Catholic Civil War Brewing?

You can't really prove a negative or a positive; it's only proven if falsifiability is removed. Once falsifiability is removed, it becomes faith.

It is not difficult at all to imagine this as a possibility. A teapot is something very specific; I could immediately imagine a couple of possibilities. A remnant that was left behind or otherwise projected into orbit after a test from space, or perhaps a personal relic that was launched as something somewhat more tangible than, say, naming a star or purchasing part of the moon.

If somebody were to genuinely assert such a thing, it would be logical to ask questions about it; if not satisfied, the logical retort would be "I don't believe you" or even "the evidence that I have considered is unconvincing." It wouldn't be "you're an idiot" or "that's nonsense."

I'm certainly fair with the ideas that I'm presenting, and I hold no gripes against those who remain unconvinced of anything; I suppose I count as unconvinced with respect to many other religions.

I have no problem with that; your view of lack of belief is necessarily different (or should be) than your view of the certainty that another's view is absolutely wrong.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

I am not sure who said this but it feels like it came from Christopher Hitchens. Mankind has invented over 6000 gods to worship in the past. You dismiss all but one. Tell me how you know those were false and I will apply that reason to the god you do believe in.

 

By faith, of course. Thanks for the admission.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

If you think this is a win. I welcome you to your delusion.

 

I don't consider us adversaries; my only "win" would be in getting you to recognize the nonsensical aspect of attacking people that have faith. I don't think you'll change despite your admissions on where your knowledge is limited. Regardless, I appreciate your effort to educate me on why you express things the way you do.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Nor do I. Where we differ is where our knowledge is limited I seek to learn more and shrink the ever expanding gap. You fill this gap with a supreme being. I don’t find that useful.

 

Well, I would submit that your determined contention to limit the universe to "where our knowledge is limited", is how you seek to "shrink the gap". You seek to shrink the universe to our limited knowledge; religion is Man reaching out to God/gods, seeking to bridge the gap of the known with the unknowable.

In Christianity, the belief (well grounded, I would submit)--is God reaching down to us.

...but in either event, as I suggested upthread--science denies the evidence when in comes to miracles, because miracles do not fit our limited knowledge of the universe.

Religion--especially the Catholic Church--follows the evidence, and, based upon the same limited knowledge as science (for much of the science we have today was developed and advanced by Christian scientists), when confronted with the miraculous--i.e.--events which occur beyond our understanding of the laws of physics--upon thorough investigation (i.e.--following the evidence) recognizes that there was a substantial deviation from said laws. And declares such--"miracles".

Then proceeds to seek to discern the will of God from there (i.e.--why, in X case, was a substantial deviation from the laws of physics permitted here? Rather than burying its head in the sand, and dismissing it as impossible, because the laws of physics could *never* permit such a thing to happen).

I'll conclude anecdotally--that I have witnessed, and been the beneficiary of, multiple miracles--and would submit that I did not come to believe in God because of that, but--arrogant as this might sound--I sincerely believe that I've benefited from divine intervention--because I believed first (and have never faltered).

fwiw.

 

GK Chesterton wrote a book in response to a HG Wells' book on the History of the World. Wells was an atheist; Chesterton, a Catholic. In it, he laid out the distinctness of Man against the rest of life--this is Part 1 of the book--A Creature Called Man; in the second Part (Part 2), he sets forth the distinctness of Jesus--A Man Called Christ. The book did not convince Mr. Wells (wasn't really intended to)--but it did serve as the impetus to covert another die hard athiest at the time--C.S. Lewis. I'll refer to Mr. Chesterton's book, as a nice reminder of how special we are as Man--and if you dare tackle Part 2--perhaps it may whet your appetite into delving further, into the specialness of the Man called Christ. Here's a small excerpt from the conclusion section, as a sampler:

In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad daylight, there are many and very various things, motionless and moving. There moves among them a race that is in its relation to the others a race of gods. The fact is not lessened but emphasised because it can behave like a race of demons. Its distinction is not an individual illusion, like one bird pluming itself on its own plumes; it is a solid and a many-sided thing. It is demonstrated in the very speculations that have led to its being denied. That men, the gods of this lower world, are linked with it in various ways is true; but it is another aspect of the same truth. That they grow as the grass grows{304} and walk as the beasts walk is a secondary necessity that sharpens the primary distinction. It is like saying that a magician must after all have the appearance of a man; or that even the fairies could not dance without feet. It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind entirely on these mild and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main fact altogether. It is customary to insist that man resembles the other creatures. Yes; and that very resemblance he alone can see. The fish does not trace the fish-bone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the elephant and the emu compare skeletons. Even in the sense in which man is at one with the universe it is an utterly lonely universality. The very sense that he is united with all things is enough to sunder him from all.

Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as the literal flame that he alone has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world makes that world visible. He sees around him a world of a certain style or type. It seems to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions. He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands; but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a design already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a groping of blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common field. In the very shape of things there is more than green growth; there is the finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and masters of the material world, that the vast majority have been moved to take a certain view of that world. They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower. But so long as the race of thinkers was able{305} to think, it was obvious that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was some one else, some strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they were designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire. Now this idea of a mind that gives a meaning to the universe has received more and more confirmation within the minds of men, by meditations and experiences much more subtle and searching than any such argument about the external plan of the world. But I am concerned here with keeping the story in its most simple and even concrete terms; and it is enough to say here that most men, including the wisest men, have come to the conclusion that the world has such a final purpose and therefore such a first cause. But most men in some sense separated themselves from the wisest men, when it came to the treatment of that idea. There came into existence two ways of treating that idea; which between them make up most of the religious history of the world.

...

Meanwhile the minority, the sages or thinkers, had withdrawn apart and had taken up an equally congenial trade. They were drawing up plans of the world; of the world which all believed to have a plan. They were trying to set forth the plan seriously and to scale. They were setting their minds directly to the mind that had made the mysterious world; considering what sort of a mind it might be and what its ultimate purpose might be. Some of them made that mind much more impersonal than mankind has generally made it; some simplified it almost to a blank; a few, a very few, doubted it altogether. One or two of the more morbid fancied that it might be evil and an enemy; just one or two of the more degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of gods. But most of these theorists were theists: and they not only saw a moral plan in nature, but they generally laid down a moral plan for humanity. Most of them were good men who did good work: and they were remembered and rever{307}enced in various ways. They were scribes; and their scriptures became more or less holy scriptures. They were law-givers; and their tradition became not only legal but ceremonial. We may say that they received divine honours, in the sense in which kings and great captains in certain countries often received divine honours. In a word, wherever the other popular spirit, the spirit of legend and gossip, could come into play, it surrounded them with the more mystical atmosphere of the myths. Popular poetry turned the sages into saints. But that was all it did. They remained themselves; men never really forgot that they were men, only made into gods in the sense that they were made into heroes. Divine Plato, like Divus Caesar, was a title and not a dogma. In Asia, where the atmosphere was more mythological, the man was made to look more like a myth, but he remained a man. He remained a man of a certain special class or school of men, receiving and deserving great honour from mankind. It is the order or school of the philosophers; the men who have set themselves seriously to trace the order across any apparent chaos in the vision of life. Instead of living on imaginative rumours and remote traditions and the tail-end of exceptional experiences about the mind and meaning behind the world, they have tried in a sense to project the primary purpose of that mind a priori. They have tried to put on paper a possible plan of the world; almost as if the world were not yet made.

Right in the middle of all these things stands up an enormous exception. It is quite unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of doom, though it is also a piece of good news; or news that seems too good to be true. It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths;{308} the Man Who Made the World. That such a higher personality exists behind all things had indeed always been implied by all the best thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But nothing of this sort had ever been implied in any of them. It is simply false to say that the other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious master and maker, of whom the world had dreamed and disputed. Not one of them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort. Not one of their sects or schools had ever claimed that they had claimed to be anything of the sort. The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being. The most that any visionary had ever said was that men might catch glimpses of the glory of that spiritual being; or much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The most that any primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand years—that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. Its unique character can be used as an argument against it as well as for it. It would be easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity; but it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.​

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton.​

The book can be accessed here:

The Everlasting Man


Also, St. Augustine wrote a little *pamphlet* in response to the Pagans, which might pique your interest.

The City of God: Volume I, by Aurelius Augustine--A Project Gutenberg eBook.

 

Just because there is counterfeit money doesn’t mean there isn’t real money. And I check mine periodically.

 

The faithful need this though, what's the point if everyone believes the same thing without dispute, not really a test of your faith, is it? You should look at the attacks as a service and thank us for allowing us to test your faith.