Skeptical Faith

Google Image On the 24 th of last month, many Catholics, and perhaps some others, observed the 45 th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. Many of you may never have heard of him and may think of El Salvador as an insignificant Central American country that is occasionally in the news because of its frequent earthquakes and its infamous mega prison, the Cecot, or by its formal name, the Center for Terrorism Confinement. However, El Salvador has a special place in my heart because of frequent trips there to aid earthquake victims and help bring medical care to rural areas, and with parishioners of an Iowa church that provides scholarships to rural students. Notorious for Horrible Conditions The prison, according to CNN, is home to some of the country’s most hardened criminals, including mass murderers and gang members. But it's also notorious for the horrible conditions in which the prisoners, many of whom were arrested and charged witho...

Google Image One of the most embarrassing things that has happened to me occurred years ago when I took my father to his doctor’s office. He was probably in his early nineties, had hearing problems and was beginning to show signs that he wasn’t entirely in tune with his surroundings. A grossly overweight young woman entered the waiting room. Dad saw her and commented in a voice that no one there could miss: “Would you look at that!” I wanted to crawl under the table next to me. I felt terrible, but there was nothing I could do to remedy the situation. I couldn’t say, “Sorry” to the young woman. That would have embarrassed her even more. There was nothing I could say to my dad. He was simply saying what he was thinking, and losing one’s inhibitions seems to come easy with age. He was otherwise a wonderful father and human being. Know It's Wrong Fact is, I also find myself often judging people because of their looks. I know it’s wrong. I believe it dates from a time in my life ...

Google Image My wife, Amparo, and I were at a restaurant recently when a family that included a teenaged girl entered. She and family members were walking to their table, accompanied by the maître de, when I noticed that the girl was wearing headphones - not the small ones that fit in the ear but large ones that included a flashing light to let you know that they were in use. Was she sending a message? I wondered. And was the message that not only did she not want to engage with family members, but wanted them – and anyone else who might try to speak to her - to know as much? If I interpreted the situation correctly, I have to acknowledge that it’s not only teens who are “plugged in” to their cell phones or other electronic devices when they could be engaging with real, live people. We’ve all experienced it among friends, family and strangers. We seem to be in a pandemic of distraction from “real life.” Avoiding the Deeper Issues “Where our culture is particularly dangerous, I feel...

Google Image While in Colombia a week or so ago, I had an interesting conversation with a taxi driver. He was sympathizing with America’s “immigration problem,” comparing it to the onslaught of Venezuelans who have entered his country in recent years. A word of explanation. As of September of last year, nearly 3 million Venezuelans have settled in Colombia, a country with a population of about 53 million where nearly 14 percent of the population - approximately 6.9 million people - are living on less than $2.15 a day. T he United Nations Refugee Agency attributes the flight from Venezuela (An estimated 25 percent of the population have migrated.) to “rampant violence, inflation, gang warfare, soaring crime rates, and shortages of food, medicine and essential services ….” For the Colombian taxi driver, these aren’t just statistics. The presence of so many poor Venezuelans in Colombia is personal. He grew up poor and continues to be poor, he said, and sees the Venezuelans as intruder...

Google Image One of my all-time, favorite movies was produced in 1989 and was entitled, “Do the Right Thing.” P roduced, written and directed by Spike Lee , “the story explores a Brooklyn   neighborhood's simmering racial tension  between its African American   residents and the Italian American  owners of a pizzeria…,” according to Wikipedia. As the name implies, it deals with a moral dilemma. So, how do we know how to “do the right thing?” Francis Collins, the retired director of the National Institutes of Health and former director of the Human Genome Project - of whom I’ve written often - grew up as a “practical atheist.” Irrelevant to Him He wasn’t so much a denier of God’s existence. It just didn’t occur to him in all his studies to become a medical doctor, then a renowned genetic scientist, to ask the God question. It was irrelevant to him, as it seems to many people. The awakening to this question extended over several years and began when as a ...

Google Image If you are a Christian, you have probably recited the Our Father, also called “the Lord’s Prayer,” more times than you can count. Even if you’re not a Christian nor profess any faith, you have at least heard of the prayer and maybe even have recited it occasionally. That prayer, writes theologian and Scripture scholar, Leonardo Boff – who specializes in the branch of theology called “Christology” - summarizes “Jesus’ fundamental project.”  In the “Our Father,” he writes, there is no information that is considered essential to the Christian faith, such as the mystery of the Incarnation, the Church, the hierarchy, the Eucharist, the Trinity. It's a simple prayer that Jesus taught to his disciples, according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Salvific Plan? “What is important is our Father, his salvific plan which is the Kingdom," writes Boff, " and Our Bread, the human being in his basic needs.” Last week’s Skeptical Faith focused on Boff’s view that p...

Google Image Some people don’t believe there was a Jesus. Others believe he was merely one of the many revolutionaries of his time, fomenting rebellion against the Roman occupiers of Israel. Others believe there was an historical Jesus, but he certainly wasn’t God. So, just to address these issues before moving on to the main topic of this blog, the existence of the historical Jesus is more certain than that of any person of his era, according to many scholars. Besides the gospels and Acts of the Apostles, which the vast majority of scholars – religious or not – believe are historical, there are non-biblical sources that attest to his existence. As for his being just another revolutionary of his time, some authors have tried to demonstrate that idea but the books I’ve read on this subject failed miserably. Jesus’ message and actions were overwhelmingly religious; that is, efforts to bring God to his people. More Complicated The third claim, about Jesus being God, is more complica...

CNN In a recent article, Sam Sawyer, editor of America Magazine, quoted Pope Francis describing politics as “a lofty vocation,   and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good.” This, writes Sawyer, who like the Pope, is a Jesuit priest, “would be considered catastrophically stupid from the standpoint of political tactics.” It’s true, Pope Francis would make a terrible candidate for the job of political adviser. Sawyer writes these thoughts in a column about Jimmy Carter, Nobel Prize winner and the 39 th U.S. president who died at age 100 two days before the end of 2024. Impossible? By no means does Sawyer imply that either Carter or Pope Francis are “catastrophically stupid.” His point is that, in case you haven’t noticed, American politics is far from alignment with genuine Christian values. Personally, I believe that it would be impossible for a genuinely committed Christian to win an American presidential election today. “(Carter) is prob...

Google Image (Part of this blog includes material from Skeptical Faith blogs from 2014 and 2024.) According to an old maxim, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” As you may recall, much of World War I and some of World War II was fought in foxholes – holes dug by soldiers to protect themselves from incoming fire. The idea of the maxim is that, when in a situation so horrifying like that of a soldier in a foxhole, non-believers are so overcome with fear they may lose or suspend doubt in the desperate hope that God exits and will save them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer commented on this idea in his Letters from Prison , a book I highly recommend. A Lutheran minister and theologian executed by the Nazis in 1945, he lamented the quality of conversions among his fellow prisoners who feared punishment and execution. Bonhoeffer worried that those kinds of conversions lacked the conviction and sincerity necessary to sustain faith. Cheap Grace Bonhoeffer also wrote a book called The Cost of Disc...

Google Image I like traditional Irish music, and one of my favorite songs is “The Rambling Irishman,” made popular in 1976 by a group called The Wolfe Tones. One of the reasons it appeals to me is that it is about an Irish emigrant from Ulster, the northern part of Ireland where many of my Irish ancestors lived. This is the song’s first verse. I am a rambling Irishman In Ulster I was born in And many the pleasant days I spent Round the shores of sweet Lough Erne But to be poor I could not endure Like others of my station To Americay I sailed away And left this Irish nation   My own family members who emigrated to the U.S. could relate to the line, “but to be poor I could not endure.” From all that I know about them, they were at least as poor as many of the immigrants to the U.S. from Latin America, Africa and Asia.   Owen McNulty When I first visited Ireland in 1960, I experienced that poverty first-hand. A cousin of my grandmother, Owen McNulty, had a 40-acre farm,...

Google Image I’m participating in a program at our parish called “Alpha.” Its aim is to discuss basic questions about God – including God’s existence – about who Jesus is, or was, about the nature of faith and a half dozen other such questions. The program is mainly aimed at the “un-churched,” including the “nones,” the people who answer “none” when asked in survey questions what religion they profess. First, a word about such a program. Some believers, including many Christians, may see little value in them, saying that people who are interested in a religion can go to any church on any street corner in America – or many other places in the world – and join up. We believers should do our own thing and leave others to theirs. Evidently, people with this view have little interest in or knowledge of what is prescribed in the Christian Bible, in passages such as this one toward the end of Mark’s gospel: “And he said to them, ‘Go out to all the world; proclaim the good news to all crea...