I'm really quite disappointed at the flurry of freaked out texts and emails I received over yesterday's post. Obviously it was an April Fool's thing, and has now been branded as such permanently so that no one who stumbles across it in the future is scandalized.
But more than that, it's disturbing that a good number of you apparently actually believed my Faith was so fragile that it could fall apart overnight, or be shaken by such petty and laughable doubts as the ones I outlined below. I'm actually rather offended several of you had so little faith in my Faith. As if something supernatural can be threatened by any merely natural rational arguments or objections!
Speaking seriously, those doubts are actually all doubts I think I've had or have on the natural intellectual level at various points. I think many religious people have. And it was a cathartic exercise for me to express them in that sort of "what if" which, I think, I've often suppressed in the past whenever any of it started coming to the surface. And yet, to be able to verbalize these things, own them, but then laugh in their face was actually quite affirming. It proves to me, in some ways, that Faith is simply on an entirely different epistemological level than any "evidence" or "logic" that the Devil or the World might trump up to try to lead me astray.
So don't worry, I still think the existentialists are whiny little European emo boys, and our Lord is much more powerful than any of their flimsy attempts to set up something else in His place. God is not mocked. But His enemies certainly open themselves to it.
Still, for anyone who freaked out or got scandalized or worried or upset:
But more than that, it's disturbing that a good number of you apparently actually believed my Faith was so fragile that it could fall apart overnight, or be shaken by such petty and laughable doubts as the ones I outlined below. I'm actually rather offended several of you had so little faith in my Faith. As if something supernatural can be threatened by any merely natural rational arguments or objections!
Speaking seriously, those doubts are actually all doubts I think I've had or have on the natural intellectual level at various points. I think many religious people have. And it was a cathartic exercise for me to express them in that sort of "what if" which, I think, I've often suppressed in the past whenever any of it started coming to the surface. And yet, to be able to verbalize these things, own them, but then laugh in their face was actually quite affirming. It proves to me, in some ways, that Faith is simply on an entirely different epistemological level than any "evidence" or "logic" that the Devil or the World might trump up to try to lead me astray.
So don't worry, I still think the existentialists are whiny little European emo boys, and our Lord is much more powerful than any of their flimsy attempts to set up something else in His place. God is not mocked. But His enemies certainly open themselves to it.
Still, for anyone who freaked out or got scandalized or worried or upset:
1 comment:
Brilliant. You had me worried - I thought it was an April fool, but the train of thought was very plausible (doubtless for reasons you've outlined above).
Don't be offended though about the lack of our faith in your faith. Our faith is fragile. From God's side, it is solid as a rock, founded on his irrevocable, gracious choice. From our side, it hangs always by a thread.
I see that you are as disturbed as I am by some young men who seem to worship liturgy and not God. They are indeed always men, never women. I wonder what there in the male psychology which makes it vulnerable to precisely this very insidious form of idolatry.
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