Menlo Park, Calif., Sep 19, 2017 / 03:53 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- People need to learn how to argue better on the internet, especially about religion, Catholic media personality and Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron said in remarks at Facebook’s headquarters on Monday.
“Seek with great patience to understand your opponent’s position,” he advised, adding that it can be “very tempting just to fire back ‘why you’re wrong.’”
Instead of going after what’s wrong, he said, one should seek also highlight what your opponent has right. This is an “extraordinarily helpful” way to get past impasses.
Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire website and media content reach millions of people each year over the internet. The bishop spoke to Facebook employees Sept. 18 at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters on the topic “How to have a religious argument.” The event was live-streamed to around 2,500 viewers.
“If we don’t know how to argue about religion, then we’re going to fight about religion,” he said.
For Bishop Barron, argument is something positive and “a way to peace.”
If one goes on social media, he said, “you’ll see a lot of energy around religious issues. There will be a lot of words exchanged, often angry ones, but very little argument.”
Bishop Barron praised the intellectual tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and his time’s treatment of disputed questions. A professor would gather in a public place and entertain objections and questions.
“What’s off the table? Nothing as far as I can tell,” the bishop summarized. He cited the way St. Thomas Aquinas made the case for disbelief in God before presenting the arguments for rational belief in God.
“If you can say ‘I wonder whether there’s a God,’ that means all these questions are fine and fair,” Bishop Barron continued. “I like the willingness to engage any question.”
Aquinas always phrases the objections “in a very pithy, and very persuasive way.” In the bishop’s view, he formulates arguments against God’s existence even better than modern atheists and sets them up in the most convincing manner, before providing his responses to these arguments.
Further, St. Thomas Aquinas cites great Muslim and Jewish scholars, as well as pre-Christian authorities like Aristotle and Cicero, always with great respect.
Bishop Barron said authentic faith is not opposed to reason; it does not accept simply anything on the basis of no evidence.
He compared faith to the process of coming to know another human person. While one can begin to come to know someone by reason, or through a Google search or a background check, when a relationship deepens, other questions arise.
“When she reveals her heart, the question becomes: Do I believe her or not? Do I trust her or not?” he said.
“The claim, at least of the great biblical religions, is that God has not become a great distant object that we examine philosophically,” the bishop said. “Rather, the claims is that God has spoken, that God has decided to reveal his heart to his people.”
Bishop Barron addressed several other mindsets that he said forestall intelligent argument about religion.
The mentality of “mere toleration” keeps religion to oneself and treats it as a hobby. However, religion makes truth claims, like claims that Christ rose from the dead.
“Truth claims, if they really are truth claims, cannot be privatized,” he said. “A truth claim always has a universal scope, a universal intent.”
“The privatization of religion is precisely what makes real argument about religion impossible.”
While science has created great knowledge that should be embraced, there is the mindset of “scientism” which reduces all knowledge to scientific form.
“It results in a deep compromise of our humanity, it seems to me,” he said, contending that religious truths are more akin to those of literature, poetry and philosophy. The scientistic mindset would have to argue that Shakespeare’s plays or Plato’s philosophical dialogues do not convey deep truths about life, death, faith, and God.
Scientism also mistakes its subject when attempting to consider God. “The one thing God is not is an item within the universe,” Bishop Barron said.
The bishop also faulted a mindset that is “voluntarist,” which believes that the faculty of the will has precedence over the intellect. In a religious context, this holds that God could make two plus two equal five. This gives rise to a view of God as arbitrary and even oppressive.
In response, some people believe humanity’s will trumps the intellect and determines truth through power. According to Bishop Barron, they see God as incompatible with human freedom and, in the words of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, see freedom as the inherent liberty to determine the meaning of one’s own concept of existence, the universe, and human life itself.
Addressing the Facebook employees about their work, he said that their company’s social media network shows an “extraordinary spiritual power” in connecting all the world.
“I think that it’s a spiritual thing that you’re bringing everybody together,” he said.
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Of course Francis would lend his blessing to anything that celebrates disorder and perversity. It just reinforces just how worthless Francis’ blessing is.
As has been said by so many others, a “blessing” which is associating God’s Good Name to that which is being blessed, is a blasphemy when it is attached either directly or by inference to acts that are intrinsically disordered and sinful. Do this, Francis, at risk of your own peril.
Deacon, begs the question, “That which is loosed on earth will be loosed in Heaven?”
Stop playing silly mind/power games Holiness.
Anything to say about the Paris blasphemy?
The supposed focus of Catholic unity is divisive, seemingly by design.
Am I the only one getting nervous that Pope Francis may weigh in on the Olympic Opening Ceremonies?
But the Pope couldn’t say anything about the Olympics outrage or bother to meet brave Cardinal Zen while the Vatican continues to protect Rupnik. Shouts rather than speaks where they stand on issues, eh what?
The only thing that raises Bergoglio’s ire is faithful Catholics praising and adoring our Lord through the same Mass that’s been used for many centuries.
*That* simple fact shouts volumes about who Bergoglio is and what spirit he serves.
Inimicus Massae Latinae est procurator Satanae.
Why does the Holy Father or anyone else need to describe a human being by one aspect of their inclinations and behaviors.? We are all souls in need of salvation and some respects are all disordered as a consequence of the fall. We are called to live a chaste life no matter our desires and inclinations. Help people who have disordered inclinations. Yes. Defining them by these inclination, regardless of their self-definition. No.
You’re absolutely right, Russell. I wouldn’t want anyone characterizing or categorizing me by my foibles, imperfections, sins, physical appearance, etc. etc.
Fr. Martin identifies the people he serves as “queer,” which is a red flag that his vision of the human person and human sexuality is distorted. His Jesuit-sponsored Outreach website promotes all sorts of filth and degradation, including acceptance of sodomy, (aka “same-sex and marriage) and the misogynistic ideology behind transgenderism. I’m not sure why Pope Francis endorses it…
We read: “The 2024 Outreach conference was organized for “LGBTQ laypeople, clergy, scholars, artists, educators, students, and family members to build community, share best practices, and worship together.”
And what might be some of the current “best practices”?
In 1985 anti-binary sexual behavior among gays was found to be “an average several dozen partners a year” and “some hundreds in a lifetime” with “tremendous promiscuity.” Practices much changed, certainly, since the scourge of AIDS….but, then, still this:
“In one recent study of gay male couples, 41.3% had open sexual agreements with some conditions or restrictions, and 10% had open sexual agreements with no restrictions on sex with outside partners. One-fifth of participants (21.9%) reported breaking their agreement in the preceding 12 months, and 13.2% of the sample reported having unprotected anal intercourse in the preceding three months with an outside partner of unknown or discordant HIV-status.”
Source: Neilands, Torsten B.; Chakravarty, Deepalika; Darbes, Lynae A.; Beougher, Sean C.; and Hoff, Colleen C. [2010], “Development and Validation of the Sexual Agreement Investment Scale,” Journal of Sex Research, 47: 1, 24 — 37, April 2009); Cited in: Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D., “An Open Secret: The Truth About Gay Male Couples.” https://www.josephnicolosi.com/collection/2015/5/28/an-open-secret-the-truth-about-gay-male-couples)
Surely, Fr. James Martin, SJ and the aligned (?) 2024 synodal relator-general, Cardinal Hollerich, include such research in their “scientific and cultural foundations” for overturning moral theology, human sexual morality, and the traditional family.
You ask what might be some of the current best practices. I don’t want to know. I am not interested in the least. I AM curious to know about the worship these people plan. WHO will they worship? Perhaps Francis will being in a new PAPAmama and all will be free to dance about a table or altar channeling pagan Paris 2024.
I wonder how they may reconcile themselves to the God of Abraham, that same God who created man and woman, commanding them to be fruitful and to multiply. How do they understand the God of Life, Jesus born of Mary and of the Father God. How do they understand Christ as the Bridegroom joined to the Church as His Bride? How do they interpret Jesus’ words in scripture about lust, eunuchs, divorce, Sodom, and Paul’s words on who will inherit the Kingdom?
Then again, I’ll let Francis do the listening. I’ll read the Word.
The words “repent” and “chastity” will never pass the lips of the Pied Piper of Sodomy James Martin LGBTQSJWXYZ during this gabfest of the intrinsically disordered.
Something wicked this way comes. A line borrowed from a Francis X Maier doomsday prognostication rarely voiced by a staid Catholic apologist.
Maier darkly chides a Mickey Jagger song Sympathy for the Devil the theme the inversion of good and evil. Maier along with the many have noticed this markedly so for over a decade. Heads would have exploded several decades past if it were known that in the near future sodomy would be celebrated as a good, what is more, a moral good by the Catholic Church. If not formally nonetheless de facto.
Pope Francis affirms the perversion as acceptable practice by offering his blessing. What the world has come to embrace, once considered a severe insult, despicable perversion is now celebrated by the Church. Not the whole Church. The Church that lives in the shadows.