-255x255.jpg "Reuters/Giampiero Sposito")
VATICAN CITY — The practical atheism of those who say they are Christian but live as if God does not exist is a greater threat than actual atheism, Pope Benedict XVI said as he presented three ways for people to more fully discover God.
While actual atheists often think deeply about God before rejecting belief, practical atheism “is even more destructive … because it leads to indifference towards faith and the question of God,” the Pope stated.
His fourth installment in a series of lessons on faith was delivered Nov. 14 during his weekly general audience to an overflow crowd of nearly 7,000 in the Pope Paul VI audience hall near St. Peter’s Square.
Benedict XVI focused his address on the challenge of witnessing to Christ in today’s world.
Christian witness is always hard, he said, because people are prone to “being dazzled by the glitter of worldliness,” but in the Western world sharing the faith is even harder today.
As he described it, the Christian faith was the everyday reality for most people in what used to be called Christendom. The burden was on non-believers to justify their disbelief.
But today the tables have turned, following a long slide into atheism, skepticism and a secular worldview that was ushered in by the Enlightenment.
This, in turn, has paved the way for moral and spiritual disaster in the Western world. People have become confused about ethics once commonly held, making room for relativism and fostering “an ambiguous conception of freedom, which instead of being liberating ends up binding man to idols,” the Pope said.
Pathways to God
In response to the ensuing moral and spiritual chaos, Pope Benedict called on all people to discover God by following three paths.
The first path involves contemplating creation. “The world is not a shapeless magma, but the more we know, the more we discover the amazing mechanisms; the more we see a pattern, we see that there is a creative intelligence,” the Holy Father remarked.
The second way of finding God is through inner contemplation. Benedict quoted St. Augustine’s famous saying, “Do not go outside yourself, come back into yourself: Truth dwells in the heart of man.” He also observed that the modern world is full of distractions that make it hard “to stop and take a deep look within ourselves and read that thirst for the infinite that we carry within, pushing us to go further and towards that Someone who can satisfy it.”
The third path, faith, is a dimly lit path for many people who view it as a limited aspect of life, if not a form of “illusion, escapism … or sentimentality.”
But, in reality, the Pope stated, faith concerns the truth about mankind and our eternal destinies.
“Faith … is an encounter with God, who speaks and acts in history and which converts our daily life, transforming our mentality, system of values, choices and actions,” he said. Faith is “not illusion, escapism, a comfortable shelter, sentimentality, but involvement in every aspect of life and proclamation of the Gospel, the Good News which can liberate all of man.”
Yet many people consider Christianity as a mere system of beliefs and morals instead of God’s self-revelation in history so that he could have a loving relationship with his creatures.
“Christianity, before being a moral or ethical value, is the experience of love, of welcoming the person of Jesus,” Pope Benedict stated, calling on all Christians to learn better the faith they profess and purify their lives in conformity with Christ.
After the Pope summarized his message in different languages and prayed the Our Father in Latin, the visiting men and boys of England’s Choir of Westminster Abbey burst into a joyful hymn.
American Pilgrims
Jim and Joyce Vieland, visiting Rome for the first time with other pilgrims from the Diocese of Cleveland, were enthralled by the experience.
“It was tranquil yet joyous,” said Mr. Vieland of Chardon, Ohio. “What I took away was the message that if you give joy to Jesus, then others, you yourself will be happy.”
Mrs. Vieland rejoiced in the unity of Catholicism on display in the hall, with so many people from around the world professing their common faith: “I believe that if more people came to Rome to see the unity of the Church, they’d become closer to Our Lord.”
Matthew Warner: Why the world doesn't take Catholicism seriously
Benjamin Wiker: Benedict XVI: Doctor of the Church
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“Do not go outside yourself, come back into yourself: Truth dwells in the heart of man.” He also observed that the modern world is full of distractions thay…....etc.”
I think that Augustine’s Modern World was a bit different than the Modern World of the 21st century!
Gods have been concocted by men for many years because of fear of the unknown. The fairly recent Christian God is no different, a man-made god with no proof of his existence! Like the others before him he will eventually be discarded by rational thought.
The Pope hit a home run with this analysis.
The pope does not mention this point, of course, but the whole reason “practical atheism” is more destructive than disbelief is because of morality - because morality and moral considerations are, in fact, not genuinely grounded in either religious faith or rules handed down by a god, but in people learning wisdom in dealing with situations and contexts in the real world, in the consequences of their behavior in modern societies. From this awareness, religious belief can serve as a distraction at best, and typically injects false ideas and immoral behavior at worst.
Dave; Do you believe in love? Why should you, if you can’t see it.
Do you believe that we breath air in order to stay alive? Why should you if you can’t see it. Christ has been around since the beginning of time and if He was going away, He would have been out of man’s heart a long time ago. Yes, the other false gods have come and gone but, man has been dying and also been martyred for Him for thousands of years and will continue being martyred for the “Truth” which is Jesus Christ. Viva Christo Rey!
Espe: Of course I believe in air, it can be proved to be there,chemically or biologically. Why such a question? Are you suggesting that I don’t believe in the Christian god simply because I can’t see him? Nonsense! Japanese radioactivity can’t be seen but they know it is there. I don’t believe in anything for which there is no empirical evidence. True I can’t prove that the Christian god does not exist but I also cannot prove that there are not six million cats living somewhere in Alpha Centauri, it is just unlikely. Faith and belief are just that, they have nothing to with reality
Yes, the Pope has got it right in this case. “Practical Atheism” is basically not going to Church—Catholic or otherwise. This indicates that people are no longer blindly following Church doctrines, but considering for themselves whether they are moral or not.
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Humans thinking for themselves are destructive to any religion.
Not to believe in God is to believe that creation created itself. If this satisfies you, then accept it.
Not to believe in God means there is no sound base for morality because everyone can invent his own.
The more one studies science the more he is convinced there is a great designer behind it.
If God does not exist how is it that He answers our prayers? Read the life of people like Padre Pio and see for yourself.
The rhetoric of Christian apologetics (rhetoric used to try to justify believing due to “faith” - i.e., just continuing to adhere to religious doctrines and traditions - despite the lack of good evidence) is always amusing because of how permeated with fallacy it is.
‘Can’t see air, but you believe it exists.’ Like atheists haven’t heard/seen that canard at least a thousand times. Not only is there in fact an abundance of empirical evidence of air, but there’s also an extensive body of scientific knowledge about all sorts of properties of air - and not only that but anyone can feel air merely by waving his hands through it. You can’t do that with angels, demons, gods, etc.. There is no scientific evidence of these things. Which is the point. But the rhetoric of Christian apologetics is purposely designed to try to obscure/hide the huge difference, and the “air” argument is just one particular example of that tactic.
The ‘Can’t see love’ argument is another example of the same thing. All you have to do is stop and think about it for not even three seconds and you know that in fact psychology is specifically that field of science in which human emotions are studied (among other aspects of the human psyche). There’s also neuroscience, where scientists have already been engaged in studying how the brain operates (as well as engaged in continuing to develop various technologies to do it). The Christian rhetoric tries to pretend that none of that exists, and tries to pretend that there is zero empirical evidence of any human emotion. Which, of course, is utterly absurd. But absurd premises is exactly what the religious apologetics rhetoric is built on.
Regarding morality, the apologetics rhetoric is used to try to pretend that without a god there is no morality at all - which is nothing more than the standard fallacy of the false dichotomy, pretending that either you have an ‘absolute morality’ dictated by a god, or there isn’t any morality at all. Which is just another typical absurdity of the rhetoric. There only way there could be no morality at all is if our behavior didn’t have any real, empirical consequences in reality. But it does. How you treat people has consequences. What you do has real world effects around you, and those effects reflect back on you. Societies have created various systems of laws precisely based on consequences. (I’m not arguing that such systems are perfect. Anything but. Behavior and consequences can be highly contextual, and law systems are only very rough models related to dealing with a small subset of behavior.) Just because there is no such thing as an ‘absolute morality’ does not in any way mean that there is no morality of any kind. It merely means that morality is much more complex than the simplistic religious model of rules dictated by a god.
Moreover, the context of Christian apologetics rhetoric specifically entails not just some abstract concept of some god, but the Bible God specifically, and when we look at some of the morality allegedly dictated by this god in the Bible, we find it to be primitive, barbaric, and repugnant in all kinds of instances. Just read the book of Joshua sometimes, where the Bible says that that god command the tribe of the Israelites to slaughter the natives - every child, woman, and man merely because they happened to be already living in some territory that this god was allegedly just arbitrarily giving ownership of to the Israelite tribe. So Bible morality says that genocide is not only okay, but it’s a virtue. (And the story in Joshue even mentions that it is considered it a crime by God for which you are to be executed if you disagree with it.) So many examples like this from the Bible are what prove the religious apologetics rhetoric from Christians about morality to be ridiculous - at best - and I’m being kind with my words when I put it like that.
But let’s not forget the original article (above) and the assertions it makes (since, in fact, assertion is precisely all that religious faith can ever have). It is asserted that “faith concerns the truth about mankind and our eternal destinies” - but the fact that such assertions have never been and can never be actually substantiated by good real world evidence is precisely what proves that such assertions are false, which means they cannot concern the truth no matter how much they pretend to.
“Practical atheism” is a misnomer because it assumes that behaving a certain way is inherent to atheism. If the person still believes in any god, he or she is not an atheist in any sense. Period.
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