Sacraments and Human Nature

Human nature guides us toward God. Human nature, as cliched in a huge amount of movies, seems to make us want to be a part of something bigger. While this isn't labeled as God in common culture, that’s what it is. Christ is pouring out, offering, grace for us to have, and it is our nature to take it. Since we want to be closer to God, it makes sense that whatever helps us become closer to God would also be a part of human nature. As such, Sacraments are a part of our nature. Moreover, Sacraments reflect something that humanity has reflected for all of its existence: progress. Grace helps us become better as people, and closer to God. Just like we strive to be closer to God, humanity has strove to become better as a race, be it through technology or philosophy or anything at all. Humanity strives to become better, and Christ gives us the grace to be better than our sin.

However, there is one specific sacrament that is visibly ingrained into the human psyche. Matrimony. Throughout history, there have been thousands of different cultures, religions, and practices of people from different locations. One thing that remains constant is the desire for love and marriage. People want’ to find love; people want to be a part of a relationship. This makes no physical sense. Rationally, we do not love. There is no love we can fathom rationally because it is inherently an emotive thing. That means love, and the quest for love, brings us emotionally closer to those of the opposite sex and to God.

The Sacraments Correspondence to Humanity

Through the Sacraments humanity is able to reach closer to God. The Sacraments are about the relationships with God and with each other. They relates to the human nature because of their goal and what they accomplish through their fulfillment. They accomplish two major things that relate to the connection to the human nature: the relationships and togetherness in faith of God and each other it requires, and how it brings us closer to God and doing so by living or following what he instructed to us while he was on earth.

The Sacraments force a togetherness and unity upon you and others who participate in them. It brings unity and connection and it is accomplished through faith. From marriage to Baptism they both require an installation and a recognition of faith in God and with others on earth. By living with and in connection of people and pursuing the Sacraments one is living as they should in the human nature. The Sacraments keep one’s human nature alive and thriving both on earth and later on in heaven.

The Sacraments bring us into connection with God. They help us endure life and do so through faith and purity. The ultimate goal in life is to be with God in the end and that is done through a life of faith and purity, living as Christ intended. Through the sacraments we can accomplish a life of virtue living in communion and in a relationship with God as he intended for the human nature from the start.

Easter vs. Christmas

There has been a long philosophical question about whether Easter or Christmas is more important. This is pretty simple to a Catholic like me. Definitely Easter. However, there are arguments on both sides, and in this post I'll discuss them and refute those who are wrong.
The first argument for why Christmas is more important is that Christmas precludes because Christ had to be born. However, there are two responses to this. First, this commits the fallacy of origin: stating that since one thing comes from another we must value the first one as the second is valuable. Second, Christmas has no meaning without Easter. Christmas would just be an average birthday party except for the fact Christ is the Son of God. Further, Christ was Incarnated for the purpose of Easter, and the Paschal Mystery. THis means even with the fallacious preclusion argument, Easter comes first.
The question that arises is why people celebrate Christmas so much when Easter us truly more important  IT's a simple answer. People celebrate Christmas to make a religious holiday more secular. The only reason Catholic and other denominational schools celebrate with two weeks off is because it's around the middle of the year. IT doesn't have to do wit the
 holiday itself, but with the time the holiday falls in the year. I once asked an Atheist if she celebrated Christmas and she said "yea Christ was a great guy and we celebrate that." I heard that and I had a mini heart attack. Christ isn't just some person like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Christ is much more. Christ is God Incarnate on Earth. Christmas is just secularized to become more acceptable to those outside the Church so they can celebrate it as well. It is by no means more importnat than Easter.

God and Intuition

With every idea comes some kind of blatant assertion. You can warrant a claim with many different reasons, but eventually you reach a conclusion that is not rational. It is merely a warrantless assertion. While philosophers like Thomas Nagel have used this as a way to exploit a theory of subjectivity, the human mind seems to operate on a different level. Even with these odd, supposedly universal, assertions, there is still a gut feeling that makes people agree or disagree with certain beliefs. This implies a human intuition.

While we know this human intuition exists, it makes no sense to confine it to evolution. While evolution has enhanced our ability to think philosophically, it still hasn't managed to change our intuition. Things liek killing are intuitively bad. There is still an intuitive appeal to progress. While this theory could be butchered and mislabeled as the whims of instinct, they operate on a much higher level. Everyone has this gut feeling, but there is no knowledge of where it comes from. However, by tracing historical roots, one comes to the realization that most of these ideas of ethics stem from a religious sense of God. That means God is the true philosopher, and he dictates the human intuition, which describes what is moral and immoral when our beliefs come down to the nitty gritty assertions without rational warrant. This is more than a proof of God, however. This is also a reason why we ought to follow God. God's guidance allows us to follow what we think to be secularly true. B following God's will and allowing him to guide our life, we improve our sense of ethics and thus become better human beings.

God and Interpersonal Relationships

As Catholics, it is our obligation to become closer to God. While it seems easy, and good, in a vacuum, people aren't sure how it actually helps us in our day to day life. One way it helps us, however, is through our relationships with others. .
Our relationships with others are hard to describe. When pressed, I think I could possibly get an idea of how someone is and what I think of them, but it isn't exactly easy. This is because interpersonal relationships are more than just rational. Relationships are built upon things like trust, things like love, that we cannot truly rationalize. you can't rationalize loving someone because the structure of our nature makes it a meta-rational idea. God must therefore be the source of our emotive relationships. Why? If the human mind cannot rationalize something that we know exists, there must be something that explains it that exceeds rational capacity. This is God. God is the source of our meta-rational thoughts and feelings. This means incorporating God into a relationship is merely bringing t light the already important bond formed by him. Also, bringing God into a relationship strengthens it insofar as it puts a metaphysical, meta-rational arbiter between them. When two people find a love of God, happiness, through their relationships with each other, the relationship becomes that much stronger.