Yes, I do. Blindness.
That’s because you refuse to listen. This might take divine intervention. The dispensation of grace isn’t miraculous. It’s providential and requires human cooperation through the exercise of our natural faculties.
Obviously you believe that human beings are both holy and inclined to sin. God is holy, but is He inclined to sin? Unless the human soul is sanctified by God and acquires a quality by His standard of human perfection it is unholy and therefore spiritually dead.
Does common sense tell you that human beings aren’t sinful by nature and inclined to sin? If they weren’t, they wouldn’t sin. We sin because sinning is part of our nature. Experience tells us that. Original sin is a state. It’s the sin of pride and inordinate self-love which alienates us from God.
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”
St. Thomas Aquinas
You have already made up your mind that there is no reason to suppose this. Anyway, no unsanctified soul can see God. And only God can sanctify it. Job was humble enough to own that he could not justify himself before God. Only God can declare us just by His grace. Has pride overtaken you by any chance?
Nobody has said that the good works of unbaptized people are necessarily evil. But good works that aren’t done in faith by anyone do not please God. God judges the heart that lies behind any good work of ours. God does take human intentions into account when he judges us by our deeds. Many people do good works, but not in the spirit of charity.
PAX
:heaven:
I never said human beings are intrinsically holy. I do believe we are innocent from birth. We are
tabula rasa at least in a moral sense. But, this moral emptiness is innocence, not guilt! Innocence and holiness are not the same thing.
If grace isn’t miraculous and the work of divine intervention, then why pray for it? Why obtain it via the sacraments? If it isn’t “magic power” to do what is right, then what is its value?
Original sin, defined by the RCC, is
not just a “state” of inclination to sin. Several councils, most clearly Trent, specifically define that
guilt is the central essence, with the inclination toward evil being an effect. Without this guilt, the entire message of Christianity would have to be radically altered. Indeed, Pelagius believed that Adam was primarily a bad example, while Jesus was primarily a teacher and good example, not an atoning sacrifice. I believe we have an evil inclination, but it doesn’t make sense to believe we are born
guilty.
Nice quote. So, faith is prior to reason? What do we call things that are prior to reason?
Unreasonable. Here’s my quote from a very different Thomas.
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
-Thomas Paine
The American Crisis
Job actually did declare himself to be righteous! The entire first part of the book is his friends arguing with him, insisting that God must be punishing him due to sin. God also affirms that Job is righteous. The point of the book is that only God knows why bad things happen to good people.
I don’t know what it means to be overtaken by pride. I could be just an overwhelmingly prideful fool, of course. Hubris lives in all of our hearts, it seems. What is the kind of pride you sense? I am able to believe only that which makes sense. I believe that I am literally incapable of believing things that don’t make sense, and I have no reason to suppose any human being or group of human beings has the authority to command others to pretend to believe things that don’t make sense. Is that pride?
The RCC teaches that we are not able to perform any good works without sanctifying grace. The vast majority of humanity
has performed good works and righteous deeds for all of history. Do they all have sanctifying grace, though they have never received the sacraments? If so, then what is their necessity? If God can give us miraculous power to do good without the Church, then what good is the Church? Is it to make us even better? Then why are non-Catholic countries not pits of misery and despair in comparison to Catholic ones? Why is there a commonality of evil among all cultures and religions in a normal distribution that we expect of other natural phenomena? Shouldn’t Christendom have been a paradise of holiness and goodness? Why do we find the same torture, disease, misery, slavery, and subjugation that we find in other human cultures?
