Skeptical Faith

Google Image Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk and promoter of a kind of meditation called centering prayer, asks this question in one of his videos on YouTube. Ancient Israel’s expectation, says Keating, who died in 2018, was that religion would save them from the problems of daily life and bring about the glory of the kingdom of Israel. “And that’s our expectation, too,” he says about the first of those ancient Jewish yearnings. “We expect religion to deliver us from the nitty gritty of daily life and put us in peace and security. But that’s not normally God’s way. God’s way is to join us in our daily lives.” The Importance of Trust Maybe it’s these expectations that partly explain why we believers get upset when things don’t go our way, despite all that we’ve heard and learned about the importance of trust in God. Our expectations are out-of-whack. We listen to or read the gospels week after week, year after year, and still believe that faith promises us a rose garden. That sh...

Google Image I’ve expressed several times in these blogs my skepticism about declarations by some of our contemporaries that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Much of the skepticism results from the false dichotomy this entails, as if the spiritual and religious are mutually exclusive. Spirituality, after all, is the whole point of being religious. With the exception of some forms of Buddhism, all the major religions aim to bring people closer to God, who is “spiritual.” St. Paul, among the earliest leaders of Christianity, wrote that he is imparting a teaching “not taught by human wisdom but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit.” But Daniel Horan, Franciscan priest, theologian and author, wrote in a recent edition of the National Catholic Reporter: “What if our starting point in thinking about what it means to be a person in communion with God, oneself and the world was not reduced to external expressions of institutional belo...

Google Image A migrant worker is toiling in a soybean field when he comes across a large metal box, mostly covered in dirt. He looks around before digging the box out and opening it. He’s stunned to find cash – hundreds of thousands of dollars. He covers it up and next day, sells everything he has and goes to the field’s owner with an offer to buy the field. This is a contemporary version of a Gospel parable in which Jesus is trying to make a point to his listeners. He verbalizes the point earlier in the same gospel of Mathew, saying that “ where your treasure is, there your heart will also be,” meaning that faith requires commitment. Ultimately, total commitment.      I thought about this parable when reading a recent article in the New York Times by Scott Hershovitz, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan. The article’s title is “How to Pray to a God you Don’t Believe In.” “The world is awful at the moment,” he writes. “Millions have died of Covid-...

Google Image I often read or hear comments about the Bible that go like this: “Why should anyone pay attention to a book that was written when people were barely literate and filled with superstition and knew nothing about the universe and how it works?” Or, regarding the Christian Bible, or New Testament: “It’s nothing but propaganda for a new religion. Ancient public relations.” Basically, the complaints are that the Bible is hopelessly antiquated and therefore, useless. Is it possible that we who live in an era of lightning-fast innovation, where new products and ideas are daily occurrences, have come to believe that wisdom can also become obsolete? Nothing to Learn? Have we nothing to learn from Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Galileo, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Descartes, and Goethe? (It’s not lost on me that all these people are white males. And that shows that, like all human wisdom, theirs was limited.) Well, then, how about Abraham, Moses, E...

Google Image In several of her books, the famous novelist, Anne Lamott, has written often about her struggles with doubt. “I have a lot of faith,” she wrote in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith .  “ But I am also afraid a lot and have no real certainty about anything.” She remembered, however, something a beloved priest told her, “that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.” I would bet that everyone who is searching for God, no matter the “amount” of faith, has had doubt, whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not. Just as I imagine most agnostics and atheists have doubts about their positions. Need Not Fight Doubt In my opinion, we need not fight doubt. We have doubt because God made us rational beings who test everything. The apostle Peter doubted. That’s why he denied Jesus. The disciples on the road ...

Google Image  The short answer, in my opinion as a lifelong and practicing Catholic, is “yes.” There’s no doubt that Catholic doctrine and tradition impose more responsibility on its members than many other churches. This causes anxiety and exaggerated feelings of guilt in some of its members. But I believe the concept of “Catholic guilt” is exaggerated, cited often by critics and comedians, including Catholic comedians. So, for me, the longer answer to the question posed in the title is, “not for Catholics who know and understand their church’s teachings.” Still, I acknowledge that as a religion that is over 2,000 years old, it has more than its share of complex teachings, many of which lead to misunderstanding. I’m writing about this subject because my Internet search engine recently had an article on its main page called, “What is Catholic Guilt and Do You Suffer from It?” Laced with a Dig Clicking on the title takes you to a series of slides with text under stock photos...

Google Image I’ve written often in these blogs about the need to care for the environment, not as part of any political position but because I believe caring for our common home is a required commitment of people searching for God. But readership for blogs about the environment is always low, according to the data my blog program tracks. For one thing, people take the environment for granted. It’s just there. Why should I have to do anything to protect it? Secondly, people feel powerless. What can I do to make any real difference? Third, people – especially young people - are pessimistic about humanity’s efforts to make environmental progress. Overcoming the obstacles seems unreachable. A recent news report may help free people from the last objection. “News reports about environmental degradation are plentiful,” writes German Lopez in a recent New York Times Morning Report, “but there may be reason to be optimistic.” Environmental Scientists As part of his reporting, he spoke ...