Finland is a wonderful country. Everyone knows it. I do too. So I am really sad to write this with a Finnish museum as a motive. Having said that, I want to stress that Finland is awesome and a country worth visiting and certainly worth felling in love with! What I mention below apply more to other countries than Finland.
To the story now...
I recently went to the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki. The museum - as everything else in Finland - is very nice and organized. The exhibits were all awesome and the whole visit was very entertaining and educational.
Until...
I went to see some polar animals in a place with funny lights. There, among the - again interesting - exhibits I saw a painting of Virgin Mary. My immediate reaction was enthusiasm. Inside the museum they had for some reason a religious image! How wonderful and unexpected!
Then the harsh truth came to ruin everything...
According to the information below the painting, the place we were was part of a chapel and we were standing - as it seemed by the space geometry - inside the shrine of that chapel! Bewilderment and puzzlement were the first reactions, which were immediately replaced by anger and sadness.
The holy place where no one could enter except the priest was now full of disco colors and animals, right next to a picture which only served as a reminder of the real purpose of this place. I am sure Fins did not mean anything wrong by this - nonetheless they did perpetrate something very wrong. Not as part of a great conspiracy against Christianity (the fight against Christianity is well beyond the conspiracy level now, it is out in the open) but as part of the ugliest face of atheism today: Indifference. Apathy. Hollowness.
Indifference towards anything religious. Apathy towards any of the great metaphysical questions which men strive to answer for thousands of years. Hollowness expressed via a shallow interest for knowledge without realizing that any knowledge without the necessary theological substrate only leads to ugly dead ends.
Museums are much more important than museums! someone would argue. After Enlightenment there has been a great shift from religion to secular ways of achieving education and that has been one of the cornerstones of modern society. And yet, this path is not enlightened but quite the opposite: Dark as the void of space. A void in which we believe firmly, after "Enlightenment" has made us believe that we are nothing more than a speck of dust inside a irrational meaningless universe. We now "know" that we are just meat, bones and blood, nothing different than animals of the lowest form. We now "know" that we are just machines. So why care about a church which only spreads lies? Why care about religion which only sustains stupidity?
The detailed answers to all of the above lie in the thousand of articles in Harmonia Philosophica. The short answer is something like this: No, we are not just meat and bones. Every man and woman knows that we are more than that. A set of lifeless electrons cannot be alive in any sense. A set of particles is just a set of particles. Every great philosopher and scientist (including most of the founders of the physics we know today) believed that we have a soul and that God exists. Not because they were stupid and they believed anything, but because evidence and logic points towards that path! The founder of Logic, Aristotle, argued in favor of the existence of a First Cause. The greatest logician of all times after Aristotle, Godel, wrote a proof for the existence of God. The people who first believed in Christ did so because of what they saw (empirical evidence) and not because of what some stupid liar said to them. Believing in a cosmos which exists for no reason and which came to be out of nothing is much more irrational than the belief in a cosmos which was created by something/ someone. I could go on for ever, but I rest assured that anyone who wants to discover more arguments for theism can read this site in more detail. Anyone who doesn't want to do so, would have skipped this section of the article anyway.
Modern society is an expert in disguising ugliness with shallow beauty. Enlightenment did cover everything with the cloak of "freedom" and no one paid attention that this meant you are free to believe in anything except if you are a Christian. In that case they got you and the guillotine was the way to get "enlightened". Enlightenment did cover everything with the dress of "progress" and yet no one took notice that there is literally no reason to dogmatically believe that new ideas are by definition better than the old ones. Unless you want to believe modern eugenics is a better idea than the "old" belief that all men are children of God. Enlightenment did dress the ugliness of anti-Christian hate with a so-called love for "knowledge". A knowledge which leads to a dark world. Remember that Mengele had two phDs and his work was used extensively by scientists all over the world. And yet it was a work done in the darkest depths of evil. Enlightenment wants to educate everyone and yet no one realizes that education has nothing to do with morality of ethics per se (or even that the most educated men can be evil, but that is something I analyze in my paper "Against the fallacy of education as a source ethics", MCDSARE, 2019). Enlightenment praises the rush of young people to do things, and yet no one recalls that the wisdom of old men was - and still is - the source of civilization for thousands of years.
Now Helsinki does have a great museum and that is great. I will for sure go again! But this could be done in a new building (or the rest of the building) and leave the chapel where it was. If not for use (if no one is going) but at least as part of a reminder of a traditional past which we ought to respect. "Isn't it useless to keep old things which are of no use?" one could ask. I believe the bones of dead animals which existed millions of years ago can answer that. And if we go to the practical aspect, one can speak for days about the practical ways in which the church helps society. For example modern society hates religion but at the other hand loves psychology, without realizing that the church covers also many practical psychological needs of the person. Needs which a science which has the soul in its name tries to cover, even though it does not even believe in it. In an era where humans feel more and more alone (how could you not, if you have been made to believe that you are just a set of atoms in a vast nothingness) and depression is the number one disease, we love seeing dead apes and whales and bones to educate our selves and our children. And when they ask us what does this all matter, we stumble upon the great void of our soul which is still there, waiting to be fed...
Modern world has more museums now. And less churches.
Watch out all that beauty.
The devil has a pleasing face...
