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Thursday, August 9, 2018

Believers in Logos vs. Believers in Flux

Believers in Logos vs. Believers in Flux

By Jim J. McCrea

Those who believe in logos believe in the fixed essences of things: the essence of a cat, a dog, a tree, a house, and the essence of male and female.

Those who believe in flux, hold things differently. They believe that all reality is simply a stream of phenomena that impacts the senses. Thus reality is a flux or a flow. They deny fixed essences.

There is a vast difference of moral beliefs between the adherents of logos and that of flux. With those who believe in logos, fixed essences of things means that there is objective good and evil, and objective truth and falsehood, as good is that which facilitates the proper essences of things and evil is that which violates them. These are the *traditionalists.* With those who believe in flux, morality is relative and changing and depends upon circumstances. Their judgment of the good is based not the integrity of things in their essences, but on the pleasure or the pain that a given stream of phenomena gives them. Of course they have a dictum that one should not do something if it harms someone else, but that is only because harming someone else can bring blowback and pain to oneself. These latter are the *progressives.*

We can see this concretely in what believers in logos vs. believers in flux adhere to in the realm of morality. The believers in logos hold to traditional morality, because traditional morality honors the essences of things - particularly the essences of man, woman, and God. The believers in flux hold to things such as sex outside of marriage, gay marriage, freedom for abortion, doctor assisted suicide, gender fluidity, etc. We can give some examples of why this is so. As believers in flux, they tend to think that that which impacts the senses most strongly has the most reality and that which brings the most pleasure has the most goodness. As a result, believers in flux in the Catholic Church (the modernists) wish to dispense with the discipline of priestly celibacy (because the great pleasure of sex is considered a great good), and also at the same time ignore abortion as a problem (because the unborn have little impact on the senses, being hidden in the mother's womb, so it is considered that they have little reality). But believers in logos hold that a thing is what it is, independent of its impact on us, and it is reason guided by supernatural faith (divine reason) that must judge the goodness or evil of that which is presented to our senses. And this goodness or evil, is determined by whether something facilitates or violates the proper essence of a thing (particularly the essence of the human person).

Believers in flux most often do not believe in the existence of the traditional God (transcendent, infinite, and almighty). This is because they hold that the flux is simply a given and do not enquire into its ultimate cause (they may enquire into causes, but only in how one element of phenomena relates to another, in isolated bits, not its ultimate underlying cause). As a result, they reject the metaphysical principles of identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason (after all, they do not want pesky rules of reality getting in the way of what they desire in life and their liberty of mind). But believer in logos hold that if there is an intelligible essence, there must be an ultimate intelligent cause for that. Only the believers in logos properly use their reason.

To hold to flux ultimately tends to hell, because flux without logos is simply chaos (it is just a stream of phenomena without an ultimate underlying order to it). But to hold to logos is to tend to heaven because logos is ultimate order, and heaven is supreme order and harmony.

The Logos (capital 'L') is Jesus Christ, who gave us the law through His Catholic Church. He is the right order of the universe. He is the ultimate reason and logic of reality. He is the form of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Only in accepting Him and doing His will, as taught by the authentic Magisterium of the Catholic Church, do we find salvation.

Those who believe in flux might believe in Jesus, but it is a Jesus of flux (fuzzy feel goods), not Jesus the Logos.