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- Jun 14, 2023
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You could “say the same” to me. However you’d be completely incorrect.
Your reply, while dressed in the veneer of inevitability, rests upon a fallacy so elementary it’s hard to believe you don’t see it. You equate your default position—one of materialism and secularism—with the journey that led me to Traditional Catholicism, as though both are mere products of their respective environments. But in doing so, you ignore the overwhelming statistical probability of your position and the staggering improbability of mine. To choose Traditional Catholicism in the late 20th century—when modernism and relativism were the reigning gods—is not comparable to your absorption of secular thought, which was and remains the dominant creed of our age. Let me elucidate this for you.
You were born into a world that spoon-fed you the tenets of materialism, skepticism, and atheism—positions heralded as intellectually superior by the cultural engineers of the late 20th century. You didn’t choose this worldview; it chose you. It was poured into the minds of your generation from birth. Secularism is the air you breathe, the water in which you swim. It requires no rebellion, no courage, no great leap of thought to adopt the views you hold. They are the default setting, the product of a society that has long since lost touch with the transcendent and sees all belief in the metaphysical as childish fancy.
Now, let’s contrast that with my journey. Traditional Catholicism is not, and has not been, the dominant institution in the world I grew up in. Far from it. By the time I reached an age of reason, the forces of secular modernity had all but decimated traditional religious structures, leaving only hollow shells of what once was. Vatican II had watered down the faith; the culture of the West had fully embraced hedonism, materialism, and nihilism. In such an environment, the chances of someone like me choosing to embrace the timeless truths of the Church’s pre-modern teachings are infinitesimally small.
Do you understand the magnitude of that difference? The vast gulf between the statistical probability of someone adhering to the dominant secular paradigm (your worldview) and the near-impossibility of someone actively seeking out and embracing Traditional Catholicism? To put it bluntly, there is no comparison. You are a Normie by birthright, molded by a system that requires nothing of you except compliance with the dominant intellectual trends. I, on the other hand, had to fight for every inch of my beliefs, against the tide of modern thought, against the prevailing winds of my generation, and against the very environment you claim I am simply a product of.
You write as though my faith was handed to me, pre-packaged, by virtue of geography and ancestry, as though I passively "osmosed" my beliefs. But this is a gross distortion of reality. I was not raised in the pre-modern Ireland of pious monks and ascetic scholars, but in an era when secularism reigned supreme. Choosing Traditional Catholicism required me to reject the very norms you have passively absorbed. It required study, reflection, and a willingness to stand apart from my peers. It required me to question the assumptions handed to me by the culture, not accept them blindly as you have.
And so, when you attempt to place us on equal footing, suggesting that we are both products of our environments, you reveal just how deeply you misunderstand the nature of belief and choice. Your worldview, like that of millions of others in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, is the product of the culture industry’s relentless indoctrination. You were trained to think the way you do, to dismiss the metaphysical, to reject the spiritual, to believe that the material world is all that exists. Your skepticism is not rebellion; it is compliance. You are not the exception; you are the rule.
In contrast, my choice to embrace the eternal truths of Traditional Catholicism represents a profound rejection of the dominant ideology. It is an act of defiance against the secular orthodoxy that rules this age. The irony is that while you accuse me of being a product of my environment, you fail to see how completely you are a product of yours. Your rejection of the supernatural, far from being the result of independent thought, is simply the mainstream dogma of modernity. You are the perfect example of a Normie, the very thing you deny.
You end your reply with a flippant remark about good and evil, reducing them to mere material acts devoid of any metaphysical significance. This reductionism is the hallmark of a worldview that has been hollowed out by decades of indoctrination into the cult of materialism. You ask, “What magic?” It is right before your eyes, yet you are too blind to see it. You have been conditioned to reject anything that doesn’t fit into the narrow confines of your ideology, and you call this blindness "rationality."
There is no statistical equivalence between the choices we have made. Your opinions are the default; mine are a rejection of the dominant paradigm. You are the Normie in this discussion, and though you may reject this label, it fits you perfectly, for you embody the exact characteristics of someone who believes they are thinking independently while, in truth, they are simply parroting the ideology of their time. I, on the other hand, have chosen a path that is the antithesis of the secular, materialist age we live in, and that is why your entire comparison collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.
