Angainor:
That is as is should be.
I just hope you truely are living your life around the truths that you believe. I can never be confident that individual Catholics live their lives around the truths someone else believes.
Your interpretation of this scripture that you linked to above, which is the same argument that you have used previously in this thread, cannot be applied here, because it is a RELATIVISTIC argument that can be used to argue against infallibility even in its general form, for example, even the infallibility of the authors of Scripture. What you are implying is that we must live our lives around the truths that we personally believe because there is no way to ultimately trust in what another person believes. Let me give you an example as to why that doesn’t work here.
Atheists use that same argument against all Christians. They will say, “How can you prove that the Apostles wrote infallibly when they wrote the books of the New Testament? They were just normal human beings, no different in their cognitive abilities than you. And so, since you can’t trust any human’s beliefs more than your own, and since there is no way to prove their infalliblity other than believing it through what other people have told you, then you might as well just trust your own beliefs.”
Let me then reword that to show just how you are applying that same argument to Catholics: “How can you prove that the Pope can speak infallibly in some cases? He is just a normal human being, no different in his cognitive abilities than you. And so, since you can’t trust any human’s beliefs more than your own, and since there is no way to prove his infalliblity other than believing it through what other people have told you, then you might as well just trust your own beliefs.”
Based on that, do you see how my choosing to have faith in the Pope’s infallibility then is no different than you choosing to have faith that the authors of the Bible were infallible? Either way, we have to each arbitrarily decide upon this belief for ourselves based on knowledge we have obtained from others. It isn’t like we can empirically or experimentally prove that ANYONE is infallible or speaks absolute truth. Also, just because the Bible doesn’t explicitly state that the Pope today can be infallible, that doesn’t mean that he can’t be. Personally, I like to look at the history of it all, and I just don’t think that the ability for the leaders Church to make binding decisions would have ended with the Apostles.
Also, getting back at the point I was making earlier, for anyone to say anything to the effect that we should rely on our own thoughts more than the thoughts of others just isn’t logically realistic. This is because our own beliefs are inherently tied to that which we have heard from others at some point in time.
I also think that it should be a pretty difficult task for ANYONE to place absolutes on what their beliefs are without REALLY opening their mind and doing a lot of studying of what others have written. This is because, quite frankly, there are just SO MANY books out there that have documented the issues involved in morals and religion.
Finally, what I see which should be avoided is for us as individuals to remain uninformed and uneducated on the issues, and then just fall back on the excuse of “trusting our own deductions more than someone else” instead of us actually seeking out answers from those who might have a greater understanding. It is not because of the fact that we are fallible creatures (and sinners) that we should not trust each other, but instead the opposite, that we ALL keep an open mind about things, be humble with what we think we know, and LOOK TO OTHERS FOR KNOWLEDGE to compare to our own. They could be spreading the absolute truth that we don’t have.
