When I see sunlight streaming down, like grace, through a hole in a cloud, it makes me think of God and how he “talks to us” in this way.  In 1997, during the passage of the Hale-Bopp comet, I went out many nights to look through binoculars at it. Comets are remnants of matter that dates back to the beginning of the Solar System, about 4.6 billion years ago.  Sometimes God uses such things to say something to us; He certainly did with the Star of Bethlehem.  You will remember that the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California thought a spaceship containing higher beings was accompanying the Hale-Bopp comet. All 39 of them killed themselves in the belief they would rendezvous with the spaceship in that way.  The otherworldly leaders of such cults are devils.  And devils always demand human sacrifice! They got 39 deaths.

     Why should so much of nature be beautiful?  Mountains, sunsets, rainbows, birds, dogs, squirrels?  Why?  My answer is that God designed them to be beautiful, for us, His other creatures.  The Baltimore Catechism says God made nature, and us, “to show forth His Goodness.” Genesis says, “God saw everything that He had made and it was good.”  Many modern scientists will say we evolved blindly out of matter and it is normal for us to admire these other collections of matter, our “molecular ancestors”, so to speak.

     That brings me to one of the most brilliant men I have ever observed, Dr. Carl Sagan.  This astronomer dazzled me and many others with his glittering PBS TV series and book, both named COSMOS.  No question that he was a genius, and a superb storyteller.  Cosmos, the book, starts out with this sentence: “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”   That just stunned me as a purposeful contradiction of the line in the Baltimore Catechism: “God always was, and always will be, and always remains the same.”  The famous Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, was the repository of hundreds of thousands of scrolls containing most of the secular knowledge of the ancient world.  According to legend, it was burned three times: (1.) In 272 AD, by order of Emperor Aurelian. (2.) In 391 AD, under Emperor Theodosius I. (3.) In 640 AD, by Muslims, under Caliph Umar I.  In Cosmos and elsewhere, Dr. Sagan blamed the 391 AD fire on St. Cyril of Alexandria and even claimed Cyril was canonized for doing so!   When I saw him make that charge on television, I did not know whether to scream or weep.  I started including Carl in my Rosaries.

     Dr. Sagan was a prominent secular humanist.  In the Humanist Manifesto, it is asserted that there is no God, no evidence for a God and no need for a God!  In fact, they say, belief in God actively retards human progress.  (I use a capital “G” for God; they use a lower case “g”.) Despite a temporarily successful bone marrow transplant and a valiant personal struggle, Dr. Sagan died in 1996.

     These are microscopic particles of blood from the Shroud of Turin, which may well be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. (As you can tell, I believe it is.)   They have been shown to be blood by Dr. Alan Adler, a chemist highly skilled in this area.  I can’t yet give you the name of the scientist who showed that the reddish substance in multiple places on the Shroud is human blood, type AB.

     That intrigues me. Of the three major blood types, A has an identifying protein; so does B. O has no identifying protein. Jesus Christ, as a universal Savior, thereby covers all three major blood types of humans:  He has the proteins for A and B and covers O by lacking the same protein that all type O’s lack.

     There is a scientist, Dr. Walter McCrone, who continues to insist that there is no blood on the Shroud.  He says that the reddish substance on the Shroud is iron oxide (rust) pigment and that the Shroud is a painting.  Both contentions have been disproved. The blood is real blood.  No other cloth image from any time shows similar photographic-like negativity.  No other cloth image contains 3-D information.  For that matter, no other photographs, except those of the Shroud, contain undistorted 3-D information.

     That brings me to the main thesis of this essay.  Since no one can say what really goes on in another person’s mind, unless that person truly tells what is going on, I can’t prove my thesis.  But, as a scientist who has dealt with many other scientists, I have found that many do not believe in God.  Scientists, more than others, are allowed to see exquisite design and order in galaxies and inside the human body.  But many reject a Designer or an Orderer.  And the vehemence some show in their disbelief has convinced me that they are not atheists!

     They are antitheists!  They strongly suspect, or even know, there is a God; and they hate Him!  They believe in complete freedom in pursuing knowledge, without moral or other limits.  Nothing is forbidden.  American “Catholic” universities have repudiated any truly Catholic limits on what can be discussed in religion and philosophy.  In 1967, a statement from a group of Catholic universities included, “there must be no forbidden books or subjects.”  This is apostasy!

     The Angel of Death of Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele, did malicious experiments on twins just to see what would happen!

     The main thing for which antitheists hate God, though, is that God requires us to keep our passions under control.  And that is completely unacceptable to the antitheist.  I don’t know so much about other countries, but America is a cesspool of impurity.  Little girls, 12y/o, sell themselves on city streets!  Similarly aged grammar school girls may consent, to be “popular.”

     The internet overflows with pornography.  A friend sent me a dancing girl who took off another garment every time you “clicked” the mouse pointer on her.  She stayed on the screen, no matter what I did to make her go away and I had to turn off the computer to escape.  And, yes, I had to escape, even at 61.  There is no age, however great, at which you can’t any longer be tempted to that sin.  At Fatima, Mary said, “Most souls are led to Hell by sins of the flesh.”  I won’t go on.  No wonder Our Blessed Mother keeps saying, in apparitions and locutions, that the World is worse than before the Flood!  Antitheists mean to eat, drink and be merry and to Hell with restrictions!

     A final note, “Hell” should always be capitalized; it is a real place, like New York City.

Ave Maria!