S
Sniffles
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Looks like I have quite a bit to respond to here, and I'll try to get to as much as possible.
I'll start by further elaborating on a point I made earlier:
Allow me to cite the Pope to an considerable extent:
I'll start by further elaborating on a point I made earlier:
Faith is the first step, but one must ultimately seek to understand that faith better through reason. As St. Anslem of Canteburry famously remarked, "Credo ut intelligam"(I believe so that I may understand).
Pope Benedict XVI addresses this issue very well in Introduction to Christianity, that belief in the mystery of the supernatural does not mean one can embrace any nonsense made in the name of that mystery. If you do that, then faith and religion look like utter nonsense. Faith is the foundation from which a rational understanding of things must precede from.
Allow me to cite the Pope to an considerable extent:
"If theology arrives at all kinds of absurdities and tries, not only to excuse them, but even when possible to canonize them by pointing to the mystery, then we are confronted with a misuse of the true idea of "mystery", the purpose of which is not to destroy reason but rather to render belief possible as understanding. In other words, it is certainly true that belief or faith is not knowledge in the sense of pratical knowledge and its particular kind of calculability. It can never become that, and in the last analysis it can only make itself ridiculous if it tries to establish itself in those forms. But the reverse is also true: practical knowledge is limited by its very nature to the apparent, to what functions, and does not represent the way in which to find truth itself, which by its very method it has renounced. The tool in with which man is equipped to deal with truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning of to which he has entrusted himself. And we must certainly add that "understanding" only reveals itself in "standing", not apart from it. One cannot occur without the other, for understanding means seizing and grasping as meaning the meaning that man has received as ground. I think this is the precise significance of what we mean by understanding: that we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and truth; that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning. If this is so, understanding not only implies no contradiction with belief but represents its most intrisnsic property."
--Introduction to Christianity pg. 77