I’m saying that even if I believed that one of the world’s religions were true, I would have no way of deciding which one it is. Any set oif standards that I would use to reject all the other religions would cause me to reject Christianity as well.
Well, ok.
I was only pointing out that humanity is far from consensus on the truth of any religion. The choice is not simply Christianity or not. It is Christianity or Islam, or Mormonism or Buddhism, or Hinduism or …
I’m sure you know that the Catholic understanding about truth considers “consensus” irrelevant.
The standards would be faith and reason.
**My experience of love is that it’s real-it’s huge, vast, transcendent. My experience of evil is that it’s also real-and transcendent in the sense that it’s unnatural-not a part of the way I’d expect the world to work if it ran by order/truth/reason. But my understanding of the universe in general is that it is ordered, non-chaotic, non-random, which points to the existence of a mind basic to and behind it all. Catholicism addresses these issues among others either in ways other religions don’t come close or at the very least much more fully or exhaustively than the rest.
Faith as a standard gets us nowhere, since people of other religions also claim to have faith that their religion is true.
Refer to my last post for the response to that. You must have missed it.
That is true.
Well! To answer that question I would have to refer you to the writings of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas…not to mention the beautifully rich encyclicals Fidest et Ratio and Veritatis Splendour. Oh, and my favorite contemporary author who speaks to this is Peter Kreeft. And, of course, CS Lewis.
Did these writings really convince you that Cathoicism is superior to all other religions, or did you go into reading them already thinking so.
You said, “I can tell you that not one prophecy made By Jesus was ever wrong and many are occurring in these days.”
Wasn’t this a reference to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, less than a generation after Christ’s death?
Specificity is irrelevant, really. Christ’s prophetic ability was not his primary mission. Neither was healing the sick and curing the lame, BTW.
Yes, they really convinced me that Catholicism is True. I did not go into reading them thinking it was already so. Many I read in college, and like every college student, I read them with an air of skepticism.
I have read many authors in other religions, and lots of atheist authors as well. Kooky, kooky, kooky.
The pure reasonableness of Christianity…the earth-shattering beauty of Christianity… the sheer intellectual faculties of Catholic thinkers such as Aquinas, Augustine, Anselm (no other writers of other religions even come close to these giants)… the experiential aspects of my life…all convince me of the truth of Christianity.
We will continue to call our baptized children Christians because it’s Catholic teaching that we should.
nop. Among other things you completely forgot about revelations as an example. And if you read the OT prophacies going centuries prior to the life of Jesus Christ, you would see how only His life could be referenced in those prophacies. There are many things you will never be able to use logic to explain away, but these again are only a part of what constitutes the foundation of Christianity. If you read deep enough into it, you would see it is only a grain of sand.
I think I should clarify. Many things I read were kooky. Some were not. I really loved the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, although I haven’t read anything he’s written in many, many years.
I haven’t read the Rig Veda or much of the Dalai Lama but I’ve read the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh, sutras too numerous to count, the writings of Krishamurti and a host of other gurus, the Koran, a little Joseph Smith, a fair amount of JW literature, etc. I didn’t necessarily think any could tell me much more than I already knew but the bible somehow stuck with me as having something authoritative to say. And later I began to hear the same voice in Catholicism, to my own surprise. And this conviction continued to grow stronger. I can’t speak for people of other faiths-only for myself-but I’d thrown everything I’d been taught as a child out the window before I began to believe in the truths put forth by Christianity-and I didn’t particularly care which, if any, religion held the truth.
Again, you make unwarranted assumptions. Why wouldn’t Christians be interested in reading important writers and thinkers from other traditions? You sure seem to know a lot about what we think!
Huh?
I thought you wanted to talk about prophecies made by Jesus rather than John.
Can you give me an example of one prophecy that you find interesting.
He was there, in their generation.