Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Faith and Reason In Christianity

According to the Catholic church, faith without reason leads to superstition, while reason without faith leads to nihilism and relativism. Nevertheless, there is little on which the Christians can base their reason upon. Their holy books have been lost and what is available is full of errors and omissions. They are accounts from people who lived hundreds of years after Jesus (AS). The present-day Christianity is not based on the teachings of Jesus (AS) who was sent by God, but rather on the philosophies of Paul, who changed Christianity from a purely monotheistic faith for the Jews to a global religion based on superstition, pagan beliefs, Greek and other philosophies.

The use of reason, without the guidance from true revelations and without a formal method of interpretation based on the methodology from a prophet and his companions, has resulted in the Christians deviating away from the Truth throughout the centuries after Jesus (AS). The deviation in Christianity started in between the year 51-55 AD when the first convention was held which brought the surviving disciples of Jesus (AS) together in their first meeting. It agreed on the prohibition of adultery, the consumption of ritually un-slaughtered animal meat and the meat of animals that were slaughtered for the idols. Eating pig meat, dealing in usury and drinking wine were introduced in Christianity.

Paul abrogated all the teachings of Torah as he claimed that it was a curse and they needed to get rid of it. He claimed that the Messiah came to change an old era for a new one. As a result of his philosophy and the influence of Greek philosophy of that time, he had borrowed the idea of the connection between God and His creation on earth. He introduced the idea of son of God and the Holy Spirit. He also introduced the concept of salvation through crucifixion. According to this he claimed that Jesus (AS) will rise to heavens and will sit on the right hand of God and will judge humanity on the Day of Resurrection based on their accepting him as divine. Initially there was a lot of resistance to Paul’s ideas. Nevertheless, the seeds of trinity and idolatry were sown in Christianity. 

Thus, the modern Christian, does not have a genuine form on revelation present with him to base his reason on, unlike the Muslims. Where the Muslim’s faith in based on reason from the revelation – the Quran - that of the Christian is baseless. The American philosopher, Alvin Plantinga describes Christian belief thus: "Christian belief is produced in the believer by the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, endorsing the teachings of Scripture, which is itself divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit. The result of the work of the Holy Spirit is faith”. This demonstrate the fallacy on which the Christian belief is based on. Neither are their scriptures sound, nor can they be sure that what they are being inspired to is from God or from Satan or even their own thinking.  Paul argues that in fact anyone can attain to the truth of God's existence merely from using his or her reason to reflect on the natural world. Without true revelation to guide thought, how can a person know if what they are thinking is the truth or a delusion?

The fact of the matter is that most Christian belief is not based on their Scriptures but is based on the dogma and doctrines of the Church. This is especially true about the Catholic and Orthodox churches. In these churches, the followers are completely dependent on the interpretation of the religious doctrine by the clergy. A church representative said: ”‘dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery”. 

In the words of Vatican II: “it is not from sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore, both sacred tradition and sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence.”

The only recourse to reason that a follower of these churches can use is to think about phenomenon based on the church doctrine. The Protestant Church is better as they have diminished the role of the clergy and encourage their followers to study their scriptures and use reason based on them. Nevertheless, their scriptures are corrupted, full of contradictions and have very little divine content in them. 

It is not surprising that in the Middle Ages, the people in Europe suffered from the authoritative role of the church on their thought and way of life. The church called scientists who used their reason to advance knowledge like Galileo, heretics and executed them. Whatever truth that was in conflict with their dogma, was knocked down. This resulted in a reaction during the Enlightenment era, in which philosophers used reason to discredit the church. They turned people against the church and developed a dislike for all religion based on their experience with the Christian church. The modern era saw the emergence of secular philosophical thought which was based on reason, replace the church doctrines which were increasingly seen as irrational. 

Made up irrational Christian concepts such as original sin, trinity, confessions to and exoneration from the clergy for personal sins, Jesus (AS) dying for the sins of man, etc. leaves an ordinary Christian no choice but to either believe in them, corrupting his thought process so that it cannot understand rationality, or to reject church doctrine and develop a free mind without any limitations. 

The catholic church tries to explain them away by the use of sophisticated terminology: “The doctrines of the Trinity and the Eucharist are beyond reason in the sense that it is beyond our finite powers to understand them, but not at all in the sense that they are inherently unintelligible; they are supra-rational, if you will, but not irrational. “

Thus, it is not surprising that secular and agnostic thoughts have penetrated modern Western society so deeply, as it became difficult to rationally use their minds while simultaneously accepting the irrational beliefs of the church. The modern West has thus indulged in the other extreme of doubting everything, even areas which are not supposed to be the realm of our minds. 

In order to try to explain the dichotomy between reason and faith in Christianity, Rev. James Brent writes:
“In sum, it takes time, teaching, and effort to learn how to integrate faith and reason. Our sins and our weaknesses make it difficult to learn to fly with both wings of the human spirit. The history of the last several centuries has moved our civilization away from an intellectual synthesis that shows us how this can be done. Finally, our contemporary culture does not teach people how to fly with both wings, and it is populated by vocal minorities who confuse people about even the possibility of synthesizing faith and reason. Is it any surprise that for nearly all people today it seems that faith and reason are opposed to one another?” 

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