In his introduction in his Introduction to Christianity, Pope Benedict writes:
both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty.
Snaps all-round. Zoomtard is going to be a beatnik club today, by the way.
Imagine your mind like a warehouse. It goes out of business if it isn’t always full. There are all kinds of different crates of junk out there that can be stored in your warehouse, all the intellectual birc-a-brac of the marketplace of ideas can end up residing in your mind.
The point is, the warehouse can’t be empty. You can proudly assert that you don’t have any aromatheraphy products in your mind – that you don’t believe in it, so to speak. But the converse of that is that you do believe in something else – say, traditional western medicine.
In the same way, it must always be possible, eventually, to express the dis-belief in a God or gods or all gods in positive terms. Our minds are not vacuums (even when they are vacuous). You believe that God or gods or all gods do not exist. There is perhaps even more depth in the first half of that sentence than the second. And Ratzinger is entirely right. We experience faith in the midst of doubt or we can choose to say we experience faith through doubt or in the form of doubt, but the one thing we can never do is refuse to believe.
Your Correspondent, The tragedy of his existence is only bettered by the comedy
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Nice. I love abstract analogies like this, I’m a computer geek (like yerself I gather). Constructing bizarre pseudo-visual environments takes up a large (weird) part of my day.
Although true, I’m not sure it’s very informative or meaningful to talk about the positive non-belief in everything that’s not in your warehouse. The list is infinite but each one only becomes ‘active’ when precisely defined by a salesman and rejected by the warehouse inventory guy.
The problem is that the acceptance of stock into the warehouse happens in the abstract. Belief in gravity doesn’t just come in a box fully formed, it is constructed by acceptance of evidences. The warehouse owner has little control over the final form of the belief, he assesses and accepts little pieces of presented evidence which piece together in the warehouse to form gravity belief or unicorn belief or evolution belief.
The correctness or validity of the beliefs held in the warehouse are proportional to the wisdom of the warehouse owner and his successful screening of the evidence. Unless of course the warehouse owner let things in as a child (Santa/fairies/ghosts) and hasn’t managed/bothered/wanted to offload them in adulthood, or if the warehouse owner gets old, infirm, mentally unstable and starts to accept all kinds of hoodoos and paranoia into his warehouse.
It’s a thumping wonder, that book! At times it seems like a recording a prophet left playing on a shortwave frequency hours before the bomb dropped. His metaphor for the Church (and I suspect, proper or not, JR would acknowledge that this is a wider body than can be corralled into a single institution) as a clown shouting at villagers that a fire is sweeping over the fields in their direction but only being met with laughter is genius. You could argue ItC is one of the best things to come out of 1968.