Stephen White, writing at the Huffington Post (yes, the Huffington Post) with an outstanding piece well worth your time:
Religion, we are told, is an escape -- an attempt to explain away the pain and suffering and impossible contradictions of human life. Religion, we are reminded, is full of stuff we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. Or worse. Religion is something we tell others in order to control them. It's not belief in God, per se, that disturbs our sophisticated, post-modern sensibilities. It's religion; especially of the organized sort. So we're all spiritual, but fewer and fewer of us are religious.
Our culture's complicated relationship with organized religion is closely tied to our culture's complicated relationship with truth. We love our truth, all right, but we treat truth a lot like religion -- it's fine, so long as everyone else keeps their truth to themselves. Tolerance -- which our culture values over all other virtues -- consists in not imposing your truth on someone else.
The problem with this well-meaning attempt at tolerance is that it is unsustainable. It's self-cannibalizing. If there is only your truth and my truth, but no Truth, then there is no common ground upon which to meet one another. Either I'm right, or you are, and since there's no middle ground, the matter is only ever settled when one side wins and the other side loses. A world without truth isn't a world liberated from conflict; it's a world without the possibility of reconciliation.
Pope Benedict's episcopal motto Cooperatores veritatis -- "co-operators of the truth" -- suggests a very different understanding of reality; one in which both faith and reason owe allegiance to the same reality, that is, to truth. And truth, at least as the Catholic Church understands it, is best demonstrated, not by carefully reasoned arguments (though those are important) and certainly not by violence, but by self-giving love. There is nothing more compelling, nothing more true, than sacrificial love.
(The central truth of Christian faith -- God became man in Jesus Christ, through whose suffering and death we are redeemed -- can be summed up like this: God got tired of telling us how to do it, so He decided to come down here and show us.)
It also suggests that Pope Benedict XVI understands a pope's role in the Church as one of leadership, but primarily of service. Among the pope's many titles -- Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of Apostles -- is this, The Servant of the Servants of God. He is only a custodian, a shepherd of Someone Else's flock. The papacy, in other words, was not given him for his sake, but for the sake of the Church's mission.
He's got more.
It's truly an outstanding piece well worth finishing.
I think we are in an area of abstract beliefs that no one is going to win. We are talking about cultures & beliefs & religion with no end to a solution.
Posted by: OhioRiver | Monday, February 18, 2013 at 10:12 AM
I have to disagree with your summation of the Christian faith.
Jesus did not come to come to show us how to "do it". He came because the children of fallen Adam were condemned to eternal separation form God unless God found a way to redeem them. And He did.
From the Book of John, Chapter 3:
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
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36 He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.
As per Ephesians 2:8 (and countless other verses and memes in theWord of GOD) :
"8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Our ability to "do it" comes from the Holy Spirit enabling the redeemed to bear His fruit:
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
23 Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)
Further, as Jesus explained in John 14:12-17:
12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
14 If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.
15 If ye love me, keep my commandments.
16 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;
17 Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.
Posted by: olivia | Monday, February 18, 2013 at 10:23 AM