First Holy Communion

In May 2006 I decided to go back to the Roman Catholic Church, after my visit to the Benedictine Abbey in Vaals (see my report of it on this blog here). It will take too long to elaborate on my feelings and emotions to do so, and I don't want to evangelize, so I will leave it with this sheer announcement. I discussed it with my wife, who is not R.C. but religious nevertheless in e very spiritual way and she agreed on having our son baptized and having his first Holy Communion. This happened yesterday, it was a very heart-warming event. Two of our friends agreed to be godparents, and they appeared not to have agreed just for doing a favour to us. What an experience, what people can mean for each other in this world where it seems they only can compete and fight! Menno's girlfriend (his "foster-sister" he says) who had never been in a church before, also attended the service. The only thing she suffered from during it was sitting still (she is eight years young).

I also notice that since my photomania after the purchase of my digital camera and since the warm weather has started, I feel less urge to hold long philosophical deliberations on this blog, but as soon as I get more time (holidays) these will return, I promise. At the moment I'm still thinking about evolution and all that concerns it, and reading the essays of Stephen Jay Gould (he is imbatable as an essayist) and asking myself if everything is just a cause-and-effect product or can intentions be identified in the development and processes of nature? Of course, there is one Great Intention (otherwise I wouldn't be there, I refuse to see myself as a cause-and-effect product), but can intentions be discovered in an observable way? Gould wrote an essay about "male nipples" and showed that these have no intentions given to them by nature, but that they simply are by-products ignored by nature because they don't harm any reproduction or surviving facility. He convincingly shows how people and cultures are so deeply immersed in this intention-idea: everything must have a function in God's creation. When I was a teenager a broke my head about the "function" of mosquitos, what good did they bring to their living environment? A creationist would say: they fertilize the flowers, but now I doubt: if there were no mosquitos the flowers would have "invented" other ways to reproduce such as the wind, other animals, etc. No, mosquitos have the right to be a great nuisance, I realize now, as part of creation and we have to accept them (within limits, of course). I think (until better insights) the same holds for other aberrations of "functional" nature such as homosexuality, and I know that the official Roman Catholic doctrine doesn't agree, but I'm sure that's not what it's about in religion.