Atheism and Catholicism

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djeter

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Another set of reading selections from Michael Novak’s 2008 bestseller, No One Sees God. Here we see a contrast between atheism and Catholicism: one where the inner horizon offers no answering personal presence (because the unbeliever thinks God is an illusion) and the other where a central light and energy and love lives within us. BTW My answer poster – Catholicism: If you think atheism is awesome…

"Catholics hold that other Christian communities share with Catholics many affirmations of Christian faith, but not all. We cherish this community of beliefs, but pray that the shared circle of belief will grow larger. We hold that our Catholic faith does not make sense unless the Jewish faith is also true.

We share with some atheists their clear commitment to reason. Truth is indeed crucial to Christian faith. But it does matter to our consciences which church is closest to the truth. As the aphorism puts it, faith does not take away from reason, but brings it to completion (gratia noi tollit sed perficit naturam).

A quite imperfect analogy is how eyeglasses, microscopes and telescopes do not demean eyesight, only carry it where it could not go alone. For Catholics and some other Christians, reason is to be honored. Which church is true is a crucial judgment of reason."
Michael Novak

It’s all here:

payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/09/15/michael-novak-on-two-radically-different-ways-of-living-in-the-world/

dj
 
Fone_Bone_2001 said:
Ah, that poster. Atheism is probably already dying in the heart of someone who can perceive what the poster asserts.
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Probably true.

“We hold that our Catholic faith does not make sense unless the Jewish faith is also true.”

That sounds a bit off, the way it’s stated. I don’t know if it will help with what he’s trying to explain. E.g. “If the Jewish faith is true, then …?”
 
The Postmoderns, starting with Nietzsche, have destroyed the belief that modern Atheism is rational.
"And so “we must learn to live after truth,” as a group of European academics wrote in After Truth: A Postmodern Manifesto. “Nothing is certain, not even this. . . . The modern age opened with the destruction of God and religion. It is ending with the threatened destruction of all coherent thought.” Nietzsche may have been the first to see this clearly, though the Marquis de Sade came close in Philosophy in the Bedroom. But, even in the fundamental thinkers of high modernity, hints can be found that knowledge requires God: Descartes uses God in the* Meditations* in order to escape from the interiority where the* cogito* has stranded him; Kant uses God as a postulate of pure practical reason in order to hold on to the possibility of morality.
Click to expand...
Christians and Postmoderns
 
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