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As I think I may have mentioned to you in previous exchanges, I AM a Catholic, indeed, a convert. I didn't mention that I went to Confession 8 days ago, to Mass Sunday morning Monday morning, Wednesday evening, and Thursday evening. I gave presents worth more than $100 to the Dominicans who run my parish and have donated about a kafilloin gazillion dollars there and to various Catholic causes, I have administered Cahtolic parishes, taught in Catholic classes, and am about to engage in working with one of my priests and friends in a ministry to some smart-assed, inquisitive, and argumentative college kids, which I think will be fun. If that's a problem with the Catholic Church, then, yes, I have a problem.

The conversation in this thread seemed to be about whether being some kind of theist made you a better person than someone who is not a theist - or maybe substitute "Christian" for "theist". Specifically it was debated whethere one could reasonably reject an atheist candidate for political office on no other grounds than that s/he is an atheist. I was engaging in that debate.

I was saying in my first paragraph, with C.S. Lewis, that my being a Christian is not an indication that I am "better" than any given atheist. All I can hope for is to be better than I was before I tried to do something vaguely Christian with my life. There are plenty of honest and virtuous atheists and of dishonest and vicious Christians and other theists. I don't think Cato was a theist and I think in very many respects he was better than I and, a fortiori better than Teddy the Hutt. I have no doubt therefore, that some atheists are more admirable than I, and some of my fellow Catholics more acutely and obviously beset with sin, more even than I. Is this under question? Is it controversial? If it is, I'm flabbergasted. Is this opinion indiciative of a problem with the Catholic Church? How so??

My final paragraph, which happens at the end of an informal exposition of a few paragraphs concludes (with an scarcely veiled allusion to Teddy the Hutt)that I would be prepared to vote for an atheist who showed himself to be virtuous in preference to SOME (not all, I neveer said ALL, never meant to imply ALL, and I think if you read "all" it's because you weren't reading carefully) Catholics, for example Jean Francois Kerry or Teddy the Hutt. I no more said that all Catholics think of God as something they have control over than I said that all atheists are prepared to die for their opinions.

I think this stand would be approved by my Dominican friends and that they would not conclude from anything I have said on this or any other thread that I have a problem with Catholics.

In the course of my argument I made a strongly monotheistic argument that if an atheist loves the truth and sincerely pursues it at cost to himself or herself that love and integrity comes from God. I got that opinioin from reflecting on my reading in Justin Martyr, whom I consider a Catholic.

I think the plain sense of what I wrote initially is as I have rephrased it and that a conclusion that I am slamming Catholics or being hubristis can come only from carelessness or malice.