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.

Peyton Siva: All about the Trinity

Many people may have heard the name Peyton Siva from the 2013 National Champion Louisville college basketball squad. He has been a name often talked about from the start of the season all through march madness playing a key role in the National Championship. However, what and why does what he does is for a purpose, something much bigger than all of us, God. He plays in honor, respect, and gratitude of God. He not just realizes his talents as something of God's doing and his appreciation he tries to infiltrate that in every aspect of everything he does, on and off the court.

“My legacy I want to leave is keep God first over everything, just put your teammates above all, and play for the name on the front and not the back,” Siva said in an interview with the NY Post before the championship game. He is a man after the Greater Glory of God and nothing else; he fulfills God's mission as best as possible in spreading God's word. He has been doing so from a young age. At 13 years old he took his brothers car to find his dad, dealing drugs and in a very destructive lifestyle, who had a gun and was prepared to commit suicide. Siva Jr. just asked his dad to stop and his Siva Sr. realized that Jr. seeked to have a father and  he would continue to request that his dad go to Church with him. This changed his dad's life immediately. Siva Jr. was living for Christ at a young age.

Number 3, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the number Siva wears. He wears it for this very reason, to honor God, for the Greater Glory of God. He initiates God as much as possible with everything he does and thanks him for his life, and his father's. Russ Smith, Louisville's leading scorer, said, “He cares so much about everyone else that the whole world just loves him.” This is how Christ intends for us to live and in doing so he does so in and with God never compromising God. 

Siva Jr. not only helped his dad. At every opportunity that arises, no matter the situation, he helps people, such as in high school he helped his friend who continuously went down a troubled path. He asked for him to move in with him so he could help him get his life straight. Peyton Siva did this on his own; he lives for Christ with out being told or forced to but rather cause he chooses to. This is why he is truly a man of Christ. He puts all others in front of himself because he puts God as his primary source for everything just as Christ intended.

Indulgences and Purgatory

First of all: what is Purgatory in the first place? Purgatory is when someone iwth the right disposition, i.e. a disposition to God, dies without being in full union with God. Unlike Heaven itself, Purgatory is temporal. That means it has a specific time that you are in Purgatory. Whether that is in days or weeks or months or years is not known by our Earthly souls. However, we do know that it is the stepping stone from Earth, and death, to eternal life in Heaven. This is just what brings us closer to God.
So that brings us to indulgences. One of the huge topics of the Protestant Reformation was that of indulgences. There is an equally huge misunderstanding on what indulgences are. Indulgences aren't forgiveness you can just buy. They aren't permissions you can get to sin in the future. They aren't even anything you really should pay money for. Rather, they are more like suggestions. It's like working out. If you work out with the right disposition and you do it well enough, you will probably lose weight. With indulgences, you don't lose any weight, but you shave off time in Purgatory. This means that your time becoming closer to God is spent on Earth and not after death, meaning after you die you pretty much get some time off your God-therapy.
So how do you get an indulgence? Each bishop has the authority to give out one partial indulgence per year. If you do this indulgence the right way, with the right disposition, you should get some time off of Purgatory. If you don't end up getting some time off Purgatory, it doesn't mean the Church, which is founded and guided by Christ, has no authority. Rather, it means you, the sinful, finite human being, didn't do it right. The Pope has the ability to give one permanent indulgence per year. This means if you do it correctly you get a free pass to heaven. However, this indulgence has to rectify something that occurred in the first place. In order to truly get rid of time on Purgatory, you must remain in a state close to God for the rest of your life. Just as you distance yourself from God in the first place, you can do so again, which means you have to avoid doing that if you truly want to go directly to Heaven.