Proph comes around

I've been a reader of Collapse: the blog almost since the beginning. The blogger there exhibits a sound grasp of history, economics, and ethics and has been a persistent predictor of the up and coming collapse. His primary focus has been the economic and political collapse, but has extended his analysis to the moral and societal condition of an increasingly decadent population.
What I find interesting is that even as a deist, he has decried many of the cultural ills spawned by secularism that have been the forefront of criticism by the Christian mainstream.

Modern liberalism was birthed in the moral and intellectual squalor of the Enlightenment -- which, if there were any justice in the world, would have been called the Darkening -- when it shucked off the rational realism and essentialism of the classical and scholastic philosophers and embraced, instead, the manifold absurdities of nominalism, empiricism, and skepticism. Its worst excesses were constrained, at the time, by the residual self-control inculcated in society through a millennium and change of Christian worship, but with the passage of time, society has forgotten even the reasons for this self-control, and its irrationality has worsened, giving way to utilitarianism, totalitarianism, and, ultimately, the present degraded nihilism that cannot even be bothered to justify or rationalize itself. Centuries after the world supposedly liberated itself from the chains of theology, it has enslaved itself to darkness again. Thinking people must go to war against it: against the exultation and fetishization of all its base impulses, against the denigration of human life and the devaluation of the human person, and against the vile particularist passions of the world. And to go to war requires that one have a clear conception of who is fighting whom.

What man requires is a return to first principles: and modern man's first principle, long before he was industrious or economic or intellectual, was spiritual. He understood himself as arising from a natural order ordained by a rationally-provable God. He understood faith to be not a mere assertion of hope in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, but a willful trust in what reason has revealed to be true, no matter how much his unreliable senses scream out against it. And he understood that to embrace that order was to live virtuously, and thus rationally, and that to rebel against it was to reject the rationality of the soul that had been given to him by God and therefore to live in sin and disorder.

When I realize this, suddenly the mere collapse of economies or societies or even civilizations seems woefully unimportant. What matters, and what is at stake here, is the collapse of man: whether he is able to embrace his noblest traits -- his reason and his will -- and so to transcend the animality of his sensory soul, or whether he will become enthralled to his passions and his senses, rebel against all order and reason, and exile himself into spiritual darkness. What is at stake is souls, by the billions. What is at stake is Heaven.

Unlike many non-theists, Proph understands that the ideals of the enlightenment that so many secular humanists praise are no sound basis for a functional and sustainable society. And that while Man is a spiritual and moral agent, his efforts to concoct a rational morality without God are futile and merely a sure-way down the road of self-destruction. In light of this, it makes perfect sense to view the Body of Christ, His Church, as a light amidst a dark and fallen world, and that what theologians describe as "the violation of the will of God" is indistinguishable from the observable evil that we see violating an individual's consciousness, ruining a families' stability, and even threatening our society's very survival.

Proph has just made that leap:

And a return to first principles starts at home. So I'm joining the Roman Catholic Church -- bending my knee to Rome, as it were, and to the God whose will is all that sustains the universe in every second. The Church has been reduced to a pale shade of its former fierceness, but it is the last and best hope for the redemption of the world.

I begin the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults in a month or two. Wish me luck.

Very good news indeed. It touches me even more after realizing that I just started praying for him not more that a few weeks ago. Its likely true that his transformation was a gradual one, but its encouraging to see the fruits of an answered prayer.