Denver, Colo., May 31, 2018 / 03:09 am (CNA).- Earlier this year, a 25-year-old man smashed his rental van into innocent pedestrians in downtown Toronto on a Tuesday, killing 10 and injuring more than a dozen.
The driver was not part of the usually-suspected terrorist networks. Instead, he was found to be part of the “incels” – short for involuntary celibates – an obscure online community of mostly men who blame women and society for their lack of a sex life. They believe the distribution of sex in the world to be unfair – particularly to them.
Their once dark and largely-unknown corner of the internet has since garnered some attention following the attack, prompting New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to posit that sex robots will be society’s answer to the incels – the logical way to pacify their lust before they turn more vans on innocent civilians.
“Whether sex workers and sex robots can actually deliver real fulfillment is another matter,” Douthat wrote. “But that they will eventually be asked to do it, in service to a redistributive goal that for now still seems creepy or misogynist or radical, feels pretty much inevitable.”
A subsequent cover story on sex robots featured in New York Magazine noted that some research has predicted that by 2050, sex robots will not just be for the angry incels, but for society at large. People will have – and possibly prefer – intimate relationships to sex robots than to people, the story predicted.
Are we more than an orgasm?
Sr. Mary Patrice Ahearn is a psychologist and a religious sister with the Religious Sisters of Mercy in Alma, Michigan.
Ahearn said that the rise in communities like incels and the prospect of relationships with sex robots points to the fact that society has forgotten God, or the transcendental aspect of the human experience.
“I think what they’re both pointing to, which nobody talks about, is the transcendental desire or part of each of us,” she said. “(W)hen we take out this transcendental part, or dare I say faith or God, you have to fill that void with something.”
People need to seriously grapple with the transcendental ache and longing that they feel in their lives, and come to terms with what that might mean, rather than looking to fill the void with sex robots or other technology, she said.
“So I would ask the question: Is the deepest desire in your heart to be sexually satisfied, to have an orgasm? Is that the deepest desire of my heart? And people have to seriously ask those questions,” she said.
“Everyone has this desire for sex,” Ahearn said, “but so do the cows we drive by on the road, we all have that.”
Not only is society increasingly irreligious and unwilling to acknowledge the transcendental, but humanity is also losing some of the basic bonds of family and friendship to technology, bonds which used to allow people to experience intimacy outside of sexual relationships, she added.
“We’re more connected than ever if you think of technology and all the ways that we can communicate,” she said. But it doesn’t always lead to deeper human relationships because it’s “this constant checking with their devices, just constant restlessness with it.”
The rise of the incels and the sex robot seem to be indications (albeit extreme ones) of another societal problem – we’re really, deeply lonely.
The loneliness problem
Recent research has shown that Americans are lonelier than ever, and technology may be the biggest culprit. A 2016 study found a strong correlation between amounts of time spent on social media and depression in young adults – the longer one lingered on sites like Facebook and Instagram, the more depressed they were.
Last year, former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy began warning of a loneliness epidemic, a public health crisis he says has gone largely ignored but that nonetheless has detrimental impacts on people’s physical and emotional well-being.
Just last month, a survey of Americans conducted by Cigna insurance company also found that people are lonelier than ever – especially the young. At least half of the survey respondents identified themselves as lonely, and the average American scored a 44 on the UCLA-created “loneliness” scale, qualifying them as, well, lonely. The Cigna survey also found that how people used social media mattered – those who used it to reach out and make real connections were less lonely than those who just passively scrolled through feeds.
Cristina Barba is the founder and executive director of The Culture Project, an organization which sends teams of young people to high schools and youth groups to “proclaim the dignity of the human person and the richness of living sexual integrity, inviting our culture to become fully alive.”
In their work with young people, Barba said they have found that technology is exacerbating the already-emerging problems of social isolation in American culture to the extreme. Not only are young people more lonely, she said, they often do not know how to make authentic, real-world connections.
“It’s a combination of a lot of things,” Barba told CNA. “The breakdown of family and marriage, families move far apart from each other, people not even having their parish worship communities like they used to…those are all broader societal issues.” “But I think what is most pervasive and most recent is technology,” she added. “Technology has just taken this to the next level, much more quickly.”
Barba’s findings match up with what researcher and psychologist Jean Twenge found among what she calls iGen, the generation after Millennials that grew up never knowing a world without the internet and smartphones.
“Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation,” Twenge said in a September 2017 article for The Atlantic. “Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements ‘A lot of times I feel lonely,’ ‘I often feel left out of things,’ and ‘I often wish I had more good friends.’ Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since,” Twenge said.
The Culture Project itself started out as a community of friends that came together, bonding over the fact that they had tried the culture’s path to happiness in various ways and had found it wanting, Barba noted.
Instead of “sitting around and moaning” about it, Barba said that group of friends decided to do something to make a difference. They started living in community, and forming the mission of The Culture Project, which gives talks to teens throughout the country about chastity and living lives of sexual integrity.
But while community has been a “key pillar” for The Culture Project, they’ve found that technology has made it so that teens today do not know how to form community or even friendships among themselves, let alone romantic relationships.
“We’ve had parents coming to us and say, ok it’s great that you’re talking about virtue and dating, but my kids don’t even know what it means to have a friend. Can you talk about friendship?”
Today’s teens are a generation that has been raised on the internet and social media, Barba said, which means that their idea of friendship equates to that of a follower.
“It’s like a show that you’re putting on,” she said, “it’s people that follow you and people that you follow. It’s not an interaction, the only interaction is to make others jealous, or to be cooler than or to prove yourself. There isn’t actually a meeting of common interests, or someone you do stuff together with, someone you care about. All of those things are lost through social media at a young age.”
‘Encounter’ as a solution
Culture Project missionaries address the friendship crisis in multiple ways throughout their encounters with teens, Barba said. One of the most effective ways to address this crisis has been simply modeling authentic, healthy friendships among the Culture Project teams.
“It’s actually them seeing the interactions of our missionaries – a couple guys who are normal, fun, attractive young men and women who are a little bit older than them…and they see these people interacting and it’s a beautiful, healthy, normal dynamic of friendship,” she said. “What we model in our interactions is what is profound and shocking to them.”
They also take the time to address social media, and bring to their students’ attention how much time they are probably spending on social media, and how it could be impacting their relationships.
Pornography and sexting – major pitfalls for young adults in a technology driven world – are also important to address.
The idea is not to bash technology, which is a neutral tool, Barba said, but to raise awareness of how addicted they have likely become to their devices, and to offer practical tips to counter that with more human interaction in their lives.
“We just bring to their attention – what are the ways that we use this? And wow, how many hours a day am I really on that?”
The challenge students to do media fasts – whether that’s an hour a day, or even a week, that they don’t use social media, and see how they feel during that time.
They also challenge them to fill that time with real human interaction – and they’ve had to come up with basic friendship guidelines to teach students how to do this.
“We’re literally making suggestions – and I just have to laugh – it’s the way people need dating guides right now, but it’s like friendship guides,” Barba said. “Like what do friends do? You could meet and go to the mall. You could meet and go to the movies. You could meet and go for a walk. I’m not even kidding.”
While the problem is not one that is easily fixed, Barba said she and her missionaries have found that little efforts can make a big difference.
“I think even just providing a space for young people, whether its a physical space or an event, but providing activities they can do together,” she said.
“It’s so basic, just basic human things, like families and parents spending time together. Or basic community, what parish life used to be or should be – people living near each other, that care about each other, that worship together, that have fun together, that have meals together, things like that,” she said.
[…]
I thought a Catholic who is in mortal sin, if he was informed of the teaching of the Church. I also thought that according to canon law is is not longer in the Church. Is this the case?
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was excommunicated latae sententiae decades ago. Unfortunately no Bishop responsible for his soul has ever had the nerve to codify that fact by issuing a ferendae sententiae excommunication.
His life long mockery of the faith will be addressed, finally, during his particular judgment.
Bishop Paprocki had the moral courage [something that should be done without hesitation although a rarity these days among clerics deserving reference as moral courage] to deny pro-abortion congressman Dick Durbin the Eucharist. And I believe he, along with Archbishop Cordileone would likely deny faux Catholic president Biden.
Biden has gone beyond reasoned propriety to expand abortion to extremes, as well as the imposition of disordered sexual behavior on society, religious institutions including the moral rape of children, in cases providing jurisdiction to remove children from parents to have them indoctrinated and sexually mutilated. What’s equally scandalous is that His Holiness doesn’t emit a peep in disapproval. Should there be wonder why we’re witnessing an apostasy? Our bishops and cardinals are left with the obligation to lead the Church out of this cauldron of evil.
It’s time to notice the extent of the gangrene…
Yes, Bishop Paprocki refers to the Fifth Commandment; yes, Cardinal Gregory identifies Biden as yet another “cafeteria Catholic,” and yes, His Holiness “doesn’t emit a peep.” We might note that the scriptural account of creation not only refers to binary man and woman, but firstly the binary relationship between good and evil.
OUR affliction today is the fluid denial of both binaries. Each denial contained within the other…
BIDEN symbolically signs himself at a pro-abortion rally precisely because the incoherent zeitgeist is already rooted in the (im)purely physical spectrum of gender theory. The discounted “sins below the belt” and Biden’s advocacy of total abortion and the pro-LGBTQ religion are two sides of the same coin.
AND as for the so-called “infinite” value (rather than immense) of the human person, what then of the distinction between the infinite God and finite Man? In Dignitas Infinita why might we detect the language of historical “consciousness” subliminally eclipsing the language of personal consciences? Is the gangrene in the “field hospital” Church so advanced that the patients no longer even comprehend to Judeo-Christian cosmos?
TODAY, our prayers are with “Eucharistic Renewal,” and yet we recall that Archbishop Cardileone’s original proposal was for Eucharistic Coherence—as between faith and actions. A “coherence” now obliterated under the crypto-Aztec Biden’s anti-Catholic/Natural Law agenda. Instead, the spectrum of anti-thought and maybe the ideology of harmonized polarities (the crypto-blessing under Fiducia Supplicans)—but no longer the violation of this or that Commandment, nor the quaint selectivity of merely “cafeteria” Catholics…
The Contradiction of the Cross is replaced by Biden’s fluid “sign of the crossing” of the Rubicon…into Nietzsche’s post-Christian “transvaluation of values.” And, into the rejection of binary human sexuality as now coupled (!) with the rejection of binary GOOD and EVIL.
Fr. Peter, I have long admired your commentary on this website, and I agree with what you say here.
But there is one thing that I would like to call to your attention, since I’m sure that your statement was inadvertent.
You said that Biiden wants to “expand abortion to extremes.”
I want to remind you that there is no abortion that is not extreme. Killing one single baby — at any stage of development — is hideous, unthinkable, extreme in the utmost sense.
Not splitting hairs here, but exactly what is a “ faux Catholic”? No, perhaps he is a real Catholic in deep trouble. To my knowledge he has yet to be publicly excommunicated nor to be publicly declared self excommunicated. Exactly WHY I don’t understand at all, but -if I not mistaken- I believe that is up to the higher clergy, not the lay, to determine. He is a brother who needs much prayer.
James, if and when you’re ordained a priest then you can make that determination in the confessional.
James, I guess I gave a glib response and I apologize. What responsibility I have as a priest references what’s manifest in a person’s behavior. Insofar as judgments, and some are necessary in the external forum there are indicators that guide us to make a moral assessment. With Biden we have direct and blatant statements of ‘disagreement’ with obligatory Catholic doctrine. Furthermore, he has an obvious obsession to dismiss moral justice in favor of a party agenda, that apparently is consistent with his own, perhaps his own even more extreme.
While there was and still is the issue of papal interference with Catholic candidates to the presidency on the Constitutional principle of no [one] religion is to have sway within a government [based on the Church of England prominence in government affairs], the principle of separation of Church and State the Constitution doesn’t prohibit any given religion to freely express its differences or priorities. Nonetheless it has been consistently misinterpreted especially by Democrats that Catholics will be controlled by the Vatican on moral issues particularly abortion, same sex relations.
The enigma now is that we have a presumably Catholic president, evidently sanctioned by his Holiness [visits to the Vatican] who obsessively promotes both abortion and homosexuality to the extent of indoctrination and its legal protection. His Holiness remains silent. As do most bishops except an honest few. As if speaking directly and openly regarding the moral injustices of this president were an abrogation of the Constitution. That is a disordered opinion. Disordered due to reversal in the order of legal right [for a religion to express its differences] and moral right [for a Roman pontiff to chastise a politician be he representative or president]. That, on the most grave issues regarding life or death, salvation or damnation. American bishops seem to be silent regarding Biden because of this misconstrued sense of Church interference in the affairs of State. That line of illegality or moral impropriety does not exist regarding Biden. He should and must be excommunicated. For sake of the truth of our faith and our loyalty to the Constitution.
Articulate and measured statement from a straight-talking bishop.
May his tribe increase.
And now it’s time for all the other bishops in the USA to grow a spine and publicly support what Bishop Paprocki has said about excommunicated Catholic Biden. (Just don’t hold your breath waiting.)
It’s an indictment of the horrific state of Catholic faith formation that a Bishop has to state what should be very obvious to any Catholic. The Bishop, rightfully, is fulfilling his teaching mission but, if our priests would give homilies that align with our faith and not namby pamby, “be good” homilies, maybe things will change for the better, namely, not of the world – Satan.
The Saginaw bishop recently said he was just stupid.
It seems that more and more Priests – just plain Priests at first and now Bishops and Cardinals – are FINALLY finding the nerve to speak up about what has been incredibly obvious for a few decades to those of us in the pews who put what we can into the collection plate each and every week. It seems to be Joe Biden, our devout ‘catholic’ president who has unwittingly become responsible for this, and so the democrats’ irony-deficiency continues unabated.
When will they ever learn?
Conservative bishops are very good at making careful statements. While it is true that Bishop Paprocki has taken some a couple of limited actions, like telling Durbin he can’t receive Communion, they are not close to being enough. Granted, the bishop of Springfield, Illinois can only do so much. Perhaps, though, at the very least he can call out the Cardinal Archbishop of DC for enabling and protecting Biden instead of giving the impression that he and Gregory are of a single mind. At this stage in the Francis era, I don’t expect much from hierarchs who have more of less gone along with the entire program. However, if they are going to make declarations that only elicit yawns or laughs from our enemies, they probably should not say anything at all.
This makes me think of Dante’s Inferno. I wonder what level of hell people like Biden will occupy 🤔. God is not mocked.
As for biden, he is a heretic-end of subject. As for the popes below the belt stupidity, I suggest he read about what Mary stated per sins of the flesh.
Biden has a long record of publicly supporting serious sins while simultaneously claiming to be Catholic. At present, though, he clearly does not always know where he is, who he is with, or what is going on. It’s impossible to say what his intentions were when he made the Sign of the Cross, just as it is impossible to know what his intentions were when he said, “God save the queen!”
Why are you making excuses? Biden’s intentions and character have been clearly and consistently revealed in his words and actions for several years at this point.
Who’s making excuses? He was a bad man before he was senile. Now that he is senile, though, it is largely pointless to pretend every action he takes is the result of a clear-headed decision, whether for good or for evil.
I’m more offended by his simulation of the sacrament of marriage when he was V.P. than by him making the Sign of the Cross.
The rich man died and went to Hell not because he had hurt the poor beggar Lazarus, but because he had lived as though Lazarus wasn’t there, as though the suffering of Lazarus wasn’t happening. (Luke 16:19-31)
Christ again makes clear that we will be damned for grave sins of omission when He declares that on judgement day, He will say to those on His left hand, “Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire … for I was hungry and you gave me not to eat, thirsty and you gave me not to drink … ” and goes on to list basic human needs the lack of which He Himself had experienced in the suffering of the least of His brethren. (Matthew 25:31-46)
These hard sayings of Christ are the reason why St. Cyprian, in his treatise On Works and Alms exhorts the flock to do good works and to give alms, not by focusing on the dire plight of the needy, but instead focusing on the fact that their salvation is at stake.
Worldwide, over a billion innocent children of God, Christ in the least of His brethren, have been murdered through “legal” abortion. (No state has the authority to legalize the murder of innocent humanity. That fact was established at the Nuremberg Trials, where prosecutors treated “legal” abortion as a crime against humanity.)
Countess temporarily confused children have had their genitalia surgically or chemically mutilated, “legally.” The sex trafficking of children has become a multi-billion dollar a year business in the United States.
Have we been living as though these things weren’t happening to the innocent children of God? Christ Himself is experiencing these things in the least of His precious brethren.
Even though massive civil disobedience is arguably justified by the current situation, many Catholics will rationalize voting for candidates who are advocates of these atrocities or who are unwilling to alter public policy in order to end them.
It is the duty of the Catholic clergy to exhort the flock regarding their obligation to use the political freedom they still possess to end these atrocities for the sake of Christ unjustly suffering again in these little ones; after all, the salvation of the flock is at stake. The clergy will begin that exhortation or one day hear God almighty incarnate say to them “Depart from me, you cursed …”
Read the White House official proclamation on March 30 2024 of March 31 2024 as Transgender Day of Visibility:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/03/30/a-proclamation-on-transgender-day-of-visibility/
MARCH 30, 2023
A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility