how do non catholic christians justify thier faith?

[Detales]

Well, how do non-C Christians justify is one side of a question. The other, since you are asking it, comes implicitly with it, and that is “How do Catholics justify their faith?” It is by no means, however, the only aspect of the issue, which has three corners, if you will, at least, and each has its similar pair of questions.

And it can be asked, as with other considerations, “How am I framing the question, and is that framing accurate, complete, and true to fact?” Usually not.

Here in the West the “first corner” in choosing a church if we are not born into one or wish to change, is to go with argumentations and decisions between the “mother” church and its inevitable children, a smorgasbord of epic proportions. One might even wonder in this case if there is not a special christianity for each of its practitioners. Witness, as proof, this forum. But that is common to all the choices and seems inevitable as well. Nevertheless, the christianist denominations are similar and have the same root, teaching (generally) a personal God, His Son who is the sole case of hypostatic union and proxy for redemption, and all the stories from virgin birth to death and resurection that we know go with that in that tradition. The alternative “second corner” is usually is some degree and kind of atheism (there is no God) or agnosticism (I don’t know if there is a God.)

The “third corner” is the one that has been swamped in our culture by the now highly questionable historicised interptretations of the Bible offered by the christianist churches. This is where the accusations and evaluations of paganism might be stemming from. It is also the corner that has been least addressed and given critical (not pious) thought in its relationship to the foundations not only of the Church, but of the matter of Salvation from the creation of Man.

I am talking here of the Monistic, or advaita, or non-dual perspective of the nature of Man, and the question of Incarnation from the perspective of the Allness of God. That is that He/She is not a personal God in the Christian sense, and that the Trinity has an entirely different and yet far more practical meaning than put forth by Christian tradition. Indeed, taking into account that the word “I” is taken in the sense of impersonal pure Consciousness in some Eastern languages when applied to spiritual teaching, a case even may be made that Jesus was Himself a Monist.

This is all given in the belief that if you are in doubt about your present position, it would be good to know that there is more to change and choice than meets the eye. It might even scare you back into your pew. For me, these considerations sent me on the greatest interior adventure of my life, profoundly revitalizing the meanigs of the Bible, the Sacraments, and the whole Jesus drama.

I guess it means that some non-Catholics, Catholics, and others can justify their choice by study, inquiry, self inquiry, and experience. God is untouched by questions that arise from sincere introspection. By the same token, that effort may be the way to find God as a living experience. The only caveat is similar in nature to the advice from Mr. Miyagi in the Karte Kid: “Karate yes, OK. Karate no, OK. Karate maybe… squished like grape.” Same goes for inquiry. One man said “The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it destroys the world in which you live.” He was not kidding.

Bindar Dundat

 

[adrift]

“There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church— which is, of course, quite a different thing"

–Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Thanks for posting this. I missed the post asking for it. I do have a slightly different version.

Few people in America hate the Catholic religion,
but there are many who hate
what they mistakenly believe is the Catholic religion
—and if what they hate really were the Catholic religion,
Catholics would hate it too

 

[SteveGC]

Few people in America hate the Catholic religion,
but there are many who hate
what they mistakenly believe is the Catholic religion
—and if what they hate really were the Catholic religion,
Catholics would hate it too .

I’d buy into that revision.

Indeed, if it were true what anti-Catholics claim (that our Church taught us a “God owes us salvation only for what we do” - “worship Mary and saints and idols” - “eat a wafer and all is forgiven” - “purgatory is a 3rd option for salvation” etc etc)…if all that were true, not only would all Catholics hate it…the very notion that it would even still be in existence is laughable.

That’s why I’m quite insulted by the insinuation some ignorant people make that I am devoted to a Church which teaches such nonsense. As if they think I am brainwashed and in a trance, under the “spell” of the Vatican. It is simply insulting and ludicrous.

God Bless

 

[ChristIsLord]

I’d buy into that revision.

Indeed, if it were true what anti-Catholics claim (that our Church taught us a** “God owes us salvation only for what we do” - “worship Mary and saints and idols” - “eat a wafer and all is forgiven” - “purgatory is a 3rd option for salvation” etc etc**)…if all that were true, not only would all Catholics hate it…the very notion that it would even still be in existence is laughable.

That’s why I’m quite insulted by the insinuation some ignorant people make that I am devoted to a Church which teaches such nonsense. As if they think I am brainwashed and in a trance, under the “spell” of the Vatican. It is simply insulting and ludicrous.

God Bless

none of the things you listed are on the list of my “gripes” at all, actually no catholic can actually look at my list and deny them unless you deny papal infallibility, bowing before statues and praying, the real presence, pedophile scandal etc…

people like to take threads such as these and dumb them down into a strawman they can beat up on. thankfully there are folks out there who look past such attempts.

 

[SteveGC]

none of the things you listed are on the list of my “gripes” at all, actually no catholic can actually look at my list and deny them unless you deny papal infallibility, bowing before statues and praying, the real presence, pedophile scandal etc…

people like to take threads such as these and dumb them down into a strawman they can beat up on. thankfully there are folks out there who look past such attempts.

Excuse me, sir.

First of all, I wasn’t talking about you. Secondly…

Atleast two of your gripes are mentioned in my post. Or did you miss the ‘worship idols’ part? This is essentially what you are griping about when you mention bowing down before statues, is it not?

And my ‘eating a wafer’ issue is in direct reference to your gripe about the Real Presence. It’s precisely the fact that folks refute the Real Presence that makes them latch onto the notion that Catholics just ‘eat a wafer’ for their forgiveness / salvation.

As for the rest, OK…no problem. I didn’t bring those up. And my apologies for not addressing exactly your issues since this is your thread. Concocting a strawman is not my style, as it is frankly completely unnecessary when defending the Catholic faith. I was merely responding to another poster on here regarding frustration over folks who tend to not understand…and therefore resort to misguided attacks or arguments.

And** of course **no Catholic can look at your list and deny them. There’s no statement of fact that you are trying to have us deny… you are just stating that you can’t come to terms with the teachings of The Church. Nobody would ever deny your opinion that you just can’t come to accept these things. Of course, we all are sympathetic to #6. No one accepts these types of things. We certainly don’t deny they happened, although we will remind folks that this sort of unfortunate behavior is not unique to any church.

God Bless.

 

[ChristIsLord]

Atleast two of your gripes are mentioned in my post. Or did you miss the ‘worship idols’ part? This is essentially what you are griping about when you mention bowing down before statues, is it not?

no, clearly as i’ve said 1,000 times, i have an issue with making graven images, bowing before them and offering prayers. i explained i do not think you are worshipping the statue as in you think it is a god. however i don’t believe that is necessary at all to break the commandment. that seems to be the point people have a hard time accepting in this discussion board. they try to defeat arguments i never made. though shalt not create a graven image, bow down to them, or worship them. catholics make them, bow down to them, pray before them and venerate them. while not worshipping it as a god, they are certainly breaking the 2nd commandment clearly imo. if you can do the mental gymnastics to say you aren’t that’s fine, i can’t.

And my ‘eating a wafer’ issue is in direct reference to your gripe about the Real Presence. It’s precisely the fact that folks refute the Real Presence that makes them latch onto the notion that Catholics just ‘eat a wafer’ for their forgiveness / salvation.

again i never said anything about all of that your “eating a wafer and all is forgiven” is hyperbolic nonsense, i never said anything about “eating a wafer for salvation” etc… i simply said i prayed on the real presence and i can’t have faith the teaching is true. everything else you added pertained to nothing of what i wrote, it’s either in your head, or you’re simply making it up for the purpose of directing the topic in a different direction, dumbing stuff down if you will. it’s been tried by several in this topic already, but i’m determined to keep the topic on point instead of it devolving into the usual nonsense.

 

[SteveGC]

Ok, friend.

My mistake. I’ll stay out of your gripe session.

But know that I had no intent of directing your topic anywhere. If you look, I never initiated a dialogue on my own which swayed the topic. I simply joined in this discussion as several have done, and my post above is simply a response to a comment of another, and was not in specific reference to your list of gripes.

Perhaps I have been posting my opinions on here with more emphasis on your thread title, rather on the **specific issues **you are having which you elaborated on in subsequent posts.

And for that, and the accusations that my post referred to your gripes…I was wrong, my apologies.

On a final note, I sympathize with your difficulty in faith on those matters you did list. I will pray for guidance for you.

God Bless

 

[adrift]

no, clearly as i’ve said 1,000 times, i have an issue with making graven images, bowing before them and offering prayers. i explained i do not think you are worshipping the statue as in you think it is a god. however i don’t believe that is necessary at all to break the commandment. that seems to be the point people have a hard time accepting in this discussion board. they try to defeat arguments i never made. though shalt not create a graven image, bow down to them, or worship them. catholics make them, bow down to them, pray before them and venerate them. while not worshipping it as a god, they are certainly breaking the 2nd commandment clearly imo. if you can do the mental gymnastics to say you aren’t that’s fine, i can’t.

This is the most revealing comment you have made. There are others who have doubted if you have ever been Catholic as you have claimed. Nothing you have posted reflects a Catholic understanding. It does, however, reflect a Protestant view. The Catholic numbering of the commandments list grave images under one not two which is the Protestant numbering. If you say that it is not thought of as a god than by definition it is not worship. You can change the definition but then you are making it up and not following the word of God.

everything else you added pertained to nothing of what i wrote, it’s either in your head, or you’re simply making it up for the purpose of directing the topic in a different direction, dumbing stuff down if you will. it’s been tried by several in this topic already, but i’m determined to keep the topic on point instead of it devolving into the usual nonsense

This was in the rest of his post

As for the rest, OK…no problem. I didn’t bring those up. And my apologies for not addressing exactly your issues since this is your thread. Concocting a strawman is not my style, as it is frankly completely unnecessary when defending the Catholic faith.

From your post

people like to take threads such as these and dumb them down into a strawman they can beat up on. thankfully there are folks out there who look past such attempts.

And of course no Catholic can look at your list and deny them. There’s no statement of fact that you are trying to have us deny… you are just stating that you can’t come to terms with the teachings of The Church. Nobody would ever deny your opinion that you just can’t come to accept these things. Of course, we all are sympathetic to #6. No one accepts these types of things. We certainly don’t deny they happened, although we will remind folks that this sort of unfortunate behavior is not unique to any church.

He was responding to this in your post

1. hate to beat a dead horse but yes the pedophilia scandle. it was so widespread for nearly 40 years and during that time we didn’t see one, not one bishop stand up and do the right thing. i can’t trust these men as my spiritual leaders if they lack the integrity to stop a child rapist from practicing his perversions. i mean that one seems pretty simple to me. yet time and time again bishop after bishop simply moved him around to protect some false facade of the churches good name instead of children. how do i know trust them as my shepherds? i can’t.

Either you are not a very careful reader, you are unable to understand, or you deliberately attack when you have no answers.

 

[pegchiu]

hi, just want to say i am in the same situation as you that searching.

just i am going from protestant to catholic… hahhaha, but i really really understand how u feel because i feel very frustrated too and no where to go and kind of helpless.

i have the same question that protestant church are indeed the branches of the catholic church if we look back the history. but then i have some questions about the some of the catholic teachings esp that of papal infallibility. really have great problem with that.

but catholic belief / teachings are something very funny ( positive here, and forgive me for this flat word 'cos english is not my first language, but i do think it’s interesting). it’s not very straight forward. i dont know how to explain. anyway, it’s very funny, i think it worths for me to go deeper with anyway.

but after all, i believe the Holy Spirit would guide us. i kind of agree that we need authority on earth, but i believe the Holy Spirit would guide me to go to the church that best suits me. and i believe the Holy Spirit would guides you too.

maybe we would go to different churches, but i believe the church that we go is the best for us at the time we go. if God wants to lead us to other church, He will work it out.

( yes, i think the Church is God’s church, not any particular church on earth but anyway we need authority / gathering / guidance… then we go to church on earth)

 

[pegchiu]

and hey, ChristisLord, i like Detales’s post very much. though i cant fully understand it.

and one more thing to add, i am attending sunday mass in catholic church for quite awhile now. have no many problems with Mary (indeed, to my suprise, most catholic church that i go doesnt always talk abt Mary, i dont think it’s too much for me anyway), Rosary prayers, praying in front of the statues… though i dont do all these myself, very very very rarely… um, i also dont think i would do it always even i do really be a catholic… so i can foresee that even i will be a catholic, i will be not be some typical catholic anyway.

maybe i am talking about the feeling of ‘distanced’. go to protestant church, well, no problem, but feel ‘distanced’, go to catholic church, well, no problem, but feel ‘distanced’.

i really dont know whether i can find a church on earth that i feel no distanced with…

anyway, maybe i have to bear the distanced feeling anyway. maybe everyone has got the distanced feeling anyway.

but i have intimate relationship with God, so happy enough and the happiest thing!

Well, how do non-C Christians justify is one side of a question. The other, since you are asking it, comes implicitly with it, and that is “How do Catholics justify their faith?” It is by no means, however, the only aspect of the issue, which has three corners, if you will, at least, and each has its similar pair of questions.

And it can be asked, as with other considerations, “How am I framing the question, and is that framing accurate, complete, and true to fact?” Usually not.

Here in the West the “first corner” in choosing a church if we are not born into one or wish to change, is to go with argumentations and decisions between the “mother” church and its inevitable children, a smorgasbord of epic proportions. One might even wonder in this case if there is not a special christianity for each of its practitioners. Witness, as proof, this forum. But that is common to all the choices and seems inevitable as well. Nevertheless, the christianist denominations are similar and have the same root, teaching (generally) a personal God, His Son who is the sole case of hypostatic union and proxy for redemption, and all the stories from virgin birth to death and resurection that we know go with that in that tradition. The alternative “second corner” is usually is some degree and kind of atheism (there is no God) or agnosticism (I don’t know if there is a God.)

The “third corner” is the one that has been swamped in our culture by the now highly questionable historicised interptretations of the Bible offered by the christianist churches. This is where the accusations and evaluations of paganism might be stemming from. It is also the corner that has been least addressed and given critical (not pious) thought in its relationship to the foundations not only of the Church, but of the matter of Salvation from the creation of Man.

I am talking here of the Monistic, or advaita, or non-dual perspective of the nature of Man, and the question of Incarnation from the perspective of the Allness of God. That is that He/She is not a personal God in the Christian sense, and that the Trinity has an entirely different and yet far more practical meaning than put forth by Christian tradition. Indeed, taking into account that the word “I” is taken in the sense of impersonal pure Consciousness in some Eastern languages when applied to spiritual teaching, a case even may be made that Jesus was Himself a Monist.

This is all given in the belief that if you are in doubt about your present position, it would be good to know that there is more to change and choice than meets the eye. It might even scare you back into your pew. For me, these considerations sent me on the greatest interior adventure of my life, profoundly revitalizing the meanigs of the Bible, the Sacraments, and the whole Jesus drama.

I guess it means that some non-Catholics, Catholics, and others can justify their choice by study, inquiry, self inquiry, and experience. God is untouched by questions that arise from sincere introspection. By the same token, that effort may be the way to find God as a living experience. The only caveat is similar in nature to the advice from Mr. Miyagi in the Karte Kid: “Karate yes, OK. Karate no, OK. Karate maybe… squished like grape.” Same goes for inquiry. One man said “The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it destroys the world in which you live.” He was not kidding.

Bindar Dundat

 

[Detales]

Thanks, PegChiu,

Rejoice, there is hope! English is my second language also. (Maybe third; I think Music is everyone’s first, or we would not respond so much to the tonal nouances of each other’s speech.) I proofread these posts sometimes even five times and still make mistakes! My first language is Magyar, (Hungarian) and it is quite different in its assumptions than English. That, I think, is how I first intuited that our birth language is one of the colored lenses that we see the world through. I can see (say) things in Hungarian that I can’t in English, and vice versa. As the Romans said (in Latin) “Idem non idem.” As applied to language and translation, it meant that "The same thing (in one language) is not the same thing (as it is construed in another.) This applies as well to the basic structure of languages as compared to actuality. E.g. Robert Heinlein said that in English “Only the first person, singular form of the verb ‘to be’ is true to fact.” I think these conditions are actual, and it is part of the reason I said some of the things I did in my post.

I said them because even the little I know about translation and the nature of witnessing leads me to believe that we have misconstrued the intent behind much of the meaning of the authors of the Bible. We have done that perhaps without malice, but the view of the purpose of writing anything down back in those days was often way different than the way we might wish to tell each other things these days. And the parables were used for a reason. (See Mark 4:33-34) Scholars know that, and it goes much deeper than might at first appear.

It is why I recommend two different books as an acclimation to these ideas that, it seems, most of us are not aware of, or don’t take significantly into account. I think they are important, because there is then the possibility of revitalizing our understanding on a very immediate and practical basis.

What I’m saying is that I will be glad to explain anything in what I wrote if you ask and really wish to know. I only have one warning that I give from experience: “The search for Truth is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.” Of course that refers to the world picture you have built and accepted as belief due to your upbringing, including language, and the ways you adopted them from your parents, others, and your filters of experience. Or, if you have seen the movie The Matrix, the search for Truth is like taking the red pill. You won’t be the same at the end. You can’t be, because you are dealing with both the intellectual and emotional understanding of the Nature of your very Self. You have to be willing to face that there might be a radically different explanation for what you believe, and see for yourself if it is true. All I can say for my part is that, though I would recommend it to very few, I am glad I undertook the journey some forty years ago. It is still for me an unfolding experience of the greatest worth. I have not been decieved.