I am moving the blog (again!) to blogspot.com. I have to move eventually because hosting for this site is going to expire in August, so I figured I’d just start now, so I can tinker with it and move somewhere else if I feel so inclined, as many times as I need before the deadline.
I sent the following to a friend of mine who is a self-proclaimed “Deist” a while ago. I was re-reading it just now and thought it might provide some insight which I haven’t mentioned before, because so much in conversations with you atheists and agnostics has focused on God’s existence…
“Speaking as a former Roman Catholic, [then] atheist, [then pseudo-]Deist, and now Roman Catholic again, I would like to tell you that what convinces me of the truth of the Christian faith, given that God exists, is the existence of evil in the world.
“If God exists, I cannot believe that he is incapable of acting in the way that the New Testament says he did, i.e. to send his only-begotten Son to save us from sin and evil; and further I cannot believe that He would be unwilling to do so. This opens up the possibility of the truth of the Christian paradigm; once this possibility is admitted, I cannot but believe that, given the evidence in the Faith handed down from our fathers, it must be so. Christ came to save us all. A simple solution to an ever-prevalent problem: Christ is the sword that clove the Gordian knot of sin and death.
“Perhaps this is not convincing. Perhaps there can be no purely rational explanation for Christianity, because like Virgil in Dante’s Comedy, human reason can only take us so far. There is a lot of literature on the philosophical basis for an epistemology of faith, and until such is understood, perhaps no faith will ever make sense. As for me, I hold that a ‘faith informed by reason’, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, is the best option, the only way to truth, and to He who is the Truth.”
[to comment on this post goto the new blog…]
I just read a story in Reuters’ “Oddly Enough” about Pierre Pinoncelli. After reading his biography, I am left with only one thought:
This madman is my hero.
Why?
Yeah!
This is a neat little addictive flash game I found. Basically the idea is that you have these “enemies” [dots] coming toward your “castle” and to protect your ten “citizens” you build and upgrade defense towers. You gain money for upgrades and new towers by killing the invaders. Each invader that gets in kills a citizen, and when all citizens die, you lose.
I got to wave 77, see if you can beat my score :)
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God.” (John 3:16-21, RSV)
Emphasis mine, the part relevant to the latest discussion on the email list.
“‘Faith comes from what is heard’, says St. Paul (Rom. 10:17). This might seem like a very transient factor, which can change; one might be tempted to see in it purely and simply the result of one particular sociological situation, so that one day it would be right to say instead, ‘faith comes from reading’ or ‘from reflection’. In reality it must be stated that we have here much more than the reflection of a historical period now past. The assertion ‘faith comes from what is heard’ contains an abiding structural truth about what happens here. It illuminates the fundamental differences between faith and mere philosophy, a difference that does not prevent faith, in its core, from setting the philosophical search for truth in motion again. One could say epigrammatically that faith does in fact come from ‘hearing’, not — like philosophy — from ‘reflection.’ Its nature lies in the fact that it is not the thinking out of something that can be thought out and that at the end of the process is then at my disposal as the result of my thought. On the contrary, it is characteristic of faith that it comes from hearing, that it is the reception of something that I have not thought out, so that in the last analysis thinking in the context of faith is always a thinking over of something previously heard and received.
“In other words, in faith the word takes precedence over the thought, a precedence that differentiates it structurally from the architecture of philosophy. In philosophy the thought precedes the word; it is after all a product of the reflection that one then tries to put into words; the words always remain secondary to the thought and thus in the last resort can always be replaced by other words. Faith, on the other hand, comes to man from outside, and this very fact is fundamental to it. It is — let me repeat — not something thought up by myself; it is something said to me, which hits me as something that has not been thought out and lays an obligation on me. This double structure of ‘Do you believe? — I do believe!’, this form of the call from outside and the reply to it, is fundamental to it. It is therefore not at all abnormal if, with very few exceptions, we have to say: I did not come to believe through the private search for truth but through a process of reception that had, so to speak, already forestalled me. Faith cannot and should not be a mere product of reflection. The idea that faith really ought to arise through our own thinking it up for ourselves and finding it in the process of a purely private search for truth is basically the expression of a definite ideal, an attitude of mind that fails to recognize the intrinsic quality of belief, which consists precisely in being the reception of what cannot be thought out — responsible reception, it is true, in which what is heard never becomes entirely my own property, and the lead held by what is received can never be completely wiped out, but in which the goal must be to make what is received more and more my own, by handing myself over to it as the greater.” (Introduction to Christianity pp. 91-2)
According to the Christian Science Monitor, the new ‘hip’ thing to do is… move to the slums of Rio de Janeiro!
Someone needs to tell these people that you don’t need to leave your own country to visit the slums…
Apparently the NFL forbade an Indianapolis Baptist church from having a Super Bowl party due to copyright law, and the church complied. Many churches across the nation heard and followed suit!
I love the first comment posted on the above-linked blog post:
Would this stupidity count as one of the signs that the apocalypse is near? After all Matt 24:15 says:
“When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)”
The holy place is the Church. Forbidding people from watching the game in church is an abomination that will leave many desolate. So on Sunday, we must all go to church and pray that the wicked repent and let us watch the game in church in future years?
More from Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity:
“The Christian attitude of belief is expressed in the little word ‘Amen’, in which the meanings trust, entrust, fidelity, firmness, firm ground, stand, truth all interpenetrate each other; this means that the thing on which man can finally take his stand and that can give him meaning can only be truth itself. Truth is the only ground suitable for man to stand upon. Thus the Christian act of faith intrinsically includes the conviction that the meaningful ground, the logos, on which we take our stand, precisely because it is meaning, is also truth.
“Meaning or sense that was not truth would be nonsense. The indivisibility of meaning, ground, and truth that is expressed both in the Hebrew word ‘Amen’ and in the Greek logos at the same time intimates a whole view of the world. The way–for us inimitable–in which words such as these embrace the indivisibility of meaning, ground, and truth throws into relief the whole network of coordinates by which the Christian faith surveys the world and takes up its position in relation to it. But this also means that in its original nature belief or faith is no blind collection of incomprehensible paradoxes. It means, furthermore, that it is nonsense to plead the ‘mystery’, as people certainly do only too often, by way of an excuse for the failure of reason. If theology arrives at all kinds of absurdities and tries, not only to excuse them, but even where possible to canonize them by pointing to the mystery, then we are confronted with a misuse of the true idea of ‘mystery’, the purpose of which is not to destroy reason but rather to render belief possible as understanding. In other words, it is certainly true that belief or faith is not knowledge in the sense of practical knowledge and its particular kind of calculability. It can never become that, and in the last analysis it can only make itself ridiculous if it tries to establish itself in those forms.
“But the reverse is also true: calculable practical knowledge is limited by its very nature to the apparent, to what functions, and does not represent the way in which to find truth itself, which by its very method it has renounced. The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself. And we must certainly add that ‘understanding’ only reveals itself in ’standing’, not apart from it. One cannot occur without the other, for understanding means seizing and grasping as meaning the meaning that man has received as ground. I think this is the precise significance of what we mean by understanding: that we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and truth; that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning.” (pg. 76-77)
I am re-reading Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity. The introduction is concerned largely with the “problem of doubt” faced by believers and nonbelievers alike (and not just in the “Modern Age”); I thought I’d share a bit:
“… If, on the one hand, the believer can perfect his faith only on the ocean of nihilism, temptation, and doubt, if he has been assigned the ocean of uncertainty as the only possible site for his faith, on the other, the unbeliever is not to be understood undialectically as a mere man without faith. Just as we have already recognized that the believer does not live immune to doubt but is always threatened by the plunge into the void, so now we can discern the entangled nature of human destinies and say that the nonbeliever does not lead a sealed-off, self-sufficient life, either. However vigorously he may assert that he is a pure positivist, who has long left behind him supernatural temptations and weaknesses and now accepts only what is immediately certain, he will never be free of the secret uncertainty about whether positivism really has the last word. Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole. He can never be absolutely certain of the autonomy of what he has seen and interpreted as a whole; he remains threatened by the question of whether belief is not after all the reality it claims to be. Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world. In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man. Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident.
“[…]
“In other words, both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction; it opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer; for one, it is his share in the fate of the nonbeliever; for the other, the form in which belief remains nevertheless a challenge to him.” (pg. 45-47)
