What is holiness - The Saints
Some Catholics called me to get informed about saints, which they
see as the proof that Catholicism would be the one true religion.
So I did, just enough to draw a secure conclusion.
I checked about Padre Pio, and Curé d'Ars
I have read just a little of Curé d'Ars'teaching, his text about the
Judgement. This was enough to me. What is this teaching about ? This
is just a description of God as
infinitely mad, hateful, paranoid and sectarian, whose only
wish is to send to hell anyone who does not worship His sectarian
madness. Something which is, after all, just an extension of the
paranoid, sectarian madness already in the Gospel as Jesus'words:
"who is not for me is against me" and "who has not the Son has no
life and the judgement of God is over him".
And this is what they call a saint ?
The second feature of this man, for which he is called a saint, was
his asceticism. I'd rather call this masochism: he worships an
ideology of hating and hurting oneself.
The fundamentalist Catholic guy (who I knew as he was a mathematics
student with me) who had put forward Curé d'Ars as his model of a
saint, claimed that Catholicism would be unique (and thus the only
Truth) just because it is the only religion having saints. This
claim is just nonsense:
- As for fundamentalism (madness, paranoia, sectarianism), there are
examples of such "saints" in Islam, such as Osama bin Laden; there
are many in neo-protestantism such as Jack T. Chick.
- If we rather seek for peaceful saints in other religions, there
can be many examples such as Gandhi or the Buddha
Boy.
So, finally, what is a saint ? A saint is someone fulfilling one or
more of the following criteria:
- A masochist, dedicating one's life to degrade, hurt and
destroy oneself (repeating mantras, praying several times a day,
walking hundreds of kilometers barefoot in pilgrimage,
abstaining from human love for God's love, or anything like
this) with the conviction that this is the best way to please
God;
- Someone that the Church called a saint because he/she
fanatically dedicated one's life to faithfully repeating the
same Church's message;
- Someone that may have got the luck to sleep with God someday
(and proudly testified it to the world so as to make other
people jealous), but whose conviction of having also (before or
meanwhile) seriously talked with Him and got to know Him, was
purely delusional anyway : such people's ideas about God were
the mere fruit of their own human erring thoughts and social
conditioning instead, to which they thought God agreed for lack
of having got any contradicting message from Him during their
mystical experience. In fact they are just as ignorant as anyone
else (for instance, they have no genuine clue how other people
can manage to live the same experience), the only difference is
that their mystical experience deprived them of any sense of
self-criticism (as needed to normally learn and progress to the
truth), through the dialectic confusion between this strange
experience and a supposed divine infallibility of thought above
the thoughts of anyone that did not have the same experience
and/or who has another opinion ;
- The target of some fanciful invisible spirit that found it
funny to produce miracles just for playing with humans like toys
(puppets), to see how they would react, and whether they would
be amazed and worshiping those events; or maybe these invisible
spirits can be well-intended too, but also as dumb, crazy and
narrow-minded, as devout believers themselves.
If the above dismissal of mystics'opinion as merely human, may a
priori seem odd and arbitrary, well, please understand that I
perfectly agree that it would a priori seem a very plausible
expectation, that people with some mystical (or anyhow wonderful
spiritual) experience, would have better clues on the truth than
those who didn't. However, please understand that I did not just
reject this expectation because I did not like it or anything like
this, but because I happened to face overwhelming contrary evidences
that I finally could not deny; I am "responsible" for dismissing
"divine revelations" in the sense that I double-checked their
emptiness myself and thus I can commit that this conclusion is true
and reliable (and I am not a mere irresponsible messenger of some
external, divine, mysterious source), but not in the sense of having
made here any arbitrary personal choice, as it is an objective truth
I am talking about. It does not matter which belief is more virtuous
than another belief, nor whether I or anyone else likes it or not.
After careful study, it turns out to be an objective fact that
miracles do exist in many religions (or at least: they are no more
in a specific religion than in others) to support absurd,
contradictory claims, and wasteful actions.
Another text I
wrote on the subject (the miracles of Evangelics and Penticostals)
Other people could make the same observation (here are 2 examples I
could find)
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