Starting to doubt Catholicism

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Platonist said:
How can I know the truth of the Catholic/Hebrew stuff that has nothing to do with reason (Salvation history, etc) ?
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One place to start might be the historical witness: the deaths of the specific martyrs who claimed to have witnessed Jesus’ resurrection firsthand and were willing to be tortured and killed in brutal ways, rather than simply say they lied or potentially misunderstood who they saw and touched, etc.

I’ve heard Jimmy Akin has a book called ‘The Drama of Salvation’. Not sure whether it’s mostly thematic or historically oriented, but maybe worth a look?
 
Good parts of the faith didn’t come from the Gentiles. They came from Christ. Have you read the Bible? Read the Bible. Cover to cover. It’s a love story between God and His people. Sure, there are differences from the Old Testament and the New Testament. God called His people and raised them, so to speak. Just as you wouldn’t treat a 2 y ear old the same as a 20 year old, neither did God. He started out with the concrete (Mosaic Law) and introduced abstract concepts later (New Testament). It’s all the same Truth. (this is what makes sense to me so this is how I have to explain it).

What’s philosophically implausible about people being given free will…to choose good or evil? Can you force someone to love you? You can’t exactly tie someone up and demand that they love y ou. That’s not love, that’s slavery. God wants us to love Him from our own free will. Anything less would be insulting to Him. We wouldn’t tolerate that in a relationship. Don’t we want people to love us out of their own free will?
 
One place to start might be the historical witness
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I recognize the historical authenticity of the gospels and early church; the problem is that in the end I still have to blindly assent to an historical claim. I want to know, not just believe. Blind belief seems insulting to God, who is Reason itself.
 
Your faith seems 100% intellectual. Our intellect comes from God and clearly we should use it for the greater glory of God but I didn’t come to faith from atheism through my intellect. I had a direct encounter with God.

Also, when I was pregnant and gave birth and fed my children from my own body that was not an intellectual exercise but one of love and self-sacrifice. Where does my experience fit in your philosophy?
 
Platonist said:
One place to start might be the historical witness
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Hmm. Maybe an analogy or two… because our reason is good and we should use it – to decide whether to – with our eyes open, not blindly – actually trust a person.

Analogy 1: Your mother has never lied to you about anything you’ve double checked before. When she told you dinner was on the table – it was. When she told you she’d stay up all night helping you finish your big project – she did. When she told you she’d pick you up after school – she always did. Now suppose one day she tells you that she had lunch that day at a local restaurant with her friend Betty, and you say: “Whoa whoa whoa. Let me stop you right there. I wasn’t there so I can’t check this one. Show me the receipt from the restaurant, and you’d better have taken a picture of you with Betty together, or I can’t reasonably believe this happened. Your word isn’t good enough; I need absolute proof.” Wouldn’t you see there’s something wrong with that? That if your mother has never lied to you before, it’s actually contrary to reason to disbelieve her about an event just because you don’t have absolute proof beyond her word? That when a person has proved themselves trustworthy on things we can check, it’s reasonable to trust them beyond that as well?

Analogy 2 (because there actually is lots of great historical evidence for Christianity, and I’d encourage you to seek it out! The Catholic Answers store should have great books available, and they offer so much content free online): Even after we’ve seen good evidence, trust is often required before an action. We can see the parachute get packed, we can know that it was packed well – but there’s still a moment when we have to choose to trust it and actually leap out of the airplane.
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Seriously, exactly what in your life can you NOT have to blindly assent to an historical claim outside your own experience?

If you are under age 50, for example, you have no choice but to accept the assertion that in 1969 men landed on the moon. You have, of course, ‘footage’ from the TV, all sorts of articles, etc. But all of those could have been faked ‘. And go back even a little further, still in the 20th century, and you cannot rely on other than hearsay or written or photographical evidence, which itself can be incomplete, doctored, wrongly interpreted. Even today you can be a victim of ‘fake news’ even if you think you have done all the requisite research. So in a sense, you are never really going to ‘know’ something which is truly outside not just the natural, but outside YOUR natural. You are not going to KNOW just what your parents think or did even if you have a journal and home movies. You might not even completely ‘know’ your own self; human beings have a remarkable capacity for self-delusion.

But God does not ask us to attempt to ‘know the unknowable’. If you truly KNOW something, you know ‘you’, you don’t know God. Does a created item ‘know’ all about its Creator, or is it vice versa:

You remind me of my children; the generation now in their 20s and 30s who were taught to ‘question always’. . .to the point that their questions can never be answered because they simply cannot ‘know it all’. My children tell me some of their friends are in a perpetual state of rage and querulous questioning because, with their inflated ‘self esteem’ of how they can ‘be and do anything they want’ —and at the ages they are now they find how false that was—they simply cannot accept ‘not knowing’. By G-d, they are ENTITLED to have full knowledge and if they don’t, it’s not because THEY ‘lack’ anything themselves, it’s mean old “GOD” who refuses to let them have what they demand!
 
lelinator said:
You know what I find odd…sometimes people want you to listen to that still small voice…unless it leads you to question them. In which case they don’t want you to listen to that still small voice at all, they want you to listen to them.
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But aren’t you a solipsist?
Isn’t everything else just a figment of your imagination?
 
God favors simple, humble, “backwards” people for the simple reason that they are more likely to love and trust and accept him rather than sit around thinking themselves into a hole and making prideful remarks about superiority of intellect.

He encourages us to strive to become simple and trusting like little children.

It’s not something one arrives at by intellectualizing.
 
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Tis_Bearself: It’s not something one arrives at by intellectualizing.
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Perhaps what Platonist is saying is, in accord with his Athenean role model, that the intellect should guide the assent to the truth, and that a rightly-ordered intellect will prevent the assent to error. Hence the intellectuals have an important role to play in protecting the revealed order.

The philosophical propositions he lists at the bottom are all ones that the Church has accepted, but are based in late-scholastic Aristotelianism. And insofar as those points are inseparable from Catholicism, they are worth discussing in the context of the Church’s credibility.
 
Platonist: I want to know , not just believe.
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Greetings, my good Socrates! I am Meno. Do you recall when you coaxed out of my stable-boy all the knowledge of geometry which was in his mind previously? Perhaps you and I do already know of God, and our intellectualizations are the effect of you drawing your figures in the sand.

I agree with you that the Catholic philosophers’ assumption of form and matter in regards to the soul is dubious, and also the creation of souls in time - though I must say that, as an existentialist, I believe the human person to be sufficiently alienated to allow for him to choose evil if his will (appetite) and heart (spiritedness) are against his head (intellect).
 
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This is where intellectual arrogance gets you: not being able to admit your ideas are leading you to self-destruction and the actions that come from that arrogance bringing disaster to others. Five young, brilliant intellectuals not willing to acknowledge their mistake in supporting Stalin due to hubris.

 
Platonist said:
As for why I’m prioritizing philosophy and having doubts about Catholicism: because we can know philosophical ideas are true. There’s no faith required to assent to the reality of God or the immortality of the soul.
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Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche would disagree with you.
 
So I’m not a believer in god(s) or anything like them. I visit CAF because I am interested in what, why and how people believe things that to me have no empirical evidence or at least none that would lead to a positive conclusion about the existence of beings or things beyond the material world.

I’m pretty sure (my working hypothesis) that religious belief conferred an evolutionary advantage to our far-removed ancestors. With it they were more optimistic, less depressed and more successful than without it. I am pretty sure the human tendency to follow strong leaders/elders and accept their word is associated with this. The principal evidence for this hypothesis is that religion is ubiquitous in human societies and even those societies that consciously attempt to eliminate religion adopt similar forms of belief/practice (e.g. communist Albania and whateverist North Korea). (Disclaimer: I am absolutely not equating Catholic or any other system of belief or morality with these two nations - just pointing out that their approach to non-belief itself took/takes a religious form).

Anyway, after that long preamble:
Platonist said:
it seems like Catholicism was just watered down classical philosophy fashioned onto Jewish folk religion. All the good parts of the faith came from the gentiles, why is this? And why was Greek culture so superior to Hebrew? Who is the Hebrew Plato, for example? Historically, they just seem like a backwards hill people, nothing makes them stand out as carriers of the Truth. Its easier to believe Socrates is in “heaven” than any Old Testament figure.
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‘Hill people’? I’ve seen nothing to indicate that the beliefs of any society in this area are less sophisticated than others. Much of the Old Testament - Job, Proverbs, Psalms - contains literature and thought I find far more relevant to my life than Platonic musings. You should maybe do a bit of anthropology before continuing as a philosopher.

And you are arguing against a straw man. Catholics rely heavily on ‘faith’ as well as ‘reason’. In every major belief in Catholicism there are articles of faith that are accepted as givens in the reasoning process. They rely on tradition to validate these articles of faith. It does not purport to be a religion starting with a black sheet of paper and working its way through to its beliefs.
 
Platonist said:
Blind belief seems insulting to God
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Yet we have many canonized saints who fell squarely into that category. God wasn’t insulted by them in the least.

You seem to not understand that there are ways of being close to God other than the one you’ve apparently picked for yourself, which you’re now complaining isn’t working for you.

At least be respectful of others’ ways, even if you want to do something else. We do have intellectual and philosopher saints too, from Aquinas to Edith Stein, but not everybody needs to be like them.
 
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lelinator said:
But I can’t help but wonder, if somebody had started a thread that expressed their doubts about atheism, and another poster applauded them for it, would that post have also been flagged and removed?
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No, because this is a Catholic forum, not “Atheist Answers”.

Encouraging someone to turn away from the Catholic faith on our own forum, with bravos and cheers, is disrespectful.
 
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