Comments for God: Psychological Projection or Real, External Being? at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 10 out of 10 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Tue, 21 May 2013 16:24:06 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-13387 Some people are honest enough so they just blind their eye to new comprehensions when they feel it can't break their believes. Other are trying to argue. - Jean-Philippe Fri, 14 Sep 2012 05:56:15 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9470 H. de Lubac's The Drama of Atheist Humanism is an excellent resource for further research. Bonagura does an excellent job succinctly framing a vast topic. It wouldn't hurt to consider, however, that Feuerbach's challenge is poignant and valid insofar as it urges Christians to rise up to the height of their dignity and believe that they are called to become the God they adore. This is the whole spirituality of "theosis" (divinization), more emphasized in the East but not absent from such great writers in the West as Augustine and Leo the Great. See CCC #460. - Rev. Michael Hickin Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:43:55 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9464 "Since the finite cannot satisfy the infinite longings of the will...." Uh ... what definition of "infinite" can we reasonably attach to the "longings of the will"? I suppose man may think he is longing for the infinite, but that's not at all the same thing, and you end up prevaricating on the meaning of infinite. - Crowhill Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:16:28 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9460 Scott Quinn's statement is an ideological reduction- "new failed catechism"? Really Scott? Have you read it? Can you show me where it contradicts the Council of Trent Catechism? Did the pre-vatican II Popes really condemn what is in the council writings? or the "spirit of Vatican II" innovations? - Achilles Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:59:11 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9458 God as a Protector figure is not very likely since the lack of supernatural protector is very evident. However, man hungers for justice and can not live without it. So, a better atheist argument would be that God is created to fulfill the hunger man and human societies have for justice. - Gian Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:00:34 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9457 @Picahel PS: Doesn't your last setence tend to support Scott Quinn's point? Doesn't the current state of things represent the very triumph of Modernism? If you we possit that this mess is not what the Council Fathers intended, it seems odd to laud people on the basis that their work was essential to that Council. Is it just, "Oops! They didn't mean that to happen at all, but they were fine chaps,"? - Thomas C. Coleman, Jr. Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:11:24 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9455 Blondel was very far from being a Modernist; as he, himself, explained, he was always careful to distinguish the method of immantism, which he employed and the theory of immanentism, condemned in Lamentabili and Pascendi. He was an outspoken opponent of the fascist Action Française, unlike the Neo-Scholastics he opposed. Along with Edouard LeRoy, he furnished the intellectual foundations of the Nouvelle Théologie of such theologians as Maréchal, Chenu, Henri de Lubac, Congar, and Daniélou, many of them his friends. It is impossible to imagine the Second Vatican Council without them - Michael PS Sun, 08 Jan 2012 07:37:11 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9453 Theism lacks scientific proof in the modern sense of science, which looks only at the natural realm and judges as real that which is observable, quantifiable, reproducible under controlled circumstances (or not). In the definition of the perennial philosophy, however, that science is knowledge through understanding of causes, the case for theism and against atheism takes on much clearer lines. That philosophy starts, though it doesn't end, with common sense. Common sense says that if there is order in a room, or a house, or a car, or pick a manufactured object, someone put it there. Philosophy says that if there is order in the universe -- and science tells us there is, even to the extent that chaos itself has been shown to be subject to laws of order -- then someone greater than the universe put it there. Thus I would argue that it is anti-scientific to posit that God does not exist, since the indications abound that He does, even if those indications do not rise to the level of absolute philosophic certainty or fall to the level of material verfiability. Professor Bonagura puts us on surer ground by showing that in the end, arguments for atheism are not scientific truth claims, but moral cris de coeur that long to describe freedom as freedom from the restraints imposed by order -- moral order, law and order, psychic order (or disorder); and while he doesn't say it in so many words, that are finally rooted not in a longing for freedom but in malice and vindictiveness. Those two vices are hardly sufficient bases upon which to build a life; but they are more than sufficient bases for destroying a life, whether it be a life of one's own, one's own family, or, finally, one's own society. As the Other Joe writes, evidence for moral vindictiveness and malice abound more and more. - Dave Sun, 08 Jan 2012 05:41:14 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9452 Wow, we can see just how rotten Catholic philosophy is today when Blondel is cited as an authority. I'll give the author credit for at least being honest when he links the modernist Blondel with the new-and-failed catechism, since, of course, what passes for Catholic teaching today is simply the very modernist errors condemned by many popes prior to Vatican II. - Scott Quinn Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:48:18 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/god-psychological-projection-or-real-external-being.html#comment-9451 Once God is removed as real and described as a projection based on anxiety or wishing, our words lose meaning. Terms such as "fulfillment" become instantly trivialized down to transient impressions of self-satisfaction. In Freud's guilt-free world are monsters such as Bernie Madoff or the perennial favorite, Hitler. If there is no God there is no judgment beyond the easily fooled courts of man. There is no compelling reason not to shoot everyone with whom I am presently annoyed, plus a few strangers and then myself. Rights and wrongs become merely political as there is no higher authority and the political becomes defined by physical power - he who has the most guns. Culture then has no higher purpose than control and amusement. And strangely, we see these things growing all around us like a cheap housing development around an old, settled neighborhood. A moment's clear thinking reveals that man-centered morality is oxymoronic. It may have been Napoleon who observed (and he would have lived during the Great Terror) that if God didn’t exist we would have to invent him. Today’s whited sepulcher is the smug atheist. - Other Joe Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:52:55 +0100