherwise, or by alleged “empirical evidence,” no matter how seemingly strong. Consider that these studies are constantly contradicting each other, and most of the “studies” we now defer to will be overturned by future studies. Relatively few studies are even capable of being replicated (i.e., they are patently useless; see the Appendix on Science). How utterly tragic to contradict what we know to be true for the sake of some trending “study.” More lamentable, indeed, than Esau squandering his inheritance for a bowl of soup (Cf. Genesis 25). These “studies” are particularly fond of seeking to overturn the Moral Law, especially as it pertains to sexual matters, and of seeking to label as illogical orthodox Catholic philosophy and theology (e.g., regarding Transubstantiation, the immateriality and immortality of the soul, the Divinely-ordered design of all natural things, etc.). Have absolutely nothing to do with this.

Qualitative and Quantitative considerations both have their place, and their respective domains must not be confused. One of atheism’s favorite errors is the notion that all matters are purely quantitative. This flows from their materialism, and their rejection of the reality of unquantifiable transcendentals such as Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. While it is foolish indeed to seek to settle a quantitative question by deferring to qualitative considerations, the far graver danger is pretending that qualitative truths may be overturned by quantitative considerations. For example, “____ is intrinsically evil” is a qualitative assertion; and, if a true one, it completely overrides any considerations, such as, “but doing _____ would save billions of dollars!”

 XVI. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”           

Intellect (reason) is an immaterial, spiritual, God-given gift that only He can create and only He can give. There is no such thing as “artificial intelligence.” There is only software (it has been accurately said that today’s “artificial intelligence” is tomorrow’s outdated software) which marketing strategists have decided to name “artificial intelligence” in order to boost sales. (Ever heard of a magic sponge? Sorry, but there is nothing magical about abrasive melamine foam). And software — even the world’s most advanced, and even the most advanced software even theoretically possible in the “quantum computers” of the future — is nothing but an amalgamation of a large number of logic gates. Logic gates, in turn, are nothing but electronic switches consisting of diodes and transistors that amplify, allow, or do not allow, electrons to pass through. Though impractical, you could build the world’s most advanced “artificial intelligence” supercomputer software with Legos. All technology — all of it — is purely material, fundamentally predictable, and entirely algorithmic.

No robot, no computer, no new technology, no “AI,” will ever have a soul. Only life created by God can have a soul, and only human beings have spiritual souls. Only human beings will ever have spiritual souls. No piece of technology (e.g., no robot) must ever be considered as an end itself, as enjoying personhood, as demanding obedience, as having free will, as having rights, as being legitimately creative, as having real emotions, etc. No machine/ robot/ AI/ computer/ whatever else will ever “become aware,” or “develop free will” or “acquire judgment” or anything of the sort. No “AI” must ever be considered to have wisdom of any type, much less any wisdom to give that is worthy of heeding: “AI” can do two and only two things: calculate algorithms and regurgitate what its human programmer has put into it. “AI” is no more worthy of admiration — no more capable of producing what is rightly called knowledge or counsel — than is a slide rule or a piece of paper. A slide rule is a helpful tool to aid in quantitative analysis, just as “AI” is. A piece of paper is a wonderful way a human author can record his own wisdom, just as a computer is. But what folly it would be to revere a slide rule, and what folly it would be to praise the paper upon which a novel is written instead of the novel’s author. Indeed, any and all meaning presented by these things — AI, slide rules, paper, etc. — come entirely and only from human beings.

Here is a little experiment you can do right now. Think of a random number between one and ten. Done? Good. You just did something that the world’s most advanced “artificial intelligence” supercomputing software cannot do and will not ever be able to do. (No, your computer cannot generate random numbers. It can only grab a number from, say, the billionths digit of your CPU’s clock, and when it does so it appears to be random. It isn’t any more random, however, than you telling me what time it is.)

Stay far away from anyone who claims that “AI” compels us to re-examine “what it means to be human.” In fact, “AI” ought not compel us to “reexamine what it means to be human” any more than Pascal’s Calculator in 1642 ought to (that is, not at all). We already know what it means to be human, 1) because God has told us, and 2) because we are human, we know ourselves, and no technology should ever compel us to reexamine this question.

Only a person (a human) can learn — i.e., grow in knowledge, understanding, intelligence. An animal has instinct (which can be steered) and can be trained and develop “habits,” but a machine/computer can do none of the above. Saying that an “AI” system can undergo “machine learning” is like saying a piece of paper learns what is written upon it, or a jig learns how to guide the tools used upon it, or an internal combustion engine learns to be more efficient after it is broken in and the edges of its piston seals are worn down.

I am not here asking you to be persnickety and insist upon a whole new lexicon other than what is commonly used; I am just asking you to remain cognizant of how discordant modern language has become with reality. As Socrates said, “misuse of words is not only harmful in itself, it also has a bad effect on the soul…” (He thus admonished those who asked him, before his execution, “How are we to bury you?”; this was a poor use of language, Socrates taught, because after his death he — Socrates — would be somewhere else, and a mere corpse is buried.) When we unreflectively, day in and day out, refer to mere heaps of metal, plastic, and silicon as having “artificial intelligence” and “learning” and “thinking,” etc., we subtly — slowly but surely — distort our very grasp of reality and prime ourselves to eventually succumb to sci-fi absurdities, which in turn primes us to fall victim to diabolical invitations.

XVII. The “gods” of the Pagans are Demons, and the Catholic Church is the One True Church to which all men are called

These “gods” of the Pagans are not always entirely made up; sometimes they are real beings – but when this is the case, they are demons. No angel would ever ask for worship for itself; therefore, whatever extra-material being requests, demands, or even permits worship of itself is most certainly a demon. These demons must not ever be incorporated into Christianity, and they must not ever be brought into the lives of Christians – no matter the form this takes (e.g., “Oh, it’s just culture!”), and no matter the reason for doing so (e.g., “Oh, it’s just for bodily health – I don’t take the spiritual part seriously!”).

Yes, dialogue can be good. But compromise on the Faith is never good. While “rays of truth” indeed exist in all religions, it is only those truths themselves which are to be endorsed. Endorsing these truths must not be leveraged to endorse non-Catholic religions as such. We should readily praise a Muslim’s dedication to praying 5 times a day, a Hindu’s dedication to detachment from the earth, a Jew’s love of the Torah, a Protestant’s zeal for Faith in Christ, etc. But we must never cause scandal by allowing this praise to be taken as an encouragement of its recipient to remain non-Catholic. Only Judaism and Christianity are Divinely revealed religions. Christianity replaced Judaism (yes, it did.). And Christianity — which will never be replaced — is not supposed to have denominations. I dearly love Pope St. John Paul II, but even he did and said some things the ambiguity of which caused scandal in this regard, so please do not suppose that one can take a certain word or deed of his as a way out of the truths I here list. A false ecumenism and a false interreligious unity will be a major dimension of the coming grand delusion.

I must again briefly mention dogma in this list focusing on extra-dogmatic truths. It is one of the most repeated and clearly taught dogmas in Church history that outside of the Catholic Church there is no salvation. It is not possible for this to be incorrect, and it is not possible for this to change. Ever. Does this mean that all who died before Christianity are damned? Of course not. Does this mean all who, for the last 2,000 years, died as non-Catholics are damned? No. But all those now in Heaven or Purgatory of the former group were saved solely by the foreseen merits of Christ, and all those in Heaven or Purgatory from the latter group were saved in spite of their non-Catholicism, not because of it, and were saved only due to invincible ignorance (which can indeed exist even if it might seem to an observer that this person should have known better) or last-moment repentance (even if such repentance was not observed externally). “Shiva” saves no one. The Buddha saves no one. Muhammed saves no one. No even reading books about Jesus (i.e., the New Testament) itself saves anyone. Jesus Christ Himself — including obedience to His commands, one of which is to be a member of the One and Only Church He founded — is the one and only way to the Father.

Furthermore, there is nothing confusing about what this dogma means by “The Catholic Church.” It means The Catholic Church. Which is to say, that Church of which the Successor of Peter is the visible head, and nothing else outside of communion with him. Every single solitary human being on the face of the planet is called to be Catholic. This includes not only every atheist, pagan, etc., but also every Jew, every Protestant, every Eastern Orthodox, and every Anglican. Whether to become a priest, whether to marry, and other such similar questions, are matters of discernment. Whether to become Catholic is never a matter of discernment: the call is universal. Seeking, of course, always precedes conversion, but once – in the course of this seeking — you realize what is true, then by wasting time “discerning” that which is not a matter of discernment you are only dialoguing with the devil. So, whoever you are, let me now save you much time and hardship: Are you Catholic? You are called to remain Catholic. Are you a non-Catholic? You are called to become Catholic. Make it happen. No excuses. (I know some live in places with little if any Catholicism around. Be at peace: God expects us to do our best, but no one is ever condemned by failing to do what would have been impossible to do.)

XVIII. SCRIPTURE IS ABSOLUTELY INERRANT

Sacred Scripture is not merely infallible on what is needed to know about Faith and Morals for the sake of Salvation. Sacred Scripture is also absolutely inerrant — containing no errors whatsoever, of any type, on what its content actually means and teaches (though, obviously, this fact does not guarantee that each translation or interpretation is accurate; nor does it mean that every verse of Scripture was intended literally in the first place). Although there may be apparent (seeming) contradictions within Scripture, there are no actual contradictions. Remember, this inerrancy covers everything. One cannot protest, “but the Bible is not a _____ textbook!” (insert “history/ science/ philosophy/ whatever else” into the blank) and proceed to thereby pretend that the Biblical teachings that can be related to these fields are just teachings that may be doubted or rejected. They cannot be doubted, ever. Faith and reason never actually contradict; but sometimes they may seem to. When they seem to contradict, guess which wins? Faith.

                                                                                           XIX. SEX AND GENDER        

There are two, and only two, sexes/genders: male and female. One’s “gender” cannot be other than what one’s sex is, and “identifying” as something contrary to reality is meaningless. And whichever sex/gender you are is the same one you have always been, since your conception (not merely since your birth), and is the same one you will always be, no matter what is done to your body. To ever contradict these truths — whether in word or deed, whether explicitly or implicitly, whether directly or by way of formal cooperation — is evil.

XX. God loves you infinitely and unconditionally, and He always will, no matter what

In this life, you can always repent, and God is always ready to welcome you back into His grace. Do not think about that fact before you sin — death would always be preferable to sin — but, if you are unfortunate enough to fall into sin, then do indeed afterwards think about that fact. I must again for a moment speak of dogmas: it is a Dogma of the Faith that the Catholic Church has the absolute right to absolve any possible sin. See Denzinger’s compilation of Catholic Dogmas, §348, wherein it is dogmatically taught that there are no exceptions to this power given by Christ to the Church. Despair is never justified anywhere but in hell itself, and you must never succumb to despair, no matter what you’ve done; no matter how “unforgivable” you are tempted to regard your sins. Do you, dear Catholic, honestly think that the nefarious global elite, or big tech gurus, or Big Pharma, or 5G towers, or the Antichrist, or even the Devil himself, has the slightest power to override a dogma — in this case, a specific promise explicitly given by Christ, in the Gospel, to His Church? You better not. So be at peace and have no fear.

XXI. CAUSALITY: No effect is greater than its cause, nor does any effect precede its cause, nor is any part greater than the whole

As with some other items on this list, #21 here is a first principle of reason (i.e., it is absolutely true, but so very foundational that logically demonstrating it on the basis of more fundamental truths is impossible. It is simply known with certainty, as soon as it is understood, by any person with the use of reason who is both sane and honest). There are practically infinite applications of this principle. Therefore, I will here give just two illustrations:

One’s reflection in a mirror is an effect; the cause is the appearance of his body itself. A change made to the effect (image in the mirror — perhaps due to someone bending the mirror as you view it) cannot itself directly alter that which causes it (the body of the person standing in front of the mirror). This is obvious enough, but one succumbs to contradicting this same exact absolute and immutable First Principle when, for example, he pretends that an electromagnetic wave inundating the brain can itself create a thought, memory, or choice in the mind or directly send information to the mind. (Of course, the senses can send information to the mind. Do you know how exactly this happens? No, you don’t. No one does. No one ever will. It is a miracle; a consequence of God breathing His Spirit into mere clay in order to form man from the dust of the earth but nevertheless bearing His own Trinitarian Image — that is, having an Intellect, Memory, and Will. This miracle can never be so much as approximated, much less matched, by technology.)

Similarly, one contradicts this principle when he supposes that a dead person can possibly be brought back to life by virtue of something done to his body after death (the “science news” websites are constantly talking about how technology will one day be able to do this, and some companies already exist claiming to do it for you — reason #875 to not take these “scientists” or the articles they write seriously). The soul is the cause — the life/animation of the body is the effect. Nothing done to the mere effect — the matter of the body — can re-create the soul (which is the superior, for it is the cause) in the body. It can at most mimic the cause (only very poorly, I might add). The soul is a real thing, and it really departed when the body died. [Obviously, the dead have often been raised — not by material phenomena, however, but only by the supernatural intervention of God sending the soul (cause) back into the body (miraculously), therefore although what happened was scientifically impossible, it nevertheless did not contradict the logical principle here being considered.]

XXII. ON DIGNITY: PLANTS, ANIMALS, AND HUMANS      

Plants and animals — though designed by God and thus enjoying a certain sense of participatory and non-essential intrinsic worth on account of what their creation says about their Creator — are not persons, never will be persons, and must never be considered as having anything like personhood in any way, shape, or form. One cannot have a personal relationship with an animal, because animals are not persons. Their value must always be considered as existing on a radically lower plane than human value — lower not merely in degree, but in kind. A human can never be a “parent” of an animal. Please, do not ever refer to yourself as your dog or cat’s “mom” or “dad;” and do not refer to your pets as your “fur babies.” That is frankly an insult to God’s order.

There is nothing wrong with our concern for the environment/creation being “anthropocentric” (man-centered). In fact, our concern for creation must always be anthropocentric; we would be deluding ourselves and contradicting what God has said by regarding mere plants, animals, or minerals as ends in and of themselves.  Tyrants –the Antichrist included — will always jump on the opportunity to leverage “environmentalism” to tyrannize humans, under the guise of concern for various plants and animal species. We know not only from Faith, but also from Reason, that all of creation exists for the sake of man. Even Aristotle, the great philosopher who preceded Christianity by hundreds of years and had no access to Jewish Divine Revelation, stated clearly “Nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.”

Though indeed all non-human life is radically below human life — not just in degree, but in kind — varying degrees of dignity exist in non-human life forms. Animals, of course, have greater dignity than plants. Dogs have greater dignity than flies. But all humans have equal dignity — infinite and intrinsic dignity — from the very moment of their conception to the moment their soul departs the body. It would always be preferable for the whole world to perish in flames than for the dignity of a single embryo, or a single nonverbal terminal dementia patient, to be directly and intentionally gravely violated. Never succumb to any utilitarian line of reasoning which seeks to detract from this dignity in so much as a single instance.

Accordingly, one’s life is not one’s own, and absolutely no one has any right whatsoever, no matter the circumstances or intent, to take his own life. Suicide is always an intrinsic grave evil. While there is always hope for everyone’s salvation (last moment repentance is always possible, and we must always pray for all who die no matter the circumstances; we must never assume they are in hell), the very worst way to leave this world is to do so with a decision to commit an intrinsic grave evil. No matter what you are going through or could ever possibly go through, suicide is not the answer and never will be the answer. 

Finally, there is no such thing, nor will there ever be such a thing, as a “quasi” human. Every human is 100% human, and every rational incarnate creature is a human. Every human has an immortal soul which will eternally be in either Heaven or hell, a guardian angel, a free will, etc. It is an utter tragedy that, today, some scientists are seeking to create chimeras by mixing cells in embryos from, for example, humans and chimps. We must condemn this practice categorically, but we also mustn’t allow ourselves to succumb to groundless existential crises: whatever twisted experiments these or future scientists undertake will, at most, result in an injured human that is still a human, or an injured chimp that is still just a chimp.  

 XXIII. THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THE ALMIGHTY          

God is absolutely Supreme now and always, and there is not a single thing that will ever happen that He has not specifically deigned to allow to happen for good reason. He has a plan, He is always in charge, and everything He has already revealed about His plan is an absolute guarantee. Not even the years ahead, along with all that they will bring, can change that. The devil cannot change that. And, no, not even Bill Gates can change that! (See Appendix 4 on Conspiracy) Most important, of course, is that you keep this teaching in mind in your own life — fear, anxiety, and despair are all things that a true Christian can, and should, categorically reject; knowing, as he does, that God’s Will cannot be thwarted, and God’s Will is pure goodness. But there is much more to be said.

Although there are practically infinite conclusions we can (and should) draw from this fact, I now present just one more for your consideration. Yes, the imminent Chastisements will wipe out a large portion of the world’s population, but waste no time at all fretting about “extinction level events” or about humanity itself being “eliminated.” God will never allow the world to be destroyed again like in the time of Noah; humanity’s ultimate temporal demise can only possibly come at the very end of time; the time chosen by God for the Last Judgment upon Christ’s Second Coming in the Flesh. Nothing and no one can budge this time. Worry not about a comet destroying the entire earth, or some scientific experiment eradicating all life by “igniting the atmosphere/creating an artificial blackhole,” or a solar flare destroying the entire earth’s surface, or a “zombie apocalypse,” or the earth itself no longer sustaining life due to a “global warming apocalypse,” or an “AI apocalypse” completely taking over humanity, or anything of the sort. The premises of the more radical of the “worldwide-dystopia fictions” also should, by the same token, be ruled out as impossible. A dystopia of sorts is coming, indeed — the reign of the Antichrist — but we know from Scripture that this reign will only last 3.5 years, that the remnant will be protected even during it, and that the Church will persist even during this. But the Antichrist’s “apparent solution to man’s problems at the price of apostasy from God” may well be a “solution” to a “problem” that we should have been able to easily ascertain, from this point #23, is not actually a possible problem at all.

XXIV. THE ABSOLUTE IMMUTABILITY OF THE LAWS OF LOGIC        

The laws of logic/reason (some of which are enumerated in this article), are absolute, in the highest sense of the word absolute. God Himself, while not “bound” by them in the sense of limiting His Omnipotence, is indeed nevertheless described accurately by them (though of course not exhaustively — He is ever a great mystery, and woe to those philosophers/theologians who think they have Him “figured out”!), inasmuch as He is Truth —God is Reason — and He could never contradict Himself. God Himself cannot suspend the Law of Noncontradiction, nor can He make 2+2=5. He cannot change the past. He cannot render false a conclusion that necessarily logically follows from true premises, nor can he render something true that itself contradicts truth. None of this limits God. Quite the opposite; it assures us, His creatures, that we can always trust Him, His Will, His plan, and His Revelation. It assures us that there is no need to ever second guess or doubt; no need to ever wonder if the very God-given reason we have used to know Him, and thus love and trust Him, could itself be subverted or contradicted.

XXV.THE LAWS OF SCIENCE: Immutable for man, but not for God             

The laws of science, on the other hand, can be suspended/changed by God (and only by God) whenever He likes. This is often what miracles consist of. The laws of science, however, are immutable in restricting what the machinations of man are capable of. This tells us at least two things:

First: When the laws of science are contradicted, something Divine is happening. In other words, when the indisputable authority of the senses (see point #6 in this list) tells us that something naturally impossible has, in fact, happened, this means that what has transpired is supernatural.  (The authority of our senses must be trusted instead of an illogical and prejudiced a priori rejection of the very possibility of miracles. The very laws of science themselves are discovered by virtue of the senses; how, therefore, can one pretend to justify rejecting what the senses tell us in supposed deference to the ‘laws of science’? Therein lies the inherent absurdity and internally contradictory nature of atheism and materialism, which obstinately denies God even in the face of miracles.)

Second: We must not give any credence to the various “conspiracy theories” that ascribe to mere men (and their technologies) power to contradict the laws of science. Technology cannot read minds, control minds, create major earthquakes or other acts of God, generate paradigm technological shifts overnight that in fact take decades, etc. (Again, see Appendix 4 on Conspiracy) If you are in the habit of uncritically accepting whatever claims are posted on “science news” websites, or brighteon, or rumble, or gab, or whatever else, about what the scientists and engineers working for the elite are up to, then you are unfortunately well primed to succumb to the Antichrist’s ploys in this regard (who will require, for his success, our own overestimation of his power), and much work may be needed to clear your mind of the fantasies that have entered into it under the guise of being legitimate science and its technological implications.

Among the “arrogant words” (cf. Revelation 13:5) that will pour forth from the mouth of the Beast will be those which claim credit for himself regarding that which God alone can do, and if we give him that credit, we will be that much more likely to succumb to his ploys and reject the invincible peace and trust that Christ wishes to give us. 

XXVI. THERE IS ONE AND ONLY ONE INCARNATION            

God will never become incarnate again. As of 34 A.D., anyone who claims to be Divine is either the Antichrist himself or a little antichrist. Jesus will never come in the flesh within time — only at the very end, to command the General Resurrection and the Last Judgment. Therefore, anyone who claims to be Jesus is, likewise, an antichrist.

  XXVII. The Earthly Lives of the Holy Family

Each member of the Holy Family was absolutely celibate for their entire lives.

Anyone who claims to be a descendent of Jesus is a deceiver. Joseph, too, was celibate, and never had any biological children. Anyone who claims to be a descendent of a step-sibling of Jesus, therefore, is also a deceiver. Mary’s perpetual virginity is a Dogma of the Faith, so we of course know that she had no children other than Jesus. St. Joseph’s celibacy is not a dogma but is nevertheless a fact by virtue of the unanimous consensus of trustworthy private revelation. Our Lord’s celibacy has never enjoyed an ex cathedra Magisterial act directly affirming it, but it is nevertheless a fact by virtue of the infallibility of the Sensus Fidelium.

Unfortunately, however, contradicting the celibacy of the Holy Family is only one of a multitude of errors commonly asserted about them today, all by our modern perverse society which seeks to reshape God in its own twisted image. When dealing with various questions about Jesus’ earthy life, one often hears it said, “Oh yes, sure, as God Christ didn’t _____, but as man, He did!” But no, one cannot simply state that distinction and pretend that it justifies asserting errors regarding Our Lord’s Humanity. Most attempts in the Church today to describe Our Lord Himself in His humanity, or Our Lady herself during her earthly life, are blasphemous. Most attempts to make movies or write stories about them are likewise blasphemous (with the notable exception of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which I beg everyone to watch).

But the tragedy goes beyond books and movies. Sadly, a typical homily today that touches upon elements of the earthly lives of the three members of the Holy Family is generally a mashup of modernist nonsense. Sacred Tradition and the unanimous consensus of trustworthy private revelation all give the same picture of the holy family. Today’s teachers of the Faith, on the other hand, prefer to completely ignore this consensus — not out of a zeal for fidelity to Scripture (which, admittedly, says little about the Holy Family), but rather out of a modernist desire to reshape the Faith in their own modernist image.

These preachers and teachers are quick to point out that Christ was “like us in all things but sin,” but they fail to recognize what is meant here by “us” and by “sin.” “Us” means human nature itself; (e.g., the having of body and soul, a family, the ability to suffer and die, etc.), it does not mean how people in the world tend to behave — much less so how modern people tend to behave. “Sin” here means anything at all attached to sin in any way, not just the deliberate commission of specific acts gravely contrary to the natural or Divine law. It includes, for example, what Aquinas calls the “fomes” of sin — i.e., the subjection of reason to the passions of the body, and any and all of those operations within the soul which lead up to actual sin. Indeed, even in His Humanity, Christ had all the virtues in absolute fullness and perfection from the first moment of His Incarnation. In His human nature, Christ, though He indeed had a human will, nevertheless had absolutely no inclination whatsoever to contradict the Divine Will: in Him, the latter always absolutely dominated the former. When Scripture speaks of Christ being “tempted” in the desert, this does not imply that Christ received the temptation interiorly like we miserable sinners tend to. It simply means that Satan tried to tempt Him — entirely unsuccessfully, might I add. Furthermore, when Christ prayed, in the Garden of Gethsemane, “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” (Matthew 26:39), He was not at all afraid of the impending pains of His Passion, as most modern preaching accuses Him of being (which is not to mention the fact that He already suffered His entire Passion interiorly right there in the Garden before He said that anyway). Jesus feared nothing, and He would have eagerly suffered His entire Passion a million times over if it could have won for Him a single additional soul. It was the “chalice” of lost souls that Jesus prayed to the Father to dispense from — a prayer offered out of pure love, and not out of fear or temptation.  One more example. In His human nature, Christ had no ignorance whatsoever. For even within His human nature, several types of knowledge existed; including Beatific and Infused Knowledge, by virtue of which He knew all things — including the precise moment of the Last Day. When, in the Gospels, Christ said “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” (Matthew 24:36), this is only a reference to the “acquired knowledge” (i.e., knowledge formed by the conclusions arrived at through the use of human reason applied to what is received by the senses); which says nothing more than that the timing of the Last Day cannot be attained by the use of human reason. But Christ did not at all need this acquired knowledge, He only submitted to its attainment so as to sanctify it, since we ourselves need acquired knowledge. (Though it should also be noted that the greatest English language Catholic Bible — the Douay Rheims — does not even have the phrase “nor the Son” within that verse.)

Mary, also, had nothing whatsoever to do with sin; not only did she never commit sin and never suffer from original sin, but she was also absolutely perfect in every possible, imaginable way. She did not get frustrated or annoyed or fearful or untrusting or disobedient or anything of the sort. In the perfection of her soul, she was much more like her Divine Son than she was like even the greatest of saints after her. Though unlike her Son, she was not omniscient, and therefore she — like us — needed Faith. (Christ had no Faith and needed no Faith, because even in his human nature He always knew everything.)

If you want to know the truth about the Holy Family, then read the saints and the mystics. I especially recommend the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, Venerable Agreda, and Blessed Emmerich. And I recommend being extremely cautious with virtually all modern attempts at writing imaginative historical fiction about the lives of the Holy Family.

XXVIII. THERE ARE THREE AND ONLY THREE SOURCES OF POWER  

There are exactly three sources of power:

 1) The Natural/Material (The Domain of Science — whether something science does already grasp, or at least plausible could grasp in the future);

2) The Beyond-Natural and Good (Supernatural/Divine/Angelic);

3) The Beyond-Natural and Bad (Preternatural/Diabolical).

Logic itself, not to mention our Faith, indicates that there is no 4th source. Now,

1) is fine when it is done ethically;

2) is good, but can never be described as following a predetermined and choreographed pattern (except in the case of the 7 Sacraments validly administered and the legitimate exercise of Papal Infallibility), nor can it ever be subordinated to our wants and whims via prescribed practices, ingredients, procedures, etc.;

3) is always evil, and its domain covers everything that does not fit into either 1) or 2).

Differentiating can sometimes be difficult, so if you’re interested in more considerations, see Appendix 1 on Science vs Pseudoscience vs. the Preternatural vs Supernatural.

If a given “source of power” (primarily health/healing related, but also related to anything else: mental/ financial/ self-help/ athletic/ etc.) lacks at least a truly plausible scientific basis [thus categorizing it in 1) The Natural], and is not a Divine Intervention [thus categorizing it in 2) The Beyond Natural and Good (i.e., a miracle)], then it is diabolical. Reject it categorically.

Gray areas only exist in 1) the Natural. For example, a given legitimate medicine might somewhat work; it might be somewhat beneficial, but also somewhat harmful, and whether one ought to use it could be debatable and even a matter of preference and discernment. Not so with anything outside the natural: such things are either 100% good or 100% bad. Black and white. And the 100% bad — the diabolical — loves to present itself to people clothed in deceptive light.

Therefore, remember: All magic is diabolical. All new age/occult is diabolical. Have nothing to do with either, ever. If in doubt regarding a given remedy/practice/etc., steer clear. You don’t need physical healing or other temporal benefits. You do need to keep your soul unstained before God in the midst of the most perverse and sinful generation in history; a generation that makes the ancient pagans themselves look like respectable Christians in comparison. Knowing “good Catholics” who engage in questionable practices shouldn’t persuade you to do likewise.

Yes, magic is sometimes real; in such cases, it operates by virtue of demonic intervention. The Magisterium of the Church does not condemn non-existent things; but even the Catechism itself does condemn magic and sorcery (see paragraph 2117) as being gravely evil. There is no good magic. No, magic is not some mere benign fiction that we should expose our children to in literature that treats this grave, intrinsic evil as something indifferent or even good. (The word “magic,” of course is sometimes used to describe benign things that aren’t literal magic, e.g., an innocent card trick played by a performer… though I do wish such performers would call themselves illusionists instead of magicians.)

XXIX. You, and you alone, are you, and no other being ever will be you.

God Himself created you and destined you to be with Him forever. Nothing and no one can thwart His Will. The only thing that can change this destiny of yours is if you freely choose to definitively reject it. There are no other exceptions.

For example, if, tragically, you are someday unethically cloned against your will, that cloned person will just be an entirely different person who happens to share your DNA (just as identical twins do), and you will not have any existential crisis at your door. No, that person will not have your memories; your memories are not in your DNA, nor are they anywhere in your body at all.

You will always be you. No matter what is ever done to your body — including your brain and your DNA — it can never cause you to undergo a substantial change, since your substantial form (your spiritual soul) is not material. Or rather, the only possible substantial change you could ever undergo is good old-fashioned death, which is nothing other than the soul departing the body. And when that happens, you will be judged by Jesus Christ, and you will then either be in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. It is that simple and there is nothing else — no existential “Twilight Zone,” no soul transmigration or imprisonment or transmogrification– that can possibly complicate the scenario. If, tragically, your DNA is someday altered by some nefarious technological initiative (whether in the medical industry or anywhere else), you will still be you just as much as you are you now and just as much as you were you when you were born. DNA is not the essence of the person. The Soul is the essence of the person.

Remember: Your spiritual soul cannot be so much as touched by any material thing. Free Will, your soul’s greatest faculty, is a gift given by God Himself, and what He Himself will never take away (not even in eternity!), He certainly will not allow to be taken away by any man, technology, or demon. I must repeat: No power will ever be given over your eternal destiny other than whether you choose to love and obey God.

XXX. THE EVIL OF TRANSHUMANISM          

Important as the previous point is, it is equally important to remember that Transhumanism of any sort and by any name is diabolical (even though, as I have said, some of Transhumanism’s goals are categorically impossible and not worth fearing or entertaining the possibility of). Just because transhumanism cannot actually succeed in dehumanizing you or literally controlling your mind (indeed, it cannot) or achieving some of its other aims, doesn’t mean it cannot do enormous harm. “Transhumanist” efforts can do enormous harm, and will do enormous harm if you submit to them; have nothing to do with this, no matter what. Death would be preferable to a chip implanted into you to “improve” you or any other sort of biotech “augmentation/ optimization/ modification/ “AI”-connection.” Interfering with human biology is only acceptable to fix an actual problem (e.g., installing a pacemaker) so as to help restore human nature to what it actually was designed to be, not to attempt to make human nature “better.” God Himself — not “evolution” — made us as we are, and it is nothing short of blasphemy to suppose that our ideas are better than His. The design of the human being — body and soul — cannot be improved, so stay far away from any technology (whether a DNA modification, chip implantation, injection, etc.) that claims to give this improvement.

                                                                            XXXI. GOD’S IMMUTABILITY    

God never changes, and God is exactly Three Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Anyone who claims so much as a 4th person added to the Trinity is a deceiver. Each person of the Trinity is fully God. Anyone who claims any of the Persons of the Trinity are mere “manifestations” of God, is a deceiver. Anyone who claims Jesus was not fully God while on earth (but, rather, was only a teacher/savior/prophet/etc.) is a deceiver. Anyone who claims Jesus sinned in any way, or was in His person subject to any ignorance, or gave teachings in Scripture which may be called into question, is a deceiver.

Since God never changes, and He is all knowing and all good, His Revelation can never contradict itself. The notion of “Progressive Revelation,” wherein later Revelations (i.e. New Testament) are considered capable of contradicting older Revelations (i.e. Old Testament) is a heresy (see page 405 of The Crown of Sanctity).

Obviously, God can, and does, reveal things that are meant to be temporary for us (e.g., the juridical precepts of the Mosaic Law, designed by God to be abrogated upon the birth of Christianity), but whatever He reveals aside from these temporary things is — by definition, and as a consequence of His Immutability — absolute, universal, and permanent. (The New Testament’s Revelation is The Eternal Covenant — it will never and can never be “dispensed from.”) For example, God indeed said He is One in the O.T. — not that He was only one person. Therefore, the N.T.’s Revelation that He is actually exactly Three Divine Persons does not contradict His earlier Revelation, for it continues to maintain that He is absolutely One Divine Nature. The notion of multiple Divine Natures, or anything other than exactly three Divine Persons, however, would contradict what He has revealed, and therefore is not now true and never can be true.

Anything since the death of the Apostle John that is presented as a new Public Revelation (or, for that matter, any “revelation” whatsoever that claims for itself the right to contradict Sacred Scripture) must be dismissed and absolutely rejected — e.g. Islam, Mormonism, the “Army of Mary,” Unificationism, “The Lost Teachings of Jesus,” “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (“Christian Science”), “The Holy Piby” (Rastafarianism), “A Course in Miracles,” “The Urantia Book,” and on the list goes. Reject any “revelations” such as these.

XXXII. Conclusions that necessarily logically follow from true premises are themselves always true.

XXXIII. AND EVERYTHING ELSE THAT GOES WITH THIS LIST.

Any assertion, theory, proposition, hypothesis, etc., that would — as it is stated or merely if taken to its logical conclusion — contradict any of the truths above, is itself false and must be rejected.

I cannot guarantee your safety simply by virtue of adherence to these truths. But they sure will help, as I am confident that the Antichrist’s nefarious agenda — whether before or after his personal public entrance, and whether the “Spirit of Antichrist” or the literal Man of Sin himself — will require contradicting a number of them.

Your Faith in Jesus Christ — and your careful use of your God-given reason directed at The Truth — can set you free and preserve your freedom… if only you let them.

Remember…

• If your favorite website, author, theologian, or pundit contradicts Truth, the Truth still wins.
• If the “consensus of scientists” contradicts Truth, the Truth still wins.
• If civil law contradicts Truth, the Truth still wins.
• If a Pastor contradicts Truth, the Truth still wins.
• If a Bishop contradicts Truth, the Truth still wins.
• If a National Bishop’s Conference contradicts Truth, the Truth still wins.
• If an alleged seer or private revelation contradicts Truth, the Truth still wins.
• If a Pope’s personal opinion contradicts Truth, the Truth still wins.

And that goes for these 33 Truths here listed, as well as any other clear teaching of either Faith or Reason.

Epilogue

I am writing this post knowing full well that much of it will appear to be refuted in the coming days. That is precisely my point. These “refutations” will be the very diabolical scheme I am warning against, and they will all be lies — the devil is always a liar, his promises are never kept, his works are always fraudulent, and his show is always empty. “Aliens” communicating with us with their “UFOs”, “quasi humans” created, “transhumanism” on the plate, “immortality via consciousness downloaded to AI,” “new technology to open communication with animals and realize they are persons,” new archeological evidence to “prove Jesus had children,” “time travel now achieved,” and so on. These will be tomorrow’s headlines, tomorrow’s lies. Perhaps the very day I click the “publish” button here, a news story will likewise be published, claiming that we have made contact with aliens, or that we have discovered proof of the personhood of apes, or that we have found memories in the brain and can alter them as we wish, or that we can re-animate dead bodies. I know full well that such stories will soon inundate us, and I write this article now so that when you see these stories, you will remember what I told you, and you will be better prepared to resist succumbing either to groundless fear of the devil or, worse, to an eager adoption of his proposals. 

Appendix 1: Science vs. Pseudoscience Vs. Preternatural vs. Supernatural

Are you wondering how to differentiate between the preternatural and the supernatural? Here’s one clue. God is not a pez-dispenser; we must submit to His Will — always. Never vice versa. If a given alleged treatment, or “tincture,” or “energy,” or bodily posture, or verbal formula, or esoteric regimen, or anything else, proposes to itself give you what you want — a certain physiological or even psychological benefit you are after — but lacks a truly plausible scientific basis, then it is likely quackery at best or diabolical at worst. New age proposals are like this. For example, Reiki proposes simply hovering your hands over certain parts of a sick person’s body to “heal” it by virtue of “energies” or “vibrations.” Whenever vague qualitative references to energies, vibrations, “manipulations,” chakras, alignments, meridians, Qi, vitalities, “‘law of similars,” etc., must be brought up to try and explain the concept of how some practice works, you can be quite confident that you are dealing with pseudoscience or a new age practice.

You should assume that some new remedy presented as scientific is actually mere pseudoscience or new age (in which case it either doesn’t work and if it seems to work is a mere placebo, or it does work by diabolical arts) if you have not been given a good reason to believe it is scientific. If there are trustworthy real scientists insisting — and presenting solid logical/scientific evidence to back up their claims — in peer reviewed journals or other authoritative sources (preferably with placebo-controlled, double-blinded studies), that some new treatment is genuinely scientific in nature, then there is a good chance it is. (Remember that the mere existence of articles or studies exploring some theory or illustrating a correlation proves nothing; absurdities are studied all the time in academia — take it from me, as I am an academic — and correlations that lack causative links are constantly discussed. The point is to find studies plausibly demonstrating the scientific nature of the matter at hand; this plausibility can rarely be accurately ascertained by the layman (it requires peer review), so consult what the peers who reviewed it actually said, instead of just glibly asserting “well this was in a peer reviewed journal.” Retractions, refutations, clarifications, etc., happen all the time in peer review: that’s the whole point of it, in fact.) Any such scientist’s input (even if he seems a devout Christian) should, however, be discarded if he has already endorsed something patently new age or pseudoscientific (a very partial list of such things can be found in this Vatican document), for the fruits have thus proven the tree rotten. If you are interested in my opinion on just one example of such a person who should not have his controversial views taken seriously on account of his authority, click here.

There are many valid natural remedies; I do not dispute that! Many herbs, for example, have been demonstrated to have antibiotic properties. But there are also many new age, occult, and pseudoscientific things promoted under the guise of naturopathy, alternative medicine, and eastern medicine. Discern carefully. The placebo effect is very powerful. Even more relevantly, however, is the fact that any remedy whatsoever is going to seem to work. Why? Because every alleged remedy takes time; and time, above all, is what the body needs in order to heal itself.  (Even more importantly still is what I mentioned above: certain remedies such as reiki or “healing crystals” may indeed at times “work,” but only by virtue of occult arts, which always bring spiritual destruction even if they seem to grant some temporal benefits). Virtually every bogus, pseudoscientific, and new age “cure”/treatment/practice/etc. claims for itself a high success rate. Though this claim is itself often a lie, even when it isn’t one, it is usually utterly empty. (Scientists refer to this as the “spontaneous remission rate;” when it is high enough — and with almost every ailment which humans face it is very, very high — it renders utterly irrelevant the claim “but look at how many people have gotten better by doing this or taking this!!”)

Finally, bear in mind (and be honest about your own situation) that the people who are most easily deceived and who most readily get caught up in nonsense are people who are in pain, refusing to consider that this pain might just be God’s Will for them for the time being, and stopping at nothing to try to find a cure. Always, therefore, temper your zeal for finding a solution to your pain with the acknowledgement that such a solution might not at all be God’s Will. Don’t believe those treatment promoters who play the role of prophet and pretend that they can tell you with certainty: “God wants you healed of this! God wants you to be rid of this pain!” Aside from a legitimate on-the-spot Divine revelation, there is no way they can actually know that, and a red flag should immediately be raised in your mind when you hear someone say that to you.

Appendix 2: Seers mustn’t be treated as oracles

I don’t suppose anyone who has spent any time perusing my blog or reading my books could get away with accusing me of being flippant about or dismissive of Heaven’s messages in private revelation. I am an extremely zealous proclaimer of them, and I am constantly begging everyone to take them seriously. Nevertheless, I must be clear: even authentic seers are very fallible, very imperfect instruments. Even authentic private revelation can have errors in it. Some seers have, within their messages, a particularly heavy admixture of their own private meditations and are thus more prone to error than others.

Seers are given to us to aid our discernment, not replace it.

While we can have an extremely high degree of confidence in mystics who died long ago and have had their legacies confirmed within the Church (e.g., St. Faustina, Blessed Conchita, the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta), the importance of caution is redoubled when we are dealing with living seers. We live in by far the most confusing times in the history of the world. Today’s seers are in no way immune to that confusion; particularly if they are “in the world,” (i.e. go on the internet, have families of their own, have secular academic degrees, have jobs, etc.) and give longer messages (the longer the message, the more difficult it is for the seer to accurately represent on paper what transpired interiorly and the more likely it is that human imagination crept in during the transposition).

If a seer gives an alleged Heavenly message that winds up being a blatant prophetic failure, this cannot necessarily be chalked up to the usual excuses. Heavenly messages are perfectly capable of indicating whether a prophecy is conditional or not. If a prophecy is not proposed as conditional, then its contents failing to materialize cannot be written off as a mere conditional thing that did not happen. One cannot say, “but all prophecy is conditional!” This is not true. While many of the details of the chastisements that have been prophesied are indeed capable of being mitigated by prayer, others are set in stone. Prophetic failures must, instead, weigh into our discernment as a negative, and at least an indication that there may be some admixture of human imagination in the messages.

Indeed, there are some living seers I regard as having some degree of authenticity (yes, degree; it is not always a black-and-white “authentic or inauthentic” decision – we are dealing with private revelation here, which can at times be a mixture), but this does not mean I think that 100% of their messages are 100% supernatural. I suspect that there are plenty of cases wherein, although their messages are generally supernatural in origin, they nevertheless contain elements of human subjectivity; that is to say, occasions wherein their own thoughts are innocently and accidentally mixed in with the genuinely supernatural aspects of the messages.

I will give just one example. Before I do so, however, I should address something related.

For the last couple months since I stepped down from Countdown to the Kingdom, my inbox has been deluged with inquiries as to why I did so. As I’ve generally found that inquiries received represent a small fraction of those interested in the same question, I suppose I should speak to that now.

First of all — and above all — please know that I still 100% stand behind everything I myself wrote and said for Countdown to the Kingdom while I was a contributor there. I also remain a strong ally of Mark Mallett, Christine Watkins, and Peter Bannister, and I feel confident that I always will. I count Mark, especially, as a real brother in Christ, a fellow soldier in the same battle, and I hope I can continue to collaborate with him in the future, as I am honored to have had the opportunity to do webcasts with him; webcasts I still stand behind and still promote.

Moreover, I continue to fully endorse Countdown’s essential mission — namely, proclaiming the Prophetic Consensus — which is the urgent need for repentance, conversion, prayer, Rosary, confession, Eucharist, fasting, evangelization, Catholic orthodoxy, trust in the Divine Mercy, and Living in the Divine Will — in light of the imminent arrival of the long-prophesied events. These events include the Chastisements, the Warning, the Antichrist, the 3 Days of Darkness, and the Glorious Reign of Peace afterwards — the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary: the Reign of the Divine Will on earth. 

But time is precious, and it became clear to me that the time I do have to spare — after my family, spiritual, work, and study duties — needs to be dedicated more specifically to what I know is my calling: the Divine Mercy revelations to St. Faustina and the Divine Will revelations to the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta. (I have much important work forthcoming related to these; please stay tuned and subscribe here with your email address to be kept abreast.) While I believe that knowing and heeding the prophetic consensus of the living seers is important, I also believe that no living seer’s messages come anywhere close to the supreme and superlative importance of these two revelations. And, pragmatically speaking, for those interested in ensuring they are prepared for what is coming: know that if you trust in the Divine Mercy and are striving to live in the Divine Will, then you are more than ready for anything the coming times could possibly throw at you. If you are not doing these things, then you are not ready for the coming times; no matter how many details of its nature you think you know and no matter how many other living-seer-inspired preparations you’ve made.

Finally, I should admit that I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with some of the details of what a certain living seer, Luz de Maria, who is featured on CTTK, has been saying. This discomfort, however, does not at all affect my conviction of the authenticity of the prophetic consensus that CTTK promotes. I had written up a lengthy document with my concerns related to this seer, but I decided against publishing it, as doing so might give the wrong impression; it might be taken as me expressing a “negative judgment” on her, or condemning her, or claiming she has demonic messages — none of which is the case. I simply suspect that some human imagination has innocently mixed itself in with the otherwise legitimately supernatural content of her messages, and the degree of this potential mingling has, in my fallible estimation, now reached a point that I am no longer comfortable standing publicly behind her. This really does not mean all that much: I am not comfortable standing publicly behind the vast majority of the alleged living seers, many of whom are no doubt mostly authentic. So, all I am doing is, for now at least, including Luz among that group of seers I’m not personally promoting; a group in which she has very good and holy company. Do NOT, therefore, I beg you, consider me an enemy of Luz or a detractor of Luz. I’m just stepping down from promoting her, is all. And instead of publishing the aforementioned document, I’ll simply offer here a few general reminders to those who have read Luz’s messages: There is no such thing as mind control. There are no aliens. “Blessed Grapes” are from a strongly condemned apparition (San Damiano), a condemnation which remains in force (it is a full-blown “constat de non,” not a mere “non constat”), and promoting this apparition’s messages is an act of disobedience. The Covid Vaccines are NOT the Mark of the Beast. HAARP cannot create earthquakes. Nuclear energy is not “the Herod of this generation,” abortion is. Fixation upon food purity and medicine purity can be a serious distraction and a trap, and you do not at all need to start an organic farm, or have a pantry stocked full of medicinal plants or essential oils, to be ready for the Chastisements. Although Luz has received Imprimaturs, Imprimaturs only assert that the text they apply to is free of heresy (I am not accusing her of any); not that it is of supernatural origin or that it has no errors of other sorts. Mystical phenomena must be carefully scrutinized by the Church; and even when valid, do not themselves indicate that 100% of a seer’s messages are 100% supernatural. In general, too much concern with conspiracy is also a trap and a distraction (see the next appendix). Another general point: Private revelation is to be judged by fruits, and there is a subjective dimension to that; whatever seer gives you anxiety or leaves you with an unsettled feeling in your spiritual gut should be left aside.

(Note: Since I know everyone is wondering, I should also say that I’m still discerning Fr. Michel. I still do not think it is possible to tell for sure whether his prophecy that Fall 2020 would see “the beginning of the great events of purification” was a prophetic hit or a prophetic miss, because it all depends upon what the effect of these Covid vaccines turns out to be. If they wind up being as destructive as the more grave theories about them assert, then I think there is a strong argument that the beginning of their distribution — Fall 2020 — was indeed the “beginning of the great events of purification.” If not, I don’t know if a strong argument can be made that his prophecy was valid, since other than the vaccine rollout beginning, Fall 2020 saw — as far as bona fide signs of the times — relatively little that was substantially different in kind from what transpired during Summer 2020 before it, and Winter 2020/2021 after it.)

“…people cannot deal with private revelations as if they were canonical books or decrees of the Holy See. Even the most enlightened persons, especially women, may be greatly mistaken in the visions, revelations, locutions, and inspiration. More than once the divine operation is restrained by human nature…” – St. Hannibal di Francia.

Consider that even a seer who receives messages every single day still spends the vast majority of his or her time trying to understand matters within the confines of his or her own limited human intellect, along with all its fallibility. Beyond merely not regarding a seer’s messages as infallible, therefore, it is perhaps even more important to not regard the seer’s own opinions on matters as oracular. A seer is no more likely to have a correct opinion on controversial or confusing topics than is an ordinary well catechized Catholic in a state of grace who carefully and prayerfully discerns the topics. In fact, I know plenty of authentic seers who are sorely mistaken on a number of points. I know plenty of authentic seers who, in their own lives, comport themselves in ways that should not be regarded as exemplary for one striving to become a saint (as we all must so strive!).

Additionally, seers should not even be regarded as the supreme interpreters of their own messages that they themselves receive. An authentic seer’s Heavenly illumination is limited to the actual text of the actual messages Heaven actually gives to him or her (which might itself only be a subset of the messages they claim Heaven gave to them!). Seers sometimes have mistaken understandings of their own messages and sometimes give bad or even bogus commentaries on their own messages. [This dynamic is reminiscent of how even Popes can have erroneous personal interpretations of their own Magisterium  (as, in fact, Pope Francis does with respect to Amoris Laetitia)– this does not detract from the Magisterium itself; it just means that Popes are human and they are not personally infallible; their infallibility is a charism of their office and applies only in certain situations.]

A footnote on this appendix: Not even canonized saints should be treated as oracles, either, nor should we assume that every single thing they did and said commands our imitation. I have long been meaning to write an article expounding upon this point; but now I do not have to, as Dr. Kwasniewski just published an excellent one that I highly recommend.

Appendix 3: On Science Itself

I love science. This love is not mere lip service, either; it is a lifelong passion of mine. I worked very hard for four years to receive my Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering. My first engineering job after college consisted in cutting edge scientific research. I continue to (albeit very much on the side) work with the principles of science and engineering in my own efforts to develop new inventions.

So as a lover of science myself, I feel more than justified in emphasizing its limitations. These limitations go much farther than the platitude one often hears from the Faithful; namely, that science “can’t give us everything we need; it can’t provide ultimate answers.” Yes, we all know that. But, unfortunately, few realize just how few answers science can give at all, and how ridiculous it is to defer to “what the science says” on a given set of questions in those situations wherein we have infinitely better means of attacking the same questions.

In my PhD coursework wherein I have reviewed the recent scholarly literature on the nature of science, what is particularly astounding to me is that the great secular thinkers themselves behind modern science do not in the least share the awestruck reverence for science that is far too often harbored by the very ones who should know better than to put such blind faith in it — that is, the Faithful.

This reverence is indeed shared by some individual scientists who are so buried in the minutiae of their own tiny little realm of expertise that they have never once bothered to take a step back and ask themselves, logically, what on earth they are even doing; but those scholars whose expertise is on the philosophy of modern science (who, by the way, are as “pro science” as they come and are often themselves card-carrying, legitimate empirical scientists as well as philosophers) more or less universally admit that empirical science does not claim and cannot claim that its theories actually describe what is true; what is actually there in reality. As observed by the renowned contemporary Stanford philosopher of science, H. Longino, all scientists can do is point out that some theory or hypothesis has been accepted on the basis of objective methods. This acceptance, she points out, “does not entitle us to say [the theory] is true but rather that it reflects critically achieved consensus of the scientific community.”  She goes on to admit that modern science operates in a context “that rewards novelty and originality… it is a commonplace that in contemporary science papers reporting negative results do not get published,” before being particularly honest in acknowledging that “when… background assumptions are shared by all members of a [scientific] community, [these assumptions] acquire an invisibility that renders them unavailable for criticism.” This, indeed, hits the nail on the head: there are plenty of devout Christians who are scientists, but too often even their scientific practice has been obscured by the fact that their background assumptions are often utterly logically devoid of substance, since science long ago detached itself from the need to be grounded in reality and truth.  (And this only describes the innocent confusion in science; it is not to mention the downright corruption in modern science, which exceeds even that of modern politics — at least those who work in the latter field are eventually answerable to their constituents, unlike those in the former, who are answerable only to the corrupt groups and individuals who run the journals, conferences, and funding sources that decide “what the science says.” Buying a scientist is much easier than buying a politician.)

You see, since the advent of non-Euclidian “geometry” in the 1800s, whereupon the unquestionable axioms of thought were themselves first popularly rejected in order to see what “interesting, useful” conclusions might follow, mainstream science and mathematics has actually often been known to pride itself on being completely detached from reality — which in turn, since the days of Kant, is dismissed as quasi-non-existent, since we “only have access to the phenomena, not the nouemana” (one of Kant’s most famous absurdities). It seems that few lay folk, who innocently assume high and noble aspirations exist among society’s intelligentsia, are aware of this dynamic.

Thus, the Pandora’s Box has been opened. Now, space is treated as a magical quasi substance, and thereafter a subject, to which predicates may be asserted; when, in fact, space is simply nothing, and nothing can be legitimately said about nothing, since predicates can only be said of something real. Time is likewise treated as if it were essentially the same as space (it is not). All the logical first principles are considered open to question. Quantity is treated as a figment of imagination which needn’t abide by the dictates of logic. Quality is treated as nothing at all. Infinity and zero are both treated as quantities. These might seem unimportant to the untrained eye, but rest assured that they are each not only deeply erroneous themselves, but also breed a multitude of other errors.

Then there are also the more obvious errors in modern science that any devout soul should be able to recognize: Divine Revelation is discounted as myth, 2,000 years of Catholic Philosophy (which is often bona fide Magisterium) is discounted as “mere opinions,” the human being is treated as something that can be exhaustively described empirically, the soul is treated as a mere epiphenomena of matter, truth itself is discounted as a mere social construct, morality is disregarded as a mere evolutionary herd instinct (and, in general, vague deference to “evolution” is used to justify any and every absurdity), beauty is dismissed as nothing but a figment of imagination, and on this list goes.

What comes to mind is Our Lord’s parable of the fool who built his house on sand instead of upon a solid foundation.

In the more modern era of science, i.e., 20^th-Century science, it became fashionable to especially zealously reject common sense logical truths when considering, for example, causality itself, space itself, time itself, etc., and instead ponder what might be entailed by certain theories (even if those theories were little more than glorified conjectures at best, or pseudoscience/science fiction at worst) posited within science. Thus, in many circles, relativity and quantum theory were detached from reality in their very premises but nevertheless still proposed to describe reality in their apparent conclusions. The contradiction here is obvious enough for even a grade school student to see, but too obvious for many scholars to see, even when presented with more scientifically phrased rebuttals (e.g., Schrodinger’s Cat).

Thus, at least cognizant of its own dismissal of reality, science now often seeks to be purely “pragmatic.” The problem is, modern science has no idea what its own allegedly pragmatic approach is even directed towards. One can have a purely pragmatic, non-abstract, non-theoretical, non-metaphysical relationship with a hammer, because he knows exactly why he needs it and what he needs it for. So long as it drives a nail into a beam successfully, all is well. But there is today no understanding — much less agreement — on what science is even supposed to do. The layman tends to assume that science is supposed to seek to understand reality; scientists themselves, as I noted above, realize this is not at all the case.

Is science, then, supposed to improve our quality of life? If we are not yet too arrogant to learn from history, we should realize it has never done this, and (on its own, at least) never will do this. The more technologically advanced a society becomes, the more unhappy its people become. Science — like economics, finance, medicine, etc. — can only improve the quality of life if 1) it is carefully circumscribed within the boundaries of principles that are superior to it and not derived from within it, and 2) it is both inspired by and directed towards that which is superior to it and not derived from within it (e.g., Goodness, Truth, Beauty, God, Morality, Revelation, etc.).

Pretending, however, that nothing is superior to science, and thereupon harboring the unbounded reverence that modern people tend to have for vague notions of “science” stems not from science itself, but from corporate and government propaganda that has found “trust the science” to be just one useful soundbite among many. I do not expect their propaganda to be anything other than propaganda, but what truly breaks my heart is to see so many of the Faithful blindly believe something just because some “science news” website says it is so, or because “the consensus of scientists says so,” even when so believing requires flippantly disregarding something they should know full well is true, if only they took both Faith and Reason seriously enough.

The problem is that we’ve bought the lie that we cannot ever be critical of science, or insist upon boundaries for science, or insist upon the proper foundations for science, or insist upon the proper motivations for science, or insist upon the proper ends of science, unless we are ourselves scientists (and even when scientists do so, they are discounted as “fringe”). But this is absurd. As the saying goes, you needn’t be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. For example, you do not need to know anything about the scientific or technological principles of telecommunications to nevertheless be certain that one cannot fast forward live TV. You do not need to know anything about the principles of Nazi science to know that what they did to the people in their concentration camps was utterly evil and unjustifiable. You do not need to know anything about astrophysics to know that the past cannot change. And you do not need to know anything about any of the particular sciences to nevertheless realize the validity of the arguments I lay out within this article.

Appendix 4: On Conspiracy

First, understand that I do not use the phrase “conspiracy theory” derogatively. Many conspiracy theories are true, and many are false. It would be foolish and prejudiced to be “pro conspiracy theory” or “anti-conspiracy theory.” Instead, each such theory must be examined on its own merits and either accepted or rejected accordingly. Remember that the Magisterium of the Church endorses many “conspiracy theories,” e.g., in pointing out the diabolical nature of freemasonry and its nefarious agenda. The prevailing error in the world — and in the Church — today is what my friend Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski described poignantly as a “conspiracy against conspiracy,” wherein most people blindly reject something as soon as some mainstream source of information has arbitrarily labelled it “conspiracy.” Indeed, this is lamentable and is the prevailing error; but since most of my readers are not worldly folk, I’ll have to focus more here on the opposite error. Do not let what follows, however, cause you to suspect me of being just another mainstream scoffer at conspiracy. Scroll down towards the bottom of this appendix, and you will realize that nothing could be farther from the truth. I am merely advising more care in examining precisely which theories we entertain.

In undertaking this examination, a few criteria for rejecting unworthy theories are worth keeping in mind.

We must not give credence to conspiracies that ascribe to mere men those powers that not even the demons have, and we must not give credence to conspiracies that ascribe to mere technology the ability to contradict the Laws of Science.

No man, no technology, can do that. Ever. For example, with due regard to the Law of Conservation of Energy (not to mention the logical fact that no effect is greater than its cause), it is not possible to reasonably assert that those natural events (e.g., major earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.) which entail far more energy than human technology is capable of generating, are nevertheless events created by some man/technology. Acts of God are just that: Acts of God (whether by virtue of His Wanted Will or His Permissive Will is another question). If we fail to recognize that — if we try to whip out some conspiracy theory to explain every natural event/disaster/phenomenon — then we’ll fail to accurately understand the Signs of the Times. We essentially render God incapable of sending signs, if we insist on imputing even the most obvious acts of God to conspiracies about man’s intervention. Click here if you are interested in more information on why, for example, any theory is mistaken which asserts major earthquakes are manmade.

I will give another example. Last winter, a certain conspiracy theory went “viral,” which asserted that the massive nationwide snowfall America experienced in the winter of 2021 wasn’t snow at all: it was some nefarious artificial phenomena orchestrated by Bill Gates to try and convince people of climate change and thus sign on to his new “Zero Carbon” initiative. This is laughable, and yet, so many fell for it. Somebody uploaded a video to social media wherein she held a lighter’s flame up against some of the snow she collected from outside her door. The snow appeared to “burn” (it became charred) and appeared not to melt, and she insisted that this was because it wasn’t snow at all, but was in fact some dangerous chemical that Bill Gates sent upon the nation and which the lighter was succeeding in burning.

In other words, she is utterly clueless about the thermodynamics of sublimation (whereby a solid, in this case snow, is directly converted into a gas due to the application of heat under certain conditions), she failed to realize that the “charring of the snow” was just the fumes from her lighter’s butane collecting on the snow’s surface; it wasn’t the snow “burning.” More importantly, she was foolish enough to suppose that a clear Act of God, which entailed the release of orders of magnitude more energy and matter than even the most extreme interventions of man are capable of unleashing, was nevertheless caused by man.

In light of this, I’d like to present some simple advice: if you don’t understand the scientific laws at play in a given scenario, that is fine. We can’t all be scientists. But at least have the humility to find someone you trust who does understand these matters, and then defer to his or her understanding. Even if this person winds up being wrong, and your deferral to him or her causes you to miss out on some juicy new conspiracy theory, so what? God will be far more pleased with your humility than He would have been by your accuracy.

We can similarly conclude that no literal mind control will ever be possible. And many other conclusions follow as well. The Antichrist, recall, will want us to overestimate his power. That is always how the devil operates with those who recognize he exists (for those who do not believe in him at all, on the other hand, he prefers to keep them in their obliviousness). He wants us to live in incessant fear of the powers of his minions; cowering in our rooms, ever afraid of HAARP, or CERN, or 5G, or Mind Control, or Chemtrails, or Bill Gates, or whatever else — failing to evangelize and do works of mercy — out of a miserable desire to protect our mortal bodies, which will soon be nothing but corpses, at all costs. No, there is no merit in giving credence to all these theories “just to be safe.” Quite the contrary, you risk damaging your soul and neglecting God’s Will by giving them too much credence.

Regarding Conspiracy in general, one mindset that we must get rid of is the notion that these secret defense department and other government projects have all sorts of technological abilities that are light years beyond the technology that exists on the market and vastly beyond the military technology that is publicly known.

No, they don’t.

I confess that developing military technology in government/defense R&D (Research and Development) was my aim during some of my undergraduate engineering years; I even interviewed with the CIA (which I was not supposed to even speak of at the time, though now I can) and was offered a position at JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, though I wound up working for GE), and I did much research into the technology and spoke at length with engineers at places like Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Yes, they of course keep the details of their technology secret so as to not give away their designs to the enemy. But they do not have technology that is light years beyond what we already know about from the corporate technological industry. In many ways, commonly available technology is in fact significantly more advanced than what is used in the military. In fact, government (and the DoD in particular) is more likely to talk up their technological abilities than they are to talk down these abilities; they would much prefer to scare the enemy into submission than have to defeat the enemy in an open conflict. And yes, defense R&D is huge. But it is dwarfed by corporate R&D. And it’s frankly sad how much our own Defense Department relies upon the same corporate technology you are using right now (Amazon’s servers, for example, store much top secret government intelligence info). Every time there is an accidental leak of military data, the most noteworthy thing is how very un-noteworthy it is. It is always a huge disappointment to those who were looking for juicy details about government projects to create earthquakes or create major weather systems or read/control minds or suspend gravity or teleport or travel in time or generate free energy (all of which is impossible) or whatever else.

Speaking more generally still, I must emphasize that your successful navigation of the precarious times ahead will not be determined by how zealously you pursue and acquire knowledge of the hidden details of what the nefarious elite are up to; it will, rather, be determined by how much you trust in the Divine Mercy and strive to live in the Divine Will.  Do also consider that even the true conspiracies only pertain to scenarios that God, in His permissive Will, is allowing for good reason — dark and nefarious though they may be. The time and effort that you do spend combatting temporal evil is usually better spent opposing those things which you know are both evil and rampant (e.g. heresy, blasphemy, atheism, abortion, impurity, the destruction of marriage, euthanasia, contraception), because they are openly admitted to, instead of pouring yourself out in the pursuit of endeavors which might just, on Judgment Day, wind up being revealed as nothing other than tilting at windmills. Here is a litmus test: does delving into some endeavor fill you with the fruits of the Holy Spirit? (Charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control…), or does it fill you with anxiety? If the former, you are doing God’s Will; if the latter, you are not. Don’t assume that every interior suffering you endure in your efforts are simply Satanic attacks to try to thwart you. You cannot successfully engage in discernment if you assume every time you feel depressed or anxious, it is just the Devil trying to get you to stop something. It is equally likely — if not more likely — that they are just the natural result of following the self-will instead of the Divine Will. The devil is a dangerous adversary, but he is nowhere near as dangerous as the passions and the self-will.

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

The remnant needs to hear that sage advice from the Battle of Bunker Hill right now, because too many among the remnant’s ranks are succumbing to falling head over heels for every nonsensical video or conspiratorial article that lands in their inbox, and are being trigger happy in dispensing apocalyptically phrased denunciations of virtually every new technology or other government/corporate initiative — which, believe it or not, are not all nefarious! Thus, the Faithful remnant is wasting all of their ammunition and, when the battle is really at the doorstep, they will have none left, and will likewise suffer the fate of the boy who cried wolf.

Dear Faithful Remnant, if some among you continue falling head over heels for every juicy conspiracy-related absurdity, then those who do so are not only risking succumbing to the traps I am warning of in this post, but they are also seriously damaging the power of their witness. If they keep credulously regarding, and forwarding on to their whole email list, every silly video or article about vaccines/Bill Gates/5G/”Big Pharma”/whatever else, then the people they are pestering are — each time — going to become that much less likely to take them seriously when they actually reach out with something important; that is, when they seek to evangelize, or warn of the real Mark of the Beast comes, or warn when the Antichrist himself makes his public entrance, or help when the Warning happens and they need to aid their friends and family in responding well to it.

If, dear Faithful remnant, we criticize the mainstream narrative (as we should), then let us not be hypocrites by merely creating a competing narrative and trying to artificially, dishonestly, and uncritically inflate it. I commend you for refusing to blindly believe a claim just because it is offered by a mainstream source of information. But let us not likewise put an equally lamentable blind trust in the claims made in the videos and posts published online by people we have never even heard of — claims which we have no way of assessing the truth of — merely because these claims themselves fit in with another narrative, albeit a counter-mainstream one. Let us, instead, seek only the Truth in all matters.

This approach, and this approach alone, will be vindicated by God. It will require the Faithful remnant to backpedal some of the over-the-top claims they’ve been promoting recently. That act of humility will be blessed by God and, without it, the remnant will not even themselves be prepared for what is coming.

I will, however, reiterate what I said at the top of this appendix: many conspiracy theories are true. While those which assert theological, philosophical, scientific, or technological absurdities must be rejected, other conspiracy theories (e.g., those which merely point out that groups we already know are evil are in the process of doing evil things) should be taken seriously. Even here, we must be very careful not to place more credence in theories than is merited by the evidence behind them (calumny does not cease being sinful merely because it is directed at a rich or famous or powerful person), but we should not be dismissive, either. Organizations like the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the WEF (World Economic Forum), The Open Society Institute, Planned Parenthood, and Freemasonry – just to name a few – are ferociously pursuing evil agendas. The Great Reset is so twisted as to be utterly dystopian and apocalyptic. Population control advocates across the world are guilty of monstrosities. Governments across the world are clearly doing evil things and trampling on civil and religious rights in the name of “fighting Covid.” In the name of “combatting climate change,” many organizations are engaged in blatantly anti-human agendas. Marxism (in essence even if not by name) is exploding throughout the world in more movements and organizations than I can count. School systems are brainwashing and corrupting our youth with Godless ideology; especially through “LGBT” curricula. From the earliest days of the Pandemic, there was seriously compelling evidence that Coronavirus was from a Chinese lab. And let’s not forget that many in the Vatican are also up to no good. And on and on the list goes with individuals and organizations clearly conspiring evil things. They must be exposed and called out for their atrocities with all vigor.

***

I conclude this Appendix with a teaching from Our Lord. Jesus shares a powerful analogy with the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta to illustrate just how lamentable it is when a Christian — who should have supernatural Faith, Hope, Trust, and Peace rendering him invincible to absurd fears nevertheless choosing to succumb to such fears. This analogy shows how these vain fears are not only lamentable because they are vain fears, but also how the situation is much graver: if only we allowed Christian common sense to cause us to reject these vain anxieties, our souls would be safe. Instead, Christians are succumbing to a self-fulfilling prophecy: risking their very salvation (by believing in things tantamount to a rejection of Supernatural Faith and Hope) in their very fears pertaining to salvation.

“…the soul who is at peace, by wanting to afflict herself, become disturbed or lose trust, would run into the misfortune of one who, though possessing millions upon millions of coins, and even being queen of various kingdoms, keeps fantasizing and lamenting, saying: ‘What shall I live on? How shall I clothe myself? Ah, I am dying of starvation! I am so unhappy! I will be reduced to the meagerest misery and I will end up dying.’ And while she says this, she cries, sighs and spends her days in sadness and squalor, immersed in the greatest melancholy. But this not all; the worst thing about her is that if she sees her treasures, if she walks within her properties, instead of rejoicing, she afflicts herself more, thinking of her nearing end; and if she sees food, she does not want to touch it to sustain herself. And if anyone tries to persuade her by letting her touch her riches with her own hands, showing her that it cannot be that she will be reduced to the meagerest misery, she is not convinced, she remains dazed, and cries even more over her sad lot.

Now, what would people say about her? That she is crazy, that it shows that she has no reason, that she has lost her brain. The reason is clear, it cannot be otherwise. Yet, it can happen that she may run into the misfortune over which she keeps fantasizing. But in what way? By going out of her kingdoms, abandoning all of her riches, and going into foreign lands in the midst of barbarian people, where no one will deign to give her a crumb of bread. Here is how the fantasy has become reality – what used to be false, is now true. But who has been the cause of it? Who should be blamed for a change of state so sad? Her perfidious and obstinate will. Such is precisely the soul who is in possession of Hope: her wanting to become disturbed or discouraged is already the greatest madness.”

– October 14, 1899.

And this leads in nicely to the Addendum.

Addendum on Disappointment

Have you perhaps read this article, recognized the truth it contains, and found yourself disappointed? Disappointed that you can no longer look forward to a “quantum leap” thanks to aliens, or time travel, or magical beasts, or a multiverse, or a whole other creation we are unaware of, or anything of the sort? Disappointed that you can’t look forward to Human 2.0? Disappointed that many of the various works of fiction you’ve read must have much of their contents safely relegated to the “mere entertainment” portion of your memory?

Well, bid your disappointment depart. If you would like to be exposed to mind-blowing truths, then look no further than the revelations of Jesus to the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta. Therein you will find the most amazing news — life-changing and world-changing news, the most amazing news imaginable — but at the same time, news that fits perfectly within the Catholic Faith and accords with the good use of Reason. News that does not require discarding common sense, rational thinking, good philosophy, or good theology. News that does not require failing to be sufficiently aware of the definitive nature of the Public Revelation we already have and the centrality and uniqueness of Salvation History, the Incarnation, the Catholic Faith, etc.

News that, in fact, far from distracting from your Christianity and your Catholicism — as the sci-fi absurdities and “science” news website do — will make you a far better Christian and a better Roman Catholic than you ever have been, and only deepen and strengthen your focus on and devotion to the central themes of the Faith.

In my work as a philosopher, I have read countless pages of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Boethius, the Stoics, Kant, and so many others. In none of these works have I come across anywhere near the degree of philosophical precision, depth, and breadth, that is evident in Jesus’ revelations to Luisa. This alone is proof of their Divine origin (Luisa was an uneducated 19th and 20th century lay woman who was bedridden almost her whole life), even leaving aside all of the more obvious proofs (see pages 69-109 of the Crown of Sanctity) of the same.

Dive into these revelations, and as long as you do so 1) in God’s grace, and 2) with a posture of openness to new outpourings of grace, you will no longer be disappointed. Disappointment, boredom, anxiety, cynicism, jadedness, and all such emotions, will be gone from your vocabulary.

***

My detractors may view this post as the ultimate Summa of Rigidity; just a rant against the “newness of the Spirit” from yet another cranky old Thomist. I will accept this calumny with docility, as I am not ashamed to be denounced by modernists or by neocons who are modernists but do not recognize it. I suppose it is quite ironic that I am the one to write such a “Summa” as this, considering how much time and effort I spend trying to persuade certain novelty-phobic Catholics who are stuck in Pharisaical ways of thinking to realize that God is indeed trying to do something new today — He is offering us the Gift of Living in the Divine Will, the greatest sanctity possible, in preparation for its imminent universal reign in the Glorious Era of Peace, wherein God’s Will shall be accomplished on earth as It is in Heaven, in fulfillment of the Our Father prayer itself.

But a kite flies high and free, a marvel to all who see it, precisely because it is anchored. Sever this tether, and it quickly becomes just another piece of litter caught in a tree branch. Indeed, it is precisely because God is on the move in granting us new Gifts that we must be especially zealous to remain fully anchored in the Truth — both the Truths of Faith and the Truths of Reason.

Please pray for me, and be assured of my prayers for all who read this article.

In Christ, through Mary,

Daniel

www.DSDOConnor.com