I know some of what we believe as Catholics, but I do not understand why we believe. I do believe, but I do not know why. What is this faith of ours based on and why is it rational?
I believe that faith in itself is rational due to the limitations of the human mind: faith is required to know God’s will.
My problem arises out of my belief that many people are deluded by false faiths, how do we know our faith is the truth and that we are not being decieved?
I know this is a hard question but perhaps someone could help me out.
One knows if one is wrongly believing something if some contradiction arises from the application of that belief.
If I believe that I can fly, and the pavement beneath my ladder contradicts my belief that I can fly, some options are presented to me:
- *) I can redefine “flying” to something less “pavement impact inducing” and continue to believe that I can fly.
- *) I can give up the belief that I can fly.
Now, it would SEEM that item #2 is the obvious choice, but I’d choose item #1, and redefine “flying” as being airborne in some “flying machine” type thingy.
The question is what “adjustments” need to be made to reconcile one’s beliefs with reality.
So, what is the “internal non-contradiction” of a set of beliefs (which is what a religion is)? And, are there any contradictions between said set-of-beliefs (religion) and reality?
Since I’m lazy, I chose Catholicism to believe in because of it’s apparent internal non-contradiction and it’s non-interference (non-contradiction in application) with physical/human-nature reality.
I also chose it because of it’s “confidence” in making some very BOLD claims seemingly not threatened in the least by the apparent ease of it’s being contradicted by non-Catholics!
I figured I’d either do some more extensive research and it’s self-contradictions would show up rather quickly, or that research would reinforce it’s validity.
Taking the axioms of Catholicism as a basis to build on, and “judging” the axioms themselves as to whether they are “obviously obnoxious” (which is admittedly rather subjective) or not, I have yet to find any reason to not believe in Catholicism, and have found an incredibly powerful basis for finding the self-contradictions in EVERY other religion whose adherents pose the validity of their religion to me to evaluate.
The reason that I believe in the Church is because it functions as it says it functions as “the one fullness of truth”, while no other religion actually does function as it says it functions unless it is self-admittedly NOT “the one fullness of truth”.
