"Our civilization is suffering from a degeneration of the mind. We pride ourselves on being intellectually advanced, and yet if real culture is a knowledge of the truth, then we are less advanced than we were several centuries ago. There is such a thing as ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the Truth. Thousands of our educated minds are dedicated to the materialist philosophy which denies that man can rise above a knowledge of earthly things. Sacred Scripture informs us that when the earth passes away there will be no more time, and yet prophets of our day teach us that the only abiding reality is space and time. Realities which cannot be touched are denied. There is said to be no spiritual soul because a scalpel never revealed it; no mysteries in life because never handled in a laboratory; no world beyond because never seen through a telescope. And faith, if there be any, means only a hypothesis or a sum of probabilities. Such are the tenets of a materialism, the Dead Sea fruit of a brain softening and atrophied through the misuse of its higher power.”  ~Fulton J. Sheen,