Lean Left

. . . and just three days before fraudulently becoming a Christian!

 (I’m sorry about these, but it’s like eating potato chips – her blog is an entire bag full of salty morsels of stupidity, and you can’t stop with just one.)

Basically, Eden has been boring people to tears for months about how she recently found Jesus and the Pope and the unbelievably tedious writings of C.S. Lewis, and has been preparing for her first, um, whatever, to become an official Catholic. That day finally came last week, not that she’s stopped writing about it.

But – just before doing that, she posted a truly bizarre rant about how having sex without becoming pregnant is like French kissing with artifical saliva. (I’m not making this up.) No one can figure out what it means, but it prompted a lot of commentary. And in that commentary thread, dated three days before her Catholic debut, she had this to say:

I’m not a dualist. What you do to your body on purpose is a product of what’s in your mind and spirit, and it affects them by turn.

(But what happens to your body accidentally does not affect your mind? That makes it hard to explain all the screaming that resulted when I broke my toe. Maybe it was “spontaneous and improvisational” screaming.)

Here, Eden is attempting some philosophical jargon that she really shouldn’t mess with without training wheels. (This, by her own description, is the best thing she’s ever done. If that were true of me, I wouldn’t try to take on Descartes.) “Dualism” is one possible solution to “the mind-body problem” – the question of how the mind, a seemingly non-physical thing, is related to the body, a physical thing. “Dualism” posits that they are both distinct entities, of different types, somehow connected (Rene Descartes, who produced an influential argument for this position, thought the pineal gland was the link). “Monism” – the alternative theory – holds that they are both simply aspects of a single substance. Monism has had several variations, but today largely takes the form of seeing the “mind” as simply the name we give to the functions of the brain – a position that seems inevitable when you note that injuries to the brain have obvious effects on the mind, and the mind disappears when the brain dies even if the rest of the body remains alive. Monism in this general form is essentially the universal position now held by virtually all scientists and philosophers – a rare example of philosophical consensus.

Eden, in declaring herself “not a dualist”, is attempting to bolster her weird position on sex (“marital love is the only true sexual love that a man and woman can express to one another. Anything else sexual is not love . . . Put it this way: Suppose you discovered sushi for the first time and fell in love with the taste of it — except the only sushi place you knew was a really cheap place that left the raw fish out so long that you got food poisoning every time you ate it. . . . Would you keep eating the delicious but sickening sushi, knowing that the more you ate it, the harder it would be to forget its sickening aftereffects once you had the real sushi?” – I swear I’m not making this up). She apparently thinks “dualism” means the body and the mind don’t affect each other, so doing icky things to the body, like having sex with it, would still leave your mind pure – but she knows better: doing icky things to the body makes your mind icky too. But there are a couple of problems here.

First, both monism and dualism obviously have to agree that the mind and body do affect one another – that “what you do to your body is a product of what’s in your mind and spirit, and it affects them by turn”, regardless of her impression to the contrary. Otherwise, there’d be no way to explain how you can make voluntary actions, like moving your arm, simply by exerting a mental inclination, nor to explain how your mind becomes aware of – and influenced by – the things that happen to your body, such as pains or sensations. (Both theories are attempts to explain how that all happens; neither of them denies that it happens. It obviously happens.) Eden clearly has no idea what she’s talking about, or what the differences between monism and dualism really are. But that just means she’s confused in her own beliefs. What’s worse, though, is that those beliefs are going to send her to hell.

See, among the few people who do believe dualism, despite all evidence to the contrary, are Christians (and apparently Muslims, though I’m not sure), and especially Catholics. You have to be a dualist to be a Christian, partly because of all that talk about the “soul”, and partly because, if there’s eternal life or resurrection, there has to be something that gets resurrected, and it’s obviously not the body. (Many Christians believe that bodies will get dug up and refurbished at some later date – but they also believe the soul is still around before that time.) Dualism posits that there is an immaterial substance connected to the body in some way, and that detaches when the body dies – this being the “soul” in Christian mythology. Working out exactly how and when these things take place is an ancient and vital strand of Christian theology, but one way or another, dualism is a central part of the religion, and an explicit and official part of Catholic dogma (I believe one of the few teachings that are declared “infallible”). It’s strange to me that someone could have taken all the classes and catechisms and such that are required for conversion into the Catholic church, and still not understand this just a few days before being officially accepted (or that her catechist didn’t ferret this out and deal with it), but that’s what she says, and we have to believe her.

So, Dawn Eden officially professed the Catholic faith while explicitly denying, in her own mind, the truth of one of its most central, and inescapable, dogmas. She renounced her own soul virtually on the steps of the church itself. Sorry, Dawn – you’re going to Hell. You bought the trip almost the same day you became a card-carrying Christian, which is probably not a first but is still a notable accomplishment. (But, on the Bright side, you’re a monist, so you’re on the right side of something, at least!)