I've been watching the Albanians discuss the matters of God and religion and whatever else, and I'm intrigued by a phenomenon that appears common in both this society and among Albanians, who do not, uh, share a whole lot of common ground with the west.
What I notice is that many who acknowledge God, trust God, seem compelled to "defend" what they know, and so help me, sometimes even to "defend" God.
God needs no "defense," especially from fallible mortal men.
For me, it's always been automatic; God Is, and God has been present every second of my own life.
I blame this defensiveness on St. Thomas Aquinas, of circa 800 years ago.
Until he wrote his famous thesis on proofs that God exists, the general sense, the medieval European sense, was that, "Well, God Is, and there's not a damned thing anybody can do about it, so it's best to accept, adapt, and move on."
But then here came St. Thomas Aquinas with the quill and parchment, trying to "prove" the Existence of God.
That was assbackwards, and Christianity has been on the defensive ever since, for 800 years, people running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off, trying to prove or disprove the medieval scholar.
How much better it would've been, if St. Thomas Aquinas had just kept his mouth shut, and the anti-Godists compelled to prove that God does NOT exist, instead.
After all, God Is, and it's up to the skeptics, the doubters, the intolerants, the bigots, the narrow-mindeds, to prove that God isn't.
That would've changed the whole course of western civilization, western philosophy, western culture, the past 800 years, and undoubtedly for the better.
St. Thomas Aquinas was a great man, but I'd been pope, I wouldn't have canonized him, making him a saint.
