I suppose Tertullian thought he was being clever, coining such an ironic expression of faith. After all, atheists like me, especially one whose mantra is “Ridenda Religio”, have condemned and ridiculed religion precisely for the absurdity of its beliefs and claims. To make absurdity itself a reason for believing (for example, in the Resurrection, “because it is impossible”, dixit Tertullian) is, to say the least provocative, but a sure way of grabbing attention.
St Augustine’s “Credo ut intelligam” – “I believe so that I may understand” – is a similar idea frequently used to establish (?) faith as a source, equally as valid as reason, for understanding. Recent Popes have rejected the “quia absurdum” (in fact “ineptum”, “incongruous”) as fideism, but adopted the “ut intelligam”. But it is just as . . . absurd. I can’t really comprehend that consecrated bread becomes Christic flesh, but I will understand if I believe it. C’mon ! You’ve got to be kidding ! The pity is I know you’re not.
RIDENDA RELIGIO
Blind Faith: Blind Folly 
Shame on you Mr O’Meara. As an ordained priest who has held the sacred body of Our Lord Jesus Christ in his hands you are a disgrace to the priesthood which you freely chose and into which you were ordained forever. Your sacriligious disparagement of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church founded by our Blessed Saviour will surely earn you eternal punishment in Hell’s fires in the life to come. You should repent before it is too late but I think you have sold your soul to Satan.
I have read your blog and am dismayed that there is no law preventing you from silencing voices of reason like Jim whose faith should stand as an inspiration to all those who labour in the vineyards of the Lord. The miracles of Our Lord in his brief blessed lifetime and later through the intercession of His Saints are proof for all fair minded children of God. The Catholic Church will be here for all eternity.
I will reluctantly pray for you but for once I fear my prayers will not be sufficient to save you from eternal damnation.
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I suspect Molly is not one of Frank’s BOTB.
I am surprised that Molly decided to post a comment – after all no one is making her read the blog and it is clearly not intended for those, like Molly, whose faith is not open to question or challenge.
I also imagine her prayers are wasted on Frank – but the thought was nice.
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Like Molly, I have serious reservations about imposing silence on those we might disagree with. There are instances of course where the practice is justified. Jim clearly has multiple issues with Frank’s blog and his style. His recent questioning of Frank’s sanity was surely meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
But respect for the right of others to hold opinions that differ from one’s own should be a fundamental in a civilised society.
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Most of my responses to Frank are now censored out. This one may also be.
His comments are offensive to many, as Molly indicates. Thom adds that Molly need not read the blog if offended. In effect he says only those of weak faith, or who agree with Frank, are welcome to read the column. Really? How sensitive to opposing views.
Frank does not justify his opinions. He just states them as fact. Thom just agrees with whatever Frank says.
As Frank has been forced to say that there is no intelligence greater than human, involved with the universe. Hence, he would certainly believe that any involvement by God in changing bread into His body is untenable.
If only Frank and Thom would engage in debating the basic evidence of belief in God, this blog might become interesting and attract a few more opinions from invisible readers.
My guess is that they realise they are on shaky ground, when argument is based on evidence.
Hoping I wont be censored.
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Molly : I have a soft spot for the Irish, especially colleens, but it is in my heart not my head.
Thom : I can’t fault your understated recognition of the pointlessness of DOTD (Dialogues Of The Deaf).
Georgie : You may be a tad too generous re Jim’s questioning of my sanity.
Jim : As ever, I would have preferred a comment on the content of the post, the quotations from Tertullian and Augustine.. Whatever I write, you keep wanting me to talk about and admit your First Cause. In my next post that is precisely what I intend to do. Time for a “Te Deum” ?
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Frank,I did not respond to your quote from Augustine as almost all my responses are being censored out.
if I can be reasonably assured of acceptance, I will confine my remarks to the topic and not your mental state. Insanity,on reflection,was a bit harsh. Mea Culpa.
I will also look up my Jurgens volumes to get the context of the Tertullian quote. You realise that Tertullian drifted into heresy in later life, and, no, he was not burned at the stake.
Is that agreed and please reference where Tertullian made the quote.
I’m rearing to go with the Augustine one.
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I would not like it to be thought that my support for freedom of speech and expression is necessarily an endorsement of Jim’s views.
As I have stated previously I continue to be surprised at much of what my Catholic friends claim to believe. I have also noticed that their beliefs do not seem to have any significant impact on how they live their lives. But maybe that is a different matter.
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If you took the time to read our Church Fathers, Georgie, you would know that the Holy Spirit is guiding them and therefore they cannot make a mistake. Whether it is our Holy Father in Rome who is the successor of Saint Peter and the other Fathers of the Church or Saint Turtelian or Saint Augustine, our Lord Jesus Christ has given them infallibility.
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I find it sad, Jim, that you presume, and want the blog’s readers to conclude, that everything I say is without foundation, at best subject to doubt, and at worst, a lie. What if I were to say, “Sorry, mate, I always thought Tertullian said that, but in fact I haven’t got a clue” ? Or even, “You’ve caught me red-handed, Jim. Tertullian never said that; I just made it up.” One for the Christians, zero for the lions. In fact, your question, if sincere and not a rhetorical gambit, reveals a surprising ignorance in a Christian apologist which I would, in your mocassins, be embarrassed to admit. Maybe you never read it in one of Tertullian’s texts, but surely you have heard it before. Many people who have heard the statement, usually without the correction I included (“ineptum” not “absurdum”), would be incapable of giving chapter and verse. If I can’t, does that prove something to you ? Do you score a point ? Do I hear you gloat with an “I thought as much !” I see no future, given your past record in our Dialogues of the Deaf and now this present ploy, in pretending there is any point in discussing faith and religion with you. No point either, in letting you publish, whatever the topic, endless repetitions of your “proof” of an intelligent First Cause (the foundation stone of the Six Steps which are supposed to prove everything else). But, in case you really are ignorant of what Tertullian said, you will find the quotation in his “De Carne Christi”, V, 4. Goodbye Jim.
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God has given me another day. Not only am I awake but lucid enough to believe that readers of your last two replies (I choose my adjectives carefully) will understand why they are your very last.
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As Jim should know, but would strive vehemently to deny, Saint Augustine held some views which are considered to be heretical.
Not that I give a rat’s arse one way or the other. Augustine and Aquinas are allowed their respective places in history BUT they are (or were) not infallible. As Jim should know only the Supreme Pontiff, the Pope in Rome, Bishop of Rome in the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, when making a pronouncement Ex Cathedra on Faith and Morals, is infallible (or so he told the world in the late 19th Century). And if you believe that you’ll believe anything.
More to the point with Jim’s tedious and spurious argumentation – he and his fellow fundamentalists have the obligation to provide a credible basis for their “God” hypothesis AND then provide adequate credible evidence in support thereof. Mere assertion satisfies neither requirement. And Jim is obviously unable to satisfy this fundamental requirement because there is no credible evidence. QED.
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To any reader who is following the sequence of comments to this “Credo Quia…” posting of Frank will find them disjointed.
The reason is that 2 of my responses, in which I most adequately demonstrated the deception of Frank pulling phrases out of the context of a paragraph to make them seem ridiculous, have been censored out. I resubmit them as a courtesy to those who wish to follow the arguments. I have no idea why they were censored, as Frank had requested my response.
Here they are:
My comment of 4/9/2014,following Frank’s response of 3/9/14
In the hope that God grants yet another day to Frank, before calling him to Judgement,
and that Frank will seek to gain some merit before his departure, by allowing the response he requested from me,on the 2 quotations, I post the following:
I do not pose as a Latin scholar, so will stick to English.
St. Augustine stated, as Frank correctly asserts: “I believe so that I may understand”.
How absurd says Frank, what blind faith!
Not at all.
As an example; No one knows just what gravity is. We know that it is associated with all material objects possessing mass. Just what it is still remains unknown, although its effects are known and can be measured accurately and predicted.
It is one of the big questions under exploration by physicists, searching for a unified theory of all the known 4 forces of the universe.
When an apple is said to have fallen on the head of Isaac Newton and he began to wonder why objects fall, he formed belief in the existence something we now know as gravity, even though he had no understanding of it.
He and others began trying to understand this phenomenon by experimenting, dropping known weights, timing their descent and working out the acceleration, finding that all objects had this attractive force, not just things falling to earth and derived a mathematical formula relating this force to the masses involved and the distance between them.
If Newton, or other investigators had never believed in the existence of such a force as gravity, their quest for understanding would never have followed.
Newton first believed so that he could understand. Had he waited until he understood prior to investigating, then I’m afraid that we would still not know why apples fall from trees nor why planets orbit the sun or why we have high/low tides or most other physical things.
So we all believe in gravity, but no one yet understands it. We did not understand it before believing.
I further contend that all scientific discovery has resulted from beginning, from the evidence, to form a certain theory, or belief, testing it to understand sufficiently(if not absolutely) and then verifying it.
Belief in God has followed the same process.
As Frank would say, and did say a few days back: QED
We Christians have ample evidence of God, from many different sources or avenues of logical reasoning; enough, I dare say to begin a Newtonioan quest to understand.
We will never fully understand God9nor any other reality), but He seems to have helped us know enough for our human needs to draw sufficiently close to Him and attain the purpose for which He individually brought us into existence.
With one stroke, Frank could censor this posting. I hope he is honest enough to let it stand and be refuted.
As promised, I have not referred to intelligence of blind chance creating/sustaining our orderly universe.
If he lets it stand, I will respond to his second quote from Tertullian, which, if put into its context, is sensible, not absurd as Frank tries to show by merely extracting a single phrase.
Frank did not allow my request for a response to his Tertullian claim, so, briefly…
In a nutshell, Tertullian was addressing the dual nature of Christ, simultaneously fully human and fully divine. It’s a mystery, like the mystery of light being fully wave like and fully a particle. both are mysteries.
So Tertullian was saying that he believes in the resurrection, which would be aabsurd if Christ was only human. This followed Tertullian’s previous sentence in which he believes in the death of Jesus by crucifixion,because it is absurd to think of a fully divine god being killed. So, his point is that the crucifixion followed by resurrection only makes sense if Christ is, indeed, fully human and fully divine.
Do you see how clever extraction of a phrase, out of context, can be mischievously used. Shame, Frank.
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1.St. Augustine was a late convert to Catholicism. He was Manchean, a heretical faith, before conversion.
2. Many of the early Fathers made errors in theology, here and there. However, collectively they taught the truth.
3. Augustine, or any other of the recognised Fathers, never defied Church teaching by holding a contrary teaching. If error was pointed out or later reaised, they accepted it.
This was an evolutionary period where the implications of the teachings of Jesus and apostles were being digested.They were feeling their way to the fullness of truth.
It is therefore misleading to accuse Augustine of heresy.
How about a credible alternative explanation of how the universe, comprising all time, space, matter and energy, came into being before any of these items existed. What source, of non intelligence(Frank’s words) began the fine tuned process that lead to the incredible order , not chaos, of the universe?
Don’t take my word for the order, just take Albert Einstein’s. Or do you prefer to believe Frank?
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