World Youth Day 2013

World Youth Day was begun by Blessed John Paul II and has been a great success.  This week hundreds of thousands of youth will converge in Brazil for World Youth Day 2013.  Pope Francis will be presiding over it - his first one. 

This event is awesome and I highly recommend it.  However, like with any large event, things can go wrong.  There are sometimes people who attend for the wrong reasons.  Instead of going to grow in faith, some use the opportunity to do things they normally would not do at home.  This was documented in Madrid where atheists and secularists began to photograph World Youth Day pilgrims doing things that are not becoming of Catholics. 

It is important that priests and youth group leaders explain to pilgrims that their actions will be heavily monitored by locals and the media.  We are all sinners and I don't expect all pilgrims to be St. Dominic Savio or St. Maria Goretti, however, they are called to holiness and the avoidance of scandal.  I remember the last World Youth Day I attended, we were warned of the media and others who would be following us as if we were celebrities.  The youth must be careful not to cause scandal amongst one another and others.

World Youth Day must not become a "Woodstock" for young Catholics to get away from their homes and act wild.  Let us pray for those participating in World Youth Day.     

 

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:

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.