Tag Archives: Culture

No Proof – No God?

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Continuing the theme:  being “amazed how people can have core beliefs with no proof behind them?”

A response:

And amazed you should be! Seems you use that amazing brain of yours to go well beyond the five senses (you depend on for proof.) Proof, though, deals with measures. You can’t measure wonder, hope, compassion, mercy and forgiveness but you can experience them. (I forgot love.)

The response to my response:

What is it that makes you base your beliefs on the Catholic ideas rather than Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Scientologist, etc? I think they all have explanations for what’s immeasurable. Is that where the hope comes in? Just pick one and hope the others are wrong?

Amazed someone was actually asking, I got carried away:

Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, all reflect experience of this life and contain much that is true. God is not limited to speaking to Catholics. People of all faiths seek and listen for Him. However, the act of seeking and listening doesn’t make everything we image or conclude true. I think many people will  except only what doesn’t conflict with their wills and desires. Truth is not relative, however. It simply is. One belief is not as good as any other. Having an explanation doesn’t make the explanation true. For instance, Hindu pantheism saying that everything is one and everything is God; God being a force, impersonal and pervading everything throughout the universe. In fact, the universe is God. That makes God part of the material world, which obviously means He can not be spiritual in his entirety.He must share our material imperfections. He’s now subject to change. Now he possesses something. Now, he doesn’t. “Not very Godly,” I’m thinking. In fact, very limited in space and therefore not all-present. Makes it very difficult to call the Hindu idea of god, God. He’s part matter and therefore made up of parts. The Hindu God is described as impersonal making Him not a person. I am a person and possess person-hood which the Hindu God does not. I’m now one up on their idea of god. I am a person precisely because I have spiritual substance, soul. I have immaterial thoughts and like you deal with, manipulate and generate thoughts every moment of consciousness. Yet the Hindu god in not conscious, just pervasive nothingness. You can believe this if you like, but then you have to reject other ideas that contradict it. Can’t all be true, even with the best, most broadminded,  intentions. Disregarding logic makes it easier; enter pop-culture, pop-everything; not well thought out, just popular for a time. It works for awhile, but there’s still that elephant in the room-the Four Last Things.

Bringing up Death is an appeal of sorts for a need to survive, even if it only in memory or our work, our art, our writings, etc. Probably not the smartest argument to make for as Dinesh D’Souza writes, quoting Woody Allen, in D’Souza’s book, “Life After Death-the Evidence”:

“I don’t want to achieve immorality through my work. I want to achieve immorality by not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on on my apartment.”


Proof – Show Me God! And Then What?

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On Facebook: Someone “is amazed how people can have core beliefs with no proof behind them?”

Not to waste a quip that begs a spiritual work of mercy, I thought I’d take it up here, rather than beleaguering those on Facebook anymore:

It’s the old “show me” that had the Russian astronaut, Yuri  Gagarin, supposedly, saying during his famous space flight, “I don’t see any God up here.”

So what if you had proof?  Would you change? Actually, Gagarin’s words are nowhere in the verbal transcript of that flight. It suited Nikita Khrushchev to say that in a speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to fit an anti-religious agenda. So, I ask, “What’s your agenda?  What will a God with a plan and an agenda of His own mean to your life?

Here’s what I mean: when Jesus appeared in the synagogues of Galilee, it was at a time of great expectancy.  The rabbis knew the signs of Messiah.  The people had no trouble recognizing the actions of Jesus to be the actions of God: love, healing, deliverance, power over the elements, power over matter and the biggie, power over death.  Some acclaimed Him.  Many walked away. Finally the rabbis said in effect and to His mortal peril, “No way.  No Messiah! They had the Romans crucify Him on their behalf.  Jesus said, “Follow Me.” Now the people too saw where it could lead. To be fair the rabbis saw where He could lead them.  He was standing above Moses, above Sabbath and spoke not about God but as God.  He was changing everything.  Even though they prayed for Messiah to come, and this man worked the signs of Messiah, they saw change as an enemy.

So I ask again. If God shows Himself, or you are given the proof you, supposedly, seek, what will change?  Will you?  Pope Benedict in his book Jesus of Nazareth, says.:

“The people who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake are those who live by God’s righteousness – by faith.  Because man constantly strives for emancipation from God’s will in order to follow himself alone, faith will always appear as a contradiction to the “world” – to the ruling powers at any given time.”

“Show me proof.” you say.  “Show me God”…. and what?  Will you change?

Tim Tebow’s Story

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Tim Tebow celebrates life and family. Here  is the  message pro-choice forces fear:

Here is the story of Tim Tebow as told by his mom, Pam and dad, Bob.

The Mystery of Death

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From the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world of the Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et spes)
The Mystery of Death

In the face of death the enigma of human existence reaches its climax. Man is not only the victim of pain and the progressive deterioration of his body; he is also, and more deeply, tormented by the fear of final extinction. But the instinctive judgment of his heart is right when he shrinks from, and rejects, the idea of a total collapse and definitive end of his own person. He carries within him the seed of eternity, which cannot be reduced to matter alone, and so he rebels against death. All efforts of technology, however useful they may be, cannot calm his anxieties; the biological extension of his life-span cannot satisfy the desire inescapably present in his heart for a life beyond this life.

Imagination is completely helpless when confronted with death. Yet the Church, instructed by divine revelation, affirms that man has been created by God for a destiny of happiness beyond the reach of earthly trials. Moreover, the Christian faith teaches that bodily death, to which man would not have been subjected if he had not sinned, ywill be conquered; the almighty and merciful Savior will restore man to the wholeness that he had lost through his own fault. God has called man, and still calls him, to be united in his whole being in perpetual communion with himself in the immortality of the divine life. This victory has been gained for us by the risen Christ, who by his own death has freed man from death.
Faith, presented with solid arguments, offers every thinking person the answer to his questionings concerning his future destiny. At the same time, it enables him to be one in Christ with his loved ones who have been taken from him by death and gives him hope that they have entered into true life with God.

Certainly, the Christian is faced with the necessity, and the duty, of fighting against evil through many trials, and of undergoing death. But by entering into the paschal mystery and being made like Christ in death, he will look forward, strong in hope, to the resurrection.

This is true not only of Christians but also of all men of good will in whose heart grace is invisibly at work. Since Christ died for all men, and the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, that is, a divine vocation, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being united with this paschal mystery in a way known only to God.
Such is the great mystery of man, enlightening believers through the Christian revelation. Through Christ and in Christ light is thrown on the enigma of pain and death which overwhelms us without his Gospel to teach us. Christ has risen, destroying death by his own death; he has given us the free gift of life so that as sons in the Son we may cry out in the Spirit, saying: Abba, Father!

Sent from my iPod

Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City On A Hill”

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Ronald Reagan, where are you when we need you?!

Today would be President Ronald Reagan’s 99th birthday.  May God bless and caress him for us, We, the People, whom he loved and lead.  We, the People, love and appreciate Reagan, the man, the mench, for his kindness, his integrity, his values, his patriotism, his determination, and his faith in We, the People.  He kept the vision of a “Shining City on a hill” before his eyes.  So, too, must we! Ronald Reagan is bright in our memory. Now we must live his dream. Freedom couldn’t have found a more clarion voice and heart to shout down the walls of tyranny by speaking with common sense. Listen again to his words of farewell:

Manifesting the Bit by Bit and Hidden Evil

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Os Guinness in his discourse “Addressing the Question of Evil In An Age of Genocide and Terror” dialogues on the questions of evil: “Where on earth does evil come from? How are we to understand evil?” Guinness asks us to consider the possibility of magnifying evil in modern times:

“The dreadful evil of the Final Solution was not carried out by monsters. Hitler was a monster.  Goring was a monster. Goebbels… They were monstrous. They didn’t carry any of it out. It was carried out by millions, and millions and millions of “good ordinary people.”

“You could see how in a world of bureaucracy with division of labor and diffusion of responsibility and a distancing,.. people don’t actually see the effects of the decisions they make.   You can see how a modern world and its procedures and its way of doing things has made possible evil on a scale the world never imagined. (paraphrased)

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.- Edmund Burke