Backstory I - No Evidence for God, therefore No God

To each of my posts, there is usually a backstory.  I decided to start a series on this blog to give you some background information on what inspired me to write a particular post on my www.sacerdotus.com blog.

My post there, "No Evidence for God, therefore No God" has been extremely popular since its debut on November 13, 2012 (Year of Faith).  The post basically deals with the idea that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" (Sagan) and expounds on how faith and reason are related, as C.K. Chesterton wrote:

"Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all."

The backstory of this post comes from a visit to a parish where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in a Monstrance.  While I was there praying before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, I noticed a young girl enter who was blind.  The girl entered the large church building walking steadily with only the sound of taps from her 'white cane' as she made her way down the aisle.  This course of events fascinated me because this young girl despite being blind, knew where the monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament was.  She genuflected right in line with the monstrance as if she had the vision that would allow her brain to calculate the distance and angles necessary to be in perfect alignment before the monstrance.  No one guided her.  She had only her stick and made here way perfectly to pray.

Sometimes I have problems finding the Tabernacle at churches and I have good vision, so I can't imagine how it must be to only perceive total darkness.  What's remarkable is that despite this, she was able to find Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  Immediately, Helen Keller came to mind along with the words for the blog which is now, " "No Evidence for God, therefore No God."

If this young blind girl was able to find Jesus without her eyes, an atheist can find God even without using his/her senses.  Thank you God and thank you young blind girl for the inspiration!   

 

Sacerdotus Radio

People always have told me that my big mouth would get me somewhere... well it has.  I am not only Social networks, but also on the radio.

I will be hosting a 30 min. long program where I will discuss all kinds of topics just like I do here on my blog.

There will be a number for callers to call in and join the discussion and ask questions; also a chat room.  I will also invite guests and co-hosts to join me.

I'm hoping that this will be a great success and that listeners will enjoy it and have fun at the same time.

Please donate to my blog if you can so that in the future, I can expand the time to 2 hours or more.


The radio program can be listened to on my blog, facebook or here:

Lukewarm Catholics

So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth -Revelation 3:16

We live in a world today that is rapidly falling to relativism.  Relativism is the idea that no absolutes exist.  Every knowledge we possess is subjective and based on culture, circumstances and experience.  In other words, ideas such as what makes a male - a male, or right and wrong come from a particular culture's way of interpreting it and those ideas are not universal or truth.  Relativism is very dangerous to society as a whole.  It presents a confusion that brings society to a halt.  Truths that are solid as rock are questioned to the point of being labeled absurd.  Relativism allows for the ideas of abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, etc to exist.

• When we convince ourselves that human life is life whenever we say it is, then we can kill it at any stage, unborn or born when convenient.  
• When we convince ourselves that marriage is nothing but a contract developed by men, then we can allow strange unions such as same-sex ones or even multiple partner ones.  
• When we convince ourselves that there is no such thing as "male" or "female," then we can create all kinds of genders that please our desires even if our bodies and genetics clearly define sex.  

Unfortunately, many Catholics have fallen prey to relativism.  They question the Church's teachings, label them as archaic because of it.  These lukewarm Catholics do great harm to the Church, themselves and society.  Christ is all about truth, not lies.  Truth exists.  Truth is not based on popular opinion nor can it be molded to fit our needs, wants or desires.

Catholics who are lukewarm must be heated with the flames of the Holy Spirit.  They must wake up and stop being hypnotized by the world's lies.       

Atheist Confession II

As an atheist, prayer was always suspect to me.  How can one solve life's problems merely by talking to oneself?  Is this wishful thinking?  These are some of the questions I asked whenever I saw fellow classmates pray before exams, or witnessed Muslims spread out a rug and pray in the middle of a public area.

Atheists claim that prayer does not work.  To them, it is merely superstition.  This is interesting because prayer is the means by which believers "talk" to God and "listen" to God.  I say this is interesting because atheists always demand incontrovertible proof of God's existence.  Logic dictates that if prayer is the means by which believers experience God, then atheists would try it if they were seriously interested in proof.  However, this does not happen.

Prayer is really the only tangible way one can have "proof" of God.  I can prove God via many channels such as theology, philosophy, psychology, physics, biology and so on; however, these proofs will not present a living God as I present myself as a living human being to whoever I am having a discussion with.  We have to "test" for God.

What about the "don't test God" thing? (Luke 4:12)  Well, this is not really a test in the sense of challenging God as Satan was doing with Christ in the desert.  Prayer is the normative manner in which believers communicate with God, therefore, it is logical for an atheist to use this to "test" for God's existence, so to speak.

As an atheist, prayer gave that extra push to what I already discovered via the sciences and reason.  Any atheist who truly wants evidence of God must pray and talk to God.  There is no other way around this.  I had the courage to take that step, so if you are an atheist and are reading this, you can as well.    

Atheist Confession I

Those of you who follow my other blogs: www.sacerdotus.com and rationallyfaithful.blogspot.com are aware that I used to be an atheist.  You can read more of my story here.

I get asked a lot, why Jesus?  Why the "Christian God?" Out of the many "gods" out there on planet Earth being worshiped by millions, why did I choose Jesus?

The question is one that we all should ask ourselves.  Why Jesus?  What makes Him so special?  This question will aid our journey of faith.

Apart from the academic aspect of why I chose Jesus, there is a deeper reason.  Out of all the gods described to us by different cultures, Jesus stood out to me the most because He was one of us. ( Hebrews 4:15)  Jesus is the only deity to incarnate Himself as one of us - a simple human being.  He had flesh and bones just like us.  He had veins that carried blood with nutrients and oxygen just like us.  He learned the alphabet and numerical system just like us.  He ate and drank, did all the functions of a human being just like us.  He also had to learn how to live in society just like us.  The only difference is that He did not sin.

This God named Jesus emptied Himself of the majesty of being the God of gods - the Supreme creator to become a tiny baby, grow, learn and suffer Rome's capital punishment - crucifixion.

The events of Jesus' life touched me deeply.  Jesus is a God who does not command us to worship out of fear, but rather, He invites us to love God with our whole being.  This God, in a sense treats us as if we were God.  All other gods which are man's attempt to define the one God all demand sacrifice, blood and blind obedience.  Jesus does the opposite.  He is the sacrifice, He sheds His blood, and He was obedient by accepting the plan the Father had for Him.

Some try to pass off Jesus as a "borrowed myth."  Like Thomas Paine, they try to impose "heathen mythology" on Jesus as if Jesus was some sort of a mythological invention.  We who are in academia know this is not so.  Even atheist historian and scholar, Michael Grant had this to say of Jesus Christ:

To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serous scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.  

                                                   Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels

This speaks volumes coming from an atheist because it is usually the atheists who claim that Jesus is a mythological being that never existed.