Starting to doubt Catholicism

[goout]

goout:

Bertrand Russel is not understanding (or not applying) the concept of both/and here. He is rigidly (in fundamentalist fashion) applying either/or to faith and reason. Faith and reason are integrated.

I think that Ana is pointing out that it’s entirely possible to accept God via faith and to understand his existence using reason (which means that you actually don’t need faith, but we’ll skip that bit). But if you can’t or even don’t agree with the reasons then you have to accept them…on faith.

Hence irony.

Thanks.
Noting the words you used: “have to accept them…”
No one is forced to accept something they find unreasonable.

This misunderstanding demonstrates the point.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

goout:

Bertrand Russel is not understanding (or not applying) the concept of both/and here. He is rigidly (in fundamentalist fashion) applying either/or to faith and reason. Faith and reason are integrated.

I think that Ana is pointing out that it’s entirely possible to accept God via faith and to understand his existence using reason (which means that you actually don’t need faith, but we’ll skip that bit). But if you can’t or even don’t agree with the reasons then you have to accept them…on faith.

Hence irony.

Thanks.
Noting the words you used: “have to accept them…”
No one is forced to accept something they find unreasonable.

This misunderstanding demonstrates the point.

Have to accept them as in it’s a requirement to accept them. Naturally, you are not forced to.

 

[fhansen]

I also have trouble with the concept that souls are created in time, that the soul is the form of the body, and that an intellect with full knowledge can assent to evil. All of these seem philosophically implausible at best.

I think most would agree that a person can have sufficient knowledge to make them culpable for wrong choices, when deciding between two choices where the wrong choice may nonetheless be the more attractive one in the moment. Otherwise we’d be no more than amoral beasts or automatons, with no internal sense of justice, no reason to be held morally accountable.

It should be self-evident from experience, itself, that this is not the case, that humans can and do decide to make selfish or in any case wrong choices that cause unnecessary harm to others, while they could do otherwise. So it could at least be said that a wrongdoer’s knowledge is often “full enough”, full enough to make them culpable. Would even fuller knowledge necessarily, automatically, preclude them from committing the sin?

Either way, can our choices and actions tend towards good, or tend towards evil-or not? Or are all of our choices always directed towards the fullest and highest good for ourselves as well as others? Are those choices always right IOW, or at least neutral, regardless of the outcome? Is a choice identifiable as being wrong simply because it involves unpleasantness, some kind of denial or repression of something we want? Is everything we want right to want? Can we know better?

 

[Platonist]

Well, maybe. Platonic cosmology just seems so much more reasonable and merciful. Maybe Plato had too much hope as to the limits of mercy.

 

[fhansen]

Ok, but considering the awful things that man can obviously do, which should indicate some kind of anomaly, some innocence lost if God creates everything good to begin with, should God be wrong for demanding some kind of righteousness in man, defined in Christianity as love? In that case God can be infinitely merciful and forgiving while still allowing us to reject said mercy, to go our own way, to fail to love, to oppose love. The basic message of Christianity is that God exists and man need God, communion with Him, in order to be who he was created to be.
"Apart from me you can do nothing." John 15:5

 

[Platonist]

Of course communion with God is the objective of every soul. everything the church understands about God and Love came from the Greeks in the first place. Man is fickle though, and the death of the body seems like such an abritrary point at which to judge a soul.

 

[bruisedreed]

You forget the place the body has in Christian theology.

Communion with God, according to Catholicism, is not the sort of merely spiritual participation in Form that Plato and Plotinus argued for.

It is the risen body’s human exchange of Love with the Father, through the corporal Son in the Holy Spirit.

Not one of the Greeks ever even came close enough to imagining that Form itself would take the form of human nature, in a poor body, in a poor town, so that he might show His love for man. So far from this understanding of love were the Greeks that not one of them even conceived of God as a person. Plotinus came as far as to say that human nature would be perfected by being subsumed and fused to the All Soul, losing its particular identity.

 

[Platonist]

Right, thats the impasse I’m at. Not only do I just have to take scripture at its word, but some parts seem contrary to reason. Why should spirit be permanently bound to matter, like the resurrection says? How can a higher thing be subject to a lower thing? Hell and its permanent state also seems unreasonable.

 

[bruisedreed]

New questions keep popping up!

I’ll try to respond very briefly to your first question.

As far as I can see it is an issue of having a correct philosophical anthropology. Generally Aquinas agreed with Aristotle on this in arguing for hylomorphism. The human person is a body-spirit composite. Human beings are not spiritual intellects but embodied ones.

If God loves you, then he loves you as you are. But you are a body. Therefore God shall love you in your body. If he saved you as a spirit he would not be saving you but something else. Without the resurrection there is no hope of eternal happiness because happiness is being who I am, completely, without blemish, but what I am is flesh.

 

[Platonist]

The body dies but the spirit is immortal. The body-soul composite seems incoherent, like you wouldnt want to accept that the essence of a thing precedes its material existence. Also I haven’t read Aquinas in depth, but he seems to just present watered down Aristotelianism , ie whenever he cannot find a synthesis between christianity and aristotle/logic, he just cites scripture.

 

[MNathaniel]

Of course communion with God is the objective of every soul. everything the church understands about God and Love came from the Greeks in the first place. Man is fickle though, and the death of the body seems like such an abritrary point at which to judge a soul.

As compared to what?

Has it occurred to you that God might have so constructed the universe, that each man dies at exactly the right time for it to be appropriate to judge his soul? With God factoring in things like floods and murderers (and so on), and knowing in advance how and when each person will die, providing each soul sufficient grace to be prepared for judgment?

God could have theoretically made humans with lifespans the same duration of fruit flies. Or a million years each. However, He seems to have settled on 80 years, give or take, as about right as the default – with many children dying young, many young adults dying of war or accident, some people living well past 100, etc.

The angels, it’s said, made their once-for-all choices, well, all-at-once.

God has made humans unique in allowing our choices to be made from within time. But that doesn’t mean that any one of us has “too little” of it. God is still a just God; He knows what we need; whatever time we’re given, it was the right amount of time for us.

 

[Platonist]

God has made humans unique in allowing our choices to be made from within time. But that doesn’t mean that any one of us has “too little” of it.

people die randomly all the time. A bit silly to suppose that everyone who has ever died prematurely in a state of mortal sin was totally without hope of repentance. “Narrow is the way”; Scripture does not paint an optimistic picture of this anyway. Acts 5:1-5 shows that Justice can often come without hope of mercy.

 

[MNathaniel]

people die randomly all the time. A bit silly to suppose that everyone who has ever died prematurely in a state of mortal sin was totally without hope of repentance.

Please point for me to where I said anything about “without hope of repentance”.

Oh, although you do say “in a state of mortal sin”, so I suppose that does beg the question.

 

[Platonist]

So more time would be good for them right? Would it possibly be, a Good?

 

[MNathaniel]

So more time would be good for them right? Would it possibly be, a Good ?

Only God knows what is good for each soul. Could be a given soul will only stack up greater punishment for itself if given more time on earth (not to mention harm other people besides).

We can only speculate. In the end, we trust that God, who holds all things in his hands, has got this. His plans and mercy for us are not thrown off by the timing of our deaths; He works around and with that.

 

[Platonist]

Binding the perfection of a soul to a single lifetime just seems too arbitrary. It might be true, but I kinda wish it weren’t!

 

[bruisedreed]

Aquinas agreed with your first sentence. But he just denied that you are your soul.

 

[MNathaniel]

Binding the perfection of a soul to a single lifetime just seems too arbitrary. It might be true, but I kinda wish it weren’t!

Does binding the perfection of an angelic soul to a single moment of angelic choice seem too arbitrary?

Different creations of God have different ways of being formed into their final perfection. Angels had one way. Humans have another.

From the perspective of angels, one might even look at humans as having a pretty sweet deal. Many of us get to change our minds back and forth, back and forth, before we die. Held alive in the mercy of God even as we follow the enemy instead, and given repeated opportunities to return to following God. One moment a true sinner – the next, truly saved. And back and forth, at all times beloved by God as we decide our way into our final shapes.

 

[Platonist]

Yes this seems arbitrary. A lot is said about the nature of time and eternity, but I don’t know what existence is like for intermediary spirit. God is eternally present, but it might not be so of lower spirit.

From the perspective of angels, one might even look at humans as having a pretty sweet deal. Many of us get to change our minds back and forth, back and forth, before we die.

Risking eternal separation from Being and the loss of spiritual perfection because of material chance isn’t a sweet deal. Historically God’s “permissive will” is quite, uh, willing. Binding something like eternal spiritual states to short material experiences just seems inappropriate.

 

[MNathaniel]

Risking eternal separation from Being and the loss of spiritual perfection because of material chance isn’t a sweet deal. Historically God’s “permissive will” is quite, uh, willing. Binding something like eternal spiritual states to short material experiences just seems inappropriate.

But you seem to be presupposing that what is “chance” from a human perspective, wasn’t foreseen by God from the beginning of time. God has known from the beginning of time exactly how each and every one of us will die. And like a loving father, He interacts with us up until then (including in unseen ways) to make sure we’re each given the grace we need to be ready at that moment – so long as we don’t reject those gifts of grace.

50 days or 50 years, doesn’t really make a difference in the big picture, when God can give bigger graces sooner within a 50 day period, and choose to meter out graces more gradually across 50 years.

He has His reasons; this is His creation, all the heavens and earth are His. He will make all things work out for good for those who love Him. That’s what He promises us. It’s up to each of us whether, today, we respond to God’s grace in our lives.