Being human beings

Well, we're already in the second month of the first year of the second quarter of the twenty-first century. One thing I learned during the first quarter of this century is to never be so foolish as to think things couldn't get worse. Techology, it seems, has aided the transnational corporate entities in pretty much controlling everything. As the Epstein files clearly show, we're all subject to a dubious oligarchy. Dear Lord, even Noam Chomsky is in on this!

What is really at stake right now is our humanity. But Qoeleth is correct: there is nothing new under the sun. From our beginning, we have wanted to transcend our humanity with its concomitant mortality. This is precisely what constitutes the original sin, an element present in every actual sin. Yet, rather making us freer, this impulse leads to slavery. "Transhumanism" is discussed not only as a genuine possibility but very often as something good, a goal to be attained.

Don't get me wrong, I believe in eternal life. I also believe that, like mortal life, eternal life is a gift from God and not a human technological achievement.

I am grateful Robert Prevost was chosen to be Pope Leo XIV. I eagerly await his first encyclical, which, I believe, will address these matter. I think the title of his first enyclical is going to be Magnifica humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”). According to reliable media sources, it currently undergoing a third revision.

It is the largely peaceful protests in different cities, like Minneapolis and earlier Portland, Oregon, and in Maine that I see something promising. Permitting one person or group of people to be dehumanized threatens our common humanity. As John Donne so eloquently stated it:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main

We do well to always and everywhere bear these things in mind.

Homo curvatus in se- "man curved in on himself" is the way Saint Augustine described the unjustified human condition. Building on Augustine's metaphor, it is Christ who comes not to straighten us out but to bend us outward, toward God by bending us toward one another. Scripture is pretty plain. You can't say you love God and hate your brother (1 John 4:20).

This could easily veer off into a something of a economic discourse, but I will limit myself to Pope Saint John Paul II's exhortation that in a genuinely human civilization, people don't serve the economy but the economy is built for people. Simple enough, right? Well, obviously no. Practically everyone has become an economic determinist.

While this would've been a better post to end with Oasis' "Live Forever," our traditio is Pixies with "Gouge Away." Kurt Cobain has this to say about this underrated band: "When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band — or at least in a Pixies cover band."