Albert Cipriani

Dear 99Percent,


Your are correct. And Tercel is incorrect for saying "consider yourself corrected."

Nothing can spring from our free will like Athena from the head of Zeus. The free will is only free to will that which has been "presented" to it. In this sense, Faith is a gift, a present presented to us from God.

One way or another, the plausibility of the existence of God must present itself to our free will, before we can freely will to believe or disbelieve, to be faithful or faithless. The Catholic Church teaches that God's plausibility is naturally apparent to everyman, that is, the call to faith, God's knocking on our door, can be heard by us all.

Through invincible ignorance (e.g., the white noise generated by pedophilic priests, erroneous philosophies, and concupiscence), God's knocking may not be heard. In which case, you are neither believers nor dis-believers but rather unbelievers. You are neither faithful nor faithless, but rather beyond the possibility of faith. In such, the free will to accept or reject the gift of faith is not operative.

Tercel says that:


To the degree that Protestants, who rebelled against 1500 years of Catholic tradition, can claim to have any sort of intellectual tradition regarding faith, their non-systematic illogical jumble of contradictions derives from the concept of a mere fiducial faith (Tercel's "trust" cf. Rom 4:3, Mt 9:2, Luke 17:19, Hebr 11:1). The Catholic conception of faith is more than this, it is dogmatic, confessional faith (c.f. Mk 16:16, John 20:31, Hebr 11:6)

Metaphysically, the Protestant conception is a ruse. They believe that as a result of this mere trust or confidence in God, God imputes righteousness to us. Or as Luther put it, God snows upon and covers up the dung heaps that we are. We trust God, and God winks and gives us the nod. We exercise our free will by believing in God, and God exercises his goodwill towards us. In short, the fruit of faith is a Divine pretense. Faith effects no metaphysical transformation.

Catholic teaching, to the contrary, is truly metaphysical. What we will we become. Willing virtue makes us virtuous. Being willing to believe in God is Act One in the drama of participating in God's being.

When we exercise our free will in assenting to our relationship to a Divine Being, that relationship steals inward, we really become divine. Just as in the marital union, where the two really become one flesh, so too, in our spiritual union with the Godhead do we become one with His triune family as adoptive members.

When we accept the gift of faith, become willing to believe and act accordingly, we really undergo an accidental change which inheres in ("inhaerere," Council of Trent D 800, 809, 821, is not merely imputed to) our immortal soul. Who we are is not covered up, but rather, our potential to fully be all that we can be is realized. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Reverend Mykeru

Sorry for digging back a bit in the thread...

I think the statement "I believe the baby is a boy" is different than "I believe the baby couldbe a boy.

Sure, you have a 50/50 chance of being right there, but is mere possibility sufficient for belief without any qualification?

Now, I am not talking about 99 percent here, I am doing a little riff off his statement, but I am often disturbed when people treat possibility, or there claim that something is possible, as sufficient reason for belief, let along knowledge. Obviously, this is not a great stretch when talking about whether a baby is going to be a boy or a girl, you get this a lot among apologists, pseudoscientists, exobiologists and the like, where they take an admission that something is possible, even by some wild stretch of the imagination, as a form of support.

I spent a good couple days reading the "Here Kitty Kitty" threads featuring "Bait", where he tried to get as much "Appeal to Ignorance" mileage out of an admission that something --such as David's slung stone sticking in Goliath's forehead because of a previously undiagnosed failure of cranial sutures to close due to giantism -- is possible. But the only way one would think that something so strained has evidentiary weight due to mere possibility is that creeping "and prove to me that it isn't" silently stuck on the end.

My ultra-dumb example of this sort of thinking is the hypothetical "I believe there is a VW Beetle in orbit around pluto." Hey, it's "possible", isn't it? How did it get there? Maybe the UFOs put it there. Hey, they are "possible" too.

OK, back to 99 Percent. If you claim the child is a boy, what reason do you have for even "believing" it is going to be a boy? Again, believing it is going to be a boy is a different thing than believing it could be a boy. Before the ultra-sound isn't the only position you can really take on it is to say that you don't know what the sex is, but that it could be a boy or, maybe, that you hope it will be a boy? I know that sounds completely nit-picky, but you might see where I am coming from when you think about how much mileage the Really Dumb People™ get out of conflating belief with expectation or wishful thinking.

joedad

So they can walk on water after all.

Koyaanisqatsi

I know this was just your attempt at humor, but it's not analogous. The wave/particle duality of photons is an established fact that has been demonstrated thousands of times. Only someone who is ignorant of this would make such a proclamation.

The trinity, on the other hand, has never been demonstrated to be an established fact, nor can it; it is an imposibility made up by cult apologists to both reconcile the blatant contradictions inherent in their mythology and reinforce the indoctrination technique of cognitive dissonance.

In other words, one (wave/particle) is a description of actual events; the other (trinity) is a load of unbelievable pigshit forced down the throats of braindead sheep in order to insure they never can think properly and thereby awaken from their programming.

Was that too technical?

Albert Cipriani

Koy explaining a fine point of theology to Tercel:


No Koy, not too technical but way too funny.

We've got an abstraction (trinity) miraculously becoming a, shall we say, non-abstraction (pig shit), becoming a means of consumption that gets digested not by stomachs but by brains (dead ones at that), whereby the non-abstraction is somehow capable of functioning as an abstraction in that it is said to prevent the heretofore established brain-dead creatures from -- you guessed it -- thinking!

You're a hoot! – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

99Percent

Albert Cipriani: Hello, thanks for your reply. I am really interested to see the theistic view of this.

The free will is only free to will that which has been "presented" to it. In this sense, Faith is a gift, a present presented to us from God.

You say it is God's gift, I think it is man's imagination for the impossible.

the plausibility of the existence of God must present itself to our free will, before we can freely will to believe or disbelieve, to be faithful or faithless.

I am glad that you accept that it has to be a plausibility of existence for faith to be coming from free will. If it isn't possible (in our imaginations) or it is a know fact of its negation and therefore it is not a possibility to consider then there can be no faith (it is or it is not) and therefore there is no free will involved in the acceptance or negation of the fact.

Through invincible ignorance (e.g., the white noise generated by pedophilic priests, erroneous philosophies, and concupiscence), God's knocking may not be heard. In which case, you are neither believers nor dis-believers but rather unbelievers. You are neither faithful nor faithless, but rather beyond the possibility of faith. In such, the free will to accept or reject the gift of faith is not operative.

Agreed, although you attribute the unbelief to "white noise" I attribute it to the fact that its possiblity of existence has been discarded through reason and/or empirical fact (e.g I do not see him) so there can be no will to belief in the first place. To disbelief is to will into negation of belief, to unbelieve is to simply know the negation of the fact - there can be no belief or disbelief. So if you really know for a fact that God exists then you would no longer need faith and this is where I find Christian faith to the shakiest card in its huge card castle.

Reverend Mykeru: Maybe my example was a bit simplistic, but it was to show that when there is a possibility of hope it is when you can have the free will to believe (or disbelieve). Of course a reasonable person would say like you say: "I believe it could be a boy". But if the person has hope and wants to have a boy he would say "I believe it is a boy", because he has the free will to believe in it or not as it is not yet an established fact whether the baby is going to be a boy or a girl.

Albert Cipriani

Dear 99%


So right!

That is why the Catholic Church teaches that when we enter heaven, we leave our Faith and Hope at the door. Only the virtue of Charity persists in that environment where the Truth needs no butressing from the virtues of Faith and Hope. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic.

99Percent

So God could be just a figment of your imagination, couldn't he?

Tercel

Before Albert goes too overboard telling everyone exactly what I believe on the basis of his (biased Catholic) conception of what all Protestants’ (which is a rather diverse group in itself) believe, perhaps I should explain it.

I do not have "faith" in God's existence. I believe God exists, I would say I know that God exists. But it seems customary to use the word "belief" to describe my acceptance of the intellectual proposition of Gods existence. Now, in my understanding of what biblically described "faith" is, it simply doesn't come into this and isn't related to this belief in God's existence.
Faith as I said above, is trust. Trust in what? -God. <strong>Not</strong> trust in God’s existence.
Karen M put it well. If I said, “I trust Kate”, I’m not trusting that Kate exists. While knowing that Kate exists, I am saying I trust her.

Trust in God is the same. Let’s have a brief look at trusting/having faith in God in the Bible.
First of all, the story of Adam and Eve. God has told them not to touch the fruit or else they will die. Did they trust that God knew best and had their best interests in mind? Well when the snake comes along his argument is that God really didn’t have Adam and Eve’s interests in mind but God was giving them the instruction for his own ends and thus that Adam and Eve shouldn’t trust God. This lack of faith/trust in God subsequently causes them to disobey God.

Their sin is kind of a generic example: sin is a lack of faith (=trust) in God. As Paul puts it, “everything that does not come from faith is sin”. Mankind was created by God to trust in him and be his servants. That is the way the relationship is supposed to work and that is the ‘right relationship with God’ that we are supposed to have. And this is how, I believe, Christ’s atonement works. As Paul puts it in Philippians 2:7-8
“[But] of his [Christ’s] own free will he gave up all he had, and took the nature of a servant,
He bacame like man and appeared in human likeness.
He was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death - his death on the cross.”

Christ trusted in God absolutely, not setting himself up as an authority above God, but being “humble” and God’s “servant”, he even trusted and obeyed God all the way to his death. The lack of trust in God shown by Adam and Eve and their subsequent decision to disobey and go their own way is a reflection of what we all do in our lives, and this means that we are no longer in a right relationship with God. “No one is righteous, not even one”. Yet the sacrifice of Christ fixes this. For he trusted God even though he knew it would lead to his own painful death, even though he knew he was innocent he didn’t say a word in his defence. And through his union with all mankind he puts all mankind into a right relationship with God and so through him we have life.

Abraham is a common example given of someone with faith. “Abraham put his trust in the LORD, and because of this the LORD accepted him as righteous” God has just told Abraham he will have many many descendants despite the fact that Abraham thinks he is too old to have children. Nethertheless, Abraham because he trusts God, believes what God has told him. This is what trust/faith is: Believing what someone tells you or doing what they say because you trust/have faith that they know best.
Hebrews 11:1 says that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Our trust in God assures us that his promises that we hope for will indeed be fulfilled and makes us sure of receiving the things he’s promised that we don’t yet see.

James points out that one cannot at the same time claim he has faith and yet have no actions to go with them. Obviously if someone trusts in God then they will do what God wants them to do. ‘“But someone will say, “One person has faith, another has actions.” My answer is, “Show me how anyone can have faith without actions. I will show you my faith by my actions.”’ (2:18) You can tell the tree by the fruit that it bears, and so we can tell whether a person really trusts in God by whether they obey God’s commands.

Mere belief that God exists is useless, it is that we trust in God that matters. “Do you believe that there is only one God? Good! The demons also believe - and tremble with fear” 2:19
It is our faith in God that separates Christians from the demons. We both believe in God’s existence, but that is not important at all. What is important is what we do with that belief: whether we trust in God or in our own abilities.
And finally, just to put Albert right,
Protestants hardly rebelled against 1500 years of Catholic tradition: Rather Protestants rebelled against heretical Catholic teachings that threatened to destroy the integrity of the 1500 year old Christian tradition.

That’s rich coming from someone who belongs to a Church that can’t even get sorted the basic idea of how faith and works interact or understand the basic differences between flesh and blood and bread and wine.


Tercel
PS. No offence meant to any Catholics other than Albert.

Albert Cipriani

Dear 99%,


Of course He could. Anything is possible, and conversely, nothing is impossible. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic