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To: independentmind
You make the mistake of thinking that all TRUTH can be determined through reason and matter. And calling the Catholic faith nothing but superstition is, if nothing else, incredibly ignorant.

I am a very open minded person. I would love for you to explain to me, what falculty you use to know something is true, if you do not use the faculty of reason? If your idea of faith is not synonymous with superstition, please explain the difference.?

Hank

181 posted on 09/30/2001 6:49:39 PM PDT by Hank Kerchief
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To: Hank Kerchief
I recently posted an article that discusses the very question you raise.

Secondly, the world in theory must be held to be always the same. The method requires this. The crisis of exegesis is a crisis of the philosophical presuppositions that guide its method by which it reaches conclusions such as that Jesus did not affirm His own divinity. "The problem of exegesis is connected ... with the problem of philosophy. The indigence of philosophy ... has turned into the indigence of our faith. The faith cannot be liberated if reason itself does not open up again." Reason, in other words, knowing itself, must see that it is grounded in what is, over which it has no control. What is controls what we know and not vice versa. The exclusion any reality, however, is contrary to the object of reason itself . "Human reason is not an autonomous absolute." Ratzinger thinks that scholastic philosophy in the Twentieth Century in a sense failed because it tried to do the impossible, that is, provide a totally rational ground of the faith that a priori excluded the possibility of faith's openness to reason.

Yet, it was reality, not reason, that decided that to which reason was open. And reality included the reality of God and His activity in time. Faith cares for and about reason. "It is not the lesser function of the faith to care for reason as such. It does not do violence to it; it is not external to it; rather, it makes it return to itself." Thus, faith can liberate reason from itself by asking it questions that it could not itself have anticipated, yet about which it can consider. "Reason will not be saved without the faith, but the faith without reason will not be human."

On understanding Current Intellectual Movements-Cardinal Ratzinger on the Modern Mind
183 posted on 09/30/2001 7:12:20 PM PDT by independentmind
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