In this Year of Faith, and especially as we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King (Nov. 25) and the beginning of Advent (Dec. 2), it's a good time to reflect on the nature of what we believe as Catholics.
To be a Christian is to believe in history. I mean that in the way the great Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson, meant it. Dawson wrote: "Christianity, together with the religion of Israel out of which it was born, is a historical religion in a sense to which none of the other world religions can lay claim."
Consider the Bible. All of the world's great religious and ethical traditions have sacred books: the Qu'ran, the Bhagavad-Gita; the Analects of Confucius. What all these texts of other traditions share is that they're essentially wisdom literature. They're collections of teachings aimed at helping believers live ethically and find the right path to happiness or enlightenment.
The Bible also aims to make people wise. But it also seeks to lead them to salvation, which is much more than enlightenment. The Bible's first words are: "In the beginning . . ." Genesis begins with the first day in the history of the world. The entire Old Testament is similar. After speaking about the first man and woman and their descendants, it proceeds to offer a historical account of God's chosen people, the children of Israel. Modern scholarship can challenge details of the Old Testament narrative, but the importance that biblical writers place on providing a history is unmistakable.
The New Testament continues that history, focusing on one particular child of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth, and the community he founded, the Church. The story is told with numerous references -- some direct, others subtle -- to that earlier history. Jesus is portrayed as fulfilling all that God promised in the Old Testament. The Church is described as the new people of God, the final realization of Israel's calling to be God's light to the nations.
Throughout the New Testament, we're given precise historical markers. To be a Christian therefore means believing very definite things about history and about our own respective places in history.
We don't just profess belief in the Incarnation. We say we believe that God took flesh at a precise moment in time, and in a definite place. It's the reason for that curious detail in our Nicene and Apostles' Creeds: We're the only religion to remember our founder's executioner by name every time we profess our faith.
Pontius Pilate and Mary are mentioned by name in the creeds. Why? The reference to Mary, Jesus' mother, guarantees Christ's humanity. The reference to Pilate, who condemned him to death, guarantees his historicity. It ensures that we can never reduce the Incarnation to an abstract concept, a metaphor, or a pretty idea. It ensures that we can never regard Jesus Christ as a kind of ideal archetype or mythical figure. He was truly a man and truly God. And he had a place on this earth he called home.
We also believe that this historical event, more than 2,000 years ago, represents a personal intervention by God "for us and for our salvation." God entered history for you and me, and for all humanity.
The four noble truths of Buddhism don't have anything to do with history. The Muslim profession of faith, the shahada, claims simply that there is no God but God, and that Muhammad was his messenger. To the degree that Islam has a historical narrative, it was arguably borrowed from and built on the Jewish-Christian narrative that preceded it.
Thus, to be Catholic is to be very unique among the world's believers. To be a Catholic means believing that we are a part of a vast historical project. And it's not "our" project. It's God's. Being Catholic means believing that since the beginning of time, God has been working out his own hidden purposes in the history of nations and in the biography of every person. He's still unfolding his purposes today. And each of us has a part to play in his divine plan.
Before the foundation of the world, God had each of us in mind. He made us out of love. And he made us for a reason: to be holy; to be his sons and daughters through Jesus Christ; to help him share his love with the whole world.
We believe in God. But as God's hand in history also clearly shows: He believes in us.
Usually these things are only justifications trotted out because they provide for better rhetoric than talking about border and trade disputes. Can you think of a war that was actually about religion? I'm sure there might have been one at some point, but I can't. They're almost all about land, money, or balance of power.
Hit the road Jack and don't ya' come back no more, no more!
On your other points, well, we can create living cells from raw matter - it was in 2010: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-05/21/worlds-first-living-synthetic-cell-created Even without that, it's the process of learning through the scientific method to understand the world more fully - if we can't do it now, that doesn't mean we won't someday. I don't have any 'faith' in science, because it doesn't require me to 'believe' in it for it to prove itself. This often seems to be a hang-up for the religious in discussions of science. I don't have 'faith' in science - it is demonstrable, like a math equation. I don't have faith that 2+2 is 4, it's that it adds up to 4 every time we do it. Religious phenomena, as in the Bible, is written expressly as beyond human understanding - a flaming bush that never burns away, a dead man rising from his grave - to express the need for faith to explain something greater than human comprehension. Science, conversely, seeks to extend the limits of human comprehension.
Has science extended human comprehension and answered your morality questions, right from wrong, how are you supposed to live? My point was to the arrogance of some science and scientists in proposing you give "faith" in them, as Hawkings has, that there is no God. He has astrophysical evidence pointing to defense of his theory. Really! 2+2 = no God? That math just doesn't add up. To your rebuttal that studying the historical records of the paranormal including cross-referenced records from eyewitnesses who were also detractors, how would that investigation differ in methodology from investigating other historical events? To use your math example, 1 eyewitness is hearsay, but 12 plus 10,000 = 10,012 eyewitnesses, plus 30,000 converts who were not eyewitnesses but happened within the first few months of the alleged event, spreading through Europe and converting Rome itself within 3 centuries - is historically unprecedented, before or after. Worth a deep dive, in my opinion. How can you prove Washington didn't walk on water? Science is great and wonderful, no question, and to many it compliments their understanding of those supernatural forces it cannot explain.
As for the history, if you want to take a particular religious text written by religious scholars to reinforce their religious doctrine as a factual record, that's up to you, but for (I think?) pretty obvious reasons that's not a very solid basis. There's no reason to prove or disprove that Washington walked on water, because there is no basis to assume he, or anyone, ever could.
Now we'll see how raising tax rates and 3% Obamacare surtax on 1 million small business owners affects the unemployment numbers and doctors accepting Medicare patients, etc. Maybe I'll blog a monthly Obama Administration report card, posting the numbers. Unfortunately of the 3 million people who decided the course of our nation's renewal and recovery over the next 4 years, only a few would read my blog. And might still vote for bad policy-makers again in 2016. I can't control that. Just as you cannot change facts. But at least some people can read report cards and CVs and make sound informed decisions, and for my elected geographic area of responsibility, no guilt here. Mission accomplished. http://perkiomenvalley.patch.com/blog_posts/romney-ryan-enjoy-big-win-in-trappe 3 million decided it for 300 million. That's all that happened. No sweeping referendum here. Congrats to Team O on yet another successful sale.
Gallup and Rasmussen have some serious 'splainin to do. Looks like many of the large supposedly non-partisan pollsters took a beating.
Not many people had writing skills in that society and even fewer had camcorders. This wasn't a bed-time story. It was intended as a factual statement for the official Roman record. And thanks for your permission. I do believe it.
If you look at the poll internals, it's clear that the polls were garbage.
2) Please click on Jack Minster's name and look at the long, long list of posts he made prior to the election. He spent 8 plus hours a day posting nonsense about how Romney was going to win in a landslide. He made up lies, slandered people, and created his own reality in a vain attempt to trick himself that the majority would actually support an empty suit like Romney. Now his latest line of BS is that Obama only won by "three million" so therefore it isn't a real victory. What a loser! This guy and his elk actually hurt their own cause because their lies are so stupid, it turns off anyone with an IQ over 70 that isn't a racist or a religious kook! Keep up the good work Jack.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/11/09/the-elections-biggest-winner-arithmetic/
Yes Richard-filth, you can keep getting banned and blocked by Patch editors everywhere due to your personal attacks and uncivilized posts which violate the agreement terms, and keep changing your handles to ever more unrecognizable versions like the current "1" - but your filthy spirit betrays you. Snuff out the light and the truth, eh Richard? Tell everyone who you really are if you have the courage. Stalker weirdo.
You may want to look up the term "projection".
However, claims about walking on water, raising the dead, and so forth are in clear violation of everything we've discovered over thousands of years of human history. Does this mean it didn't happen? No. But it does demand considerably more evidence than more mundane claims, such as George Washington crossing the Delaware.
The fact is Obama won and Romney lost - whether by 3 million or 3. The fact is that in the last six presidential elections, the Republican won the popular vote exactly once. The fact is this year every incumbent Senator was re-elected while every right wing tea party associated senate candidate lost (including Tom Smith here in PA). The fact is the Republicans held on to their house majority, but Democratic house candidates won more votes in total - thank you gerrymandering. The fact is, the white vote dropped again. This time by 4% from 2008. This is not the USA of a few decades ago and we're not going back. This is a far more diverse and colorful USA. If the Republicans keep making statements about the 47% and blaming their electoral losses on gifts to minorities and young people, they will continue to lose. It's fairly simple math. As for Nate Silver fmrRPRez, he didn't get it right by coincidence - the polls just didn't happen to "cancel each other out." In fact, that's the whole idea! That's the brilliance of Nate Silver. It's called statistical science.
Silver weights polls based on historical accuracy, though, not partisan bias. The reason the poll that favored the Democrats is heavily weighted is because it was historically accurate, as you may have noted by the election results, which also favored the Democrats.
And, if you look at PPPs data, it was wildly wrong, and that carries into Silver's analysis.
PPP, for example, polled that 46% of voters in Colorado would vote for Romney on 11/4 and 46% of Colorado actually voted for Romney. They polled Florida 50/49, exactly what it was. Polls, much less single polls (and especially not nonpartisan firms), aren't ever perfectly accurate (PPP's Iowa poll had an extra 2% for Romney that didn't materialize), but the premise that it's pure chance and that an extremely divergent poll ends up looking accurate and therefore polling is basically meaningless is just not how statistics function in the slightest.
PPP's president was out bragging about how his company had the right "hunch" about turnout, and that that's why they got the election right. The "hunch" isn't a matter of good data... it's mostly a good guess. What he didn't mention, though, was that their hunch was actually considerably off. Had they known that Obama would get fewer votes than McCain got in '08, their polls would have given Romney the win.
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/11/14/infographic-of-the-day-obama-lost-independent-voters-in-all-swing-states-minus-nc/ http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-romney-independent-vote-polls-moderates-election-2012-11
Things that make you go Uhm... Came across this web site that is logging the voter fraud reported and investigated by news services. Click each link and read the articles if you have the time. http://obamavoterfraud.blogspot.com/2012/11/barack-obama-voter-fraud-2012.html?m=1 Pray, Pray, Pray
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/graphics/pew-religion-08/flash.htm The minor are not the majority, but continue to wag the dog. Until the dog bites the tail.