Bishop Barron on Atheism and Assisted Suicide

Bishops Robert Barron: Your Life Does Not Belong to You

The following comes from Bishop Barron at the NCR:

It was revealed this week that, for the first time in its history, Harvard University, which had been founded for religious purposes and named for a minister of the Gospel, has admitted a freshman class in which atheists and agnostics outnumber professed Christians and Jews. Also this week, the House and the Senate of California passed a provision that allows for physician assisted suicide in the Golden State. As I write these words, the governor of California is deliberating whether to sign the bill into law. Though it might seem strange to suggest as much, I believe that the make-up of the Harvard freshman class and the passing of the suicide law are really related.

 

I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised that non-believers have come to outnumber believers among the rising cohort of the American aristocracy. For the whole of their lives, these young people have been immersed in the corrosive acids of relativism, scientism, and materialism. Though they have benefitted from every advantage that money can afford, they have been largely denied what the human heart most longs for: contact with the transcendent, with the good, true, and beautiful in their properly unconditioned form. But as Paul Tillich, echoing the Hebrew prophets, reminded us, we are built for worship, and therefore in the absence of God, we will make some other value our ultimate concern. Wealth, power, pleasure, and honor have all played the role of false gods over the course of the human drama, but today especially, freedom itself has emerged as the ultimate good, as the object of worship. And what this looks like on the ground is that our lives come to belong utterly to us, that we become great projects of self-creation and self-determination.

 

As the Bible tells it, the human project went off the rails precisely at the moment when Adam arrogated to himself the prerogative of determining the meaning of his life, when he, in the agelessly beautiful poetry of the book of Genesis, ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Read the chapters that immediately follow the account of the Fall, and you will discover the consequences of this deified freedom: jealousy, hatred, fratricide, imperialism, and the war of all against all. The rest of the Biblical narrative can be interpreted as God's attempt to convince human beings that their lives, in point of fact, do not belong to them. He did this precisely by choosing a people whom he would form after his own mind and heart, teaching them how to think, how to behave, and above all, how to worship. This holy people Israel - a word that means, marvelously, "the one who wrestles with God" - would then, by the splendor of their way of life, attract the rest of the world. On the Christian reading, this project reached its climax in the person of Jesus Christ, a first-century Israelite from the town of Nazareth, who was also the Incarnation of the living God. The coming-together of divinity and humanity, the meeting of infinite and finite freedom, Jesus embodies what God intended for us from the beginning.

 

And this is precisely why Paul, one of Jesus' first missionaries, announced him as Kyrios (Lord) to all the nations, and why he characterized himself as doulos Christou Iesou (a slave of Christ Jesus). Paul exulted in the fact that his life did not belong to him, but rather to Christ. In his letter to the Ephesians, he wrote, "there is a power already at work in you that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine." He was referencing the Holy Spirit, which orders our freedom and which opens up possibilities utterly beyond our capacities. To follow the promptings of this Spirit is, for Paul and for all the Biblical authors, the source of life, joy, and true creativity. 

 

All of which brings me back to Harvard and legalized suicide. The denial of God - or the blithe bracketing of the question of God - is not a harmless parlor game. Rather, it carries with it the gravest implications. If there is no God, then our lives do indeed belong to us, and we can do with them what we want. If there is no God, our lives have no ultimate meaning or transcendent purpose, and they become simply artifacts of our own designing. Accordingly, when they become too painful or too shallow or just too boring, we ought to have the prerogative to end them. We can argue the legalities and even the morality of assisted suicide until the cows come home, but the real issue that has to be engaged is that of God's existence. 

 

The incoming freshman class at Harvard is a disturbing omen indeed, for the more our society drifts into atheism, the more human life is under threat. The less we are willing even to wrestle with God, the more de-humanized we become.

Why I am Catholic: Former Atheist Jennifer Fulwiler

Jennifer Fulwiler is a Catholic Convert from atheism and writer at ConversionDiary.com.  She is the author of the book Something Other Than God.  The following comes from Why I am Catholic:

One thing I could never get on the same page with my fellow atheists about was the idea of meaning. The other atheists I knew seemed to feel like life was full of purpose despite the fact that we're all nothing more than chemical reactions. I could never get there. In fact, I thought that whole line of thinking was unscientific, and more than a little intellectually dishonest. If everything that we call heroism and glory, and all the significance of all great human achievements, can be reduced to some neurons firing in the human brain, then it's all destined to be extinguished at death. And considering that the entire span of homo sapiens' existence on earth wouldn't even amount to a blip on the radar screen of a 5-billion-year-old universe, it seemed silly to pretend like the 60-odd-year life of some random organism on one of trillions of planets was something special. (I was a blast at parties.)

By simply living my life, I felt like I was living a lie. I acknowledged the truth that life was meaningless, and yet I kept acting as if my own life had meaning, as if all the hope and love and joy I'd experienced was something real, something more than a mirage produced by the chemicals in my brain. Suicide had crossed my mind -- not because I was depressed in the common sense of the word, simply because it seemed like it was nothing more than speeding up the inevitable. A life multiplied by zero yields the same result, no matter when you do it.

Not knowing what else to do, I followed the well-worn path of people who are trying to run from something that haunts them: I worked too much. I drank too much. I was emotionally fragile. Many of my relationships with other people were toxic. I wrapped myself in a cocoon of distractions, trying to pretend like I didn't know what I knew.

###

A year after I graduated from college, I met a guy at work named Joe. I was so impressed with him, I didn't think I had much of a chance. He'd grown up poor, raised by a single mother, and had gone on to get degrees from Yale, Columbia and Stanford. People who knew him said he was one of the smartest people they'd ever met. So when we began dating, I was thrilled. Our life together turned out to be even better than I could have imagined: We traveled the world on whims, ate at the finest restaurants, flew first class, and threw epic parties on the roof of his loft downtown. On top of that, both of our careers were taking off, so our future held only more money and more success.

We were a perfect couple. The only thing we didn't see the same way was the issue of religion. A few months after we started dating, it came out that Joe not only believed in God, but considered himself a Christian. I did not understand how someone who was perfectly capable of rational thought could believe in fairy tale stories like those of Christianity. Did he believe in Santa Claus too?

It didn't cause any problems between us, though, since we had the same basic moral code, he didn't practice this bizarre faith of his in any noticeable way, and, mainly, I did not want to think about it. At all. Whenever the subject of God came up, something deep within me recoiled. Not that I had any problem demolishing silly theist ideas -- it had been something of a hobby back in college -- but the subject took me too close to that thing I was trying to forget. I had constructed my entire life around not thinking about it, so I never articulated what it was. It had been so buried by the parties and the socializing and the breathless running from place to place that it was no longer a specific concept, just some dark, cold amorphous knowledge I needed to avoid.

Joe and I married in a theater in 2003, reciting vows we wrote ourselves, with me wearing a dark purple dress. The plan was that marriage would be just a stepping stone along the path we were already on. But then I discovered I was pregnant, and everything changed.

###

Motherhood caught me completely off guard. I'd grown up as an only child in a culture where nobody I knew had more than two kids living at home. I never had a friend whose mom had a baby during the time of our friendship. And considering that I'd never wanted kids and had some minor medical issues that made me think I probably couldn't have them anyway, I was utterly unprepared for motherhood. The physical, mental and emotional changes I went through after the birth of my son were a hard blow, like a punch to the head that comes out of the blue, and it left me reeling.

This cataclysmic event unearthed all those old thoughts about meaninglessness, and this time there was no re-burying them. Now that I had a child, it felt like my life had more meaning than ever. The dark-haired, blue-eyed baby felt so valuable; my own life was flooded with hope and joy at his presence. But with none of the usual distractions in place, the facts of the matter now descended upon me: There was nothing transcendent about my son's life, my life, or any of the love I felt for him. He was destined for the same fate as the rest of us, to have his entire existence erased upon his inevitable death.

For weeks, I hardly got out of bed. Some combination of severe sleep deprivation and more severe depression left me almost catatonic. But then one morning, as I looked at the baby in the pre-dawn light that filtered in through the window, I felt something new within me. It was something that was not despair, some unfamiliar yet welcome feeling. I peeled back the layers to find that it was doubt: Doubt of my purely materialist worldview, doubt of the truth I had believed since childhood that there is nothing transcendent about the human life.

I considered that in almost every single time and place throughout human history, people have believed in some kind of spiritual realm. Almost every human society we know of has shared the belief that there is more to life than meets the eye, that what transpires here in the material world somehow reverberates into the eternal. Previously I had assumed that the vast majority of the billions of people who had ever lived were all simply ignorant; now I wondered if maybe I was the one who was missing something.

###

A few months later, I stumbled across a Christian book. I'd never been in the Religion section of a bookstore, let alone read anything about Christianity. I'd only picked up this book because the author claimed to be a former atheist, and I was curious to see what level of fraud he was. After flipping through the first few pages, I was surprised to find that I believed that he had been an atheist. I read a few more pages, and found his writing to be clear and basically reasonable. Obviously he'd come to the wrong conclusions, but I could respect the fact that he at least attempted to reason his way into his current belief system, rather than basing it on some emotional experience. I found that I couldn't put the book down, and ended up buying it (loudly noting to the cashier that it was a gift for a friend).

A quick internet search showed that the book was widely scorned by atheists, and some of their counter-points to the author's arguments were good. But it was simply not true to say that there was nothing compelling about it. For example, the book pointed out that thousands of Jewish people abandoned the sacred practices that had sustained them through centuries, through all types of persecution, in the years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Almost all of Jesus' original followers went to their death rather than recant their statements that they'd seen him rise from the dead. Christianity spread like wildfire in the early centuries, despite the fact that becoming a Christian often meant persecution or even death.

I had never seen Jesus as anything other than a silly fairy tale figure whom people called upon to give a divine thumbs-up to self-serving beliefs; but now I was intrigued by the man as a historical figure. Something happened in first-century Palestine, something so big that it still sends shockwaves down to the present day. And it all centered around the figure of Jesus Christ. As Joe once pointed out when I asked him why he considered himself a Christian, Christianity is the only one of all the major world religions to be founded by a guy who claimed to be God. That's an easy claim to disprove if it's not true.

One afternoon, shortly after I finished the book, I was caught off guard by a thought:

What if it's true?

Read the rest here.

Interview with Jennifer Fulwiler - On Atheism, Writing, Blogging, and Books

A Theist or Atheist?

The following comes from Fr. Dwight Longenecker: 

HuffPo reports that an atheist in New Jersey has succeeded in getting a license plate that reads ATHE 1ST. The problem is the statement is ambiguous. What if I read it and conclude that the driver is… A theist? That’s the problem with atheists…they haven’t thought of all the possibilities.

Their advertising stunts are so lame. What about the one in Times Square last year which showed encouraged people to enjoy Santa Claus, but not Christ because Christ was a myth? Duh. So Santa is real? Then there is the really, really smart clever and witty bus signs posted in England that said something like, “God probably doesn’t exist so enjoy yourself.” Is that it? Is that all they could think of? Is that the extent of their wit, their wordplay, their badinage? What about the super dull bus poster above? And advertising on a bus to start with? Who advertises on a bus? Can’t help thiking of nuns on the bus. It’s much the same sort of tiresome, self righteous, yawn inducing activism.

And people say Christianity is boring?

Geesh, Christianity is very interesting compared to these yawners. I mean we’ve got cool stuff like snake handlers, incorrupt bodies of saints, relics, Eucharistic miracles, statues that weep and bleed, apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and more. We’ve got monks who brew beer and nuns who levitate. We’ve got saints who bi-locate, exist for years on nothing but the Eucharistic and joke with their torturers. You might not believe any of that stuff or think it’s all some sort of psychosis, but at least it’s interesting. Furthermore, we have fun stuff like pilgrimages, and World Youth Day, and all night vigils and climbing the Santa Scala on your knees–not to mention wild places like Antonio Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona, Mont St Michel, the catacombs or that Capuchin cellar in Rome with all the bones.

Atheism on the other hand is so mind numbingly dull, and the worst kind of atheism is the self righteous, “We’re good people too you know” kind of atheism. “Oh, look at me. I’m working at the soup kitchen!  I campaigned to ban nuclear power! I have a ‘co-exist’ bumper sticker on my Prius.” They pretend to be revolutionaries, but to me they seem as dull as the McMansion next door and the usual suburban, fast food, shop at the mall American. At least the old fashioned atheists followed their logic and tried to wipe out everyone who didn’t agree with them. Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot had teeth. The present day respectable atheists are about as interesting as yesterday’s oatmeal.

They’re bland. “It’s a case of the bland leading the bland…and they shall both fall into the ditch.”

Not only dull, but humorless. The closest thing to wit I’ve ever experienced with atheists is a bit of sophomoric sarcasm. They’re always so darned serious…especially about themselves. Not only dull, but a little bit spooky.

The conversation with atheists always lacks a certain edge. There’s a slipperiness to it and a lack of grip–like wrestling in jello with a one armed man. I have thought long and hard about this phenomenon and I think it is because the theist is arguing from a positive proposition and the atheist is arguing from a negation. The theist is arguing in support of something positive. The atheist can only deny. That denial and essential negativity culminates in a vagueness about everything–their mindset seems dull and out of focus.

The bottom line is that if there is no God, no heaven and no hell and no final judgement then what’s the point? The weary dullness of the atheist is a true reflection. Without an afterlife and a final tally then there are only two options: the old Greek choice– Epicureanism and Stoicism. The first is, “Eat, Drink and be merry for tomorrow you die.” The second is “Be good. Be noble… for tomorrow you die.”

It’s like we’re all on the deck of a sinking cruise liner with no lifeboats. The Epicureans sit down to a five course meal and try to hold on while the tables slip away. The Stoic stands on the deck, gazes into the distance and goes down with the ship.

The Christian spots a distant light, believes it is a rescue ship, dons a life jacket and jumps in to swim for it or die in the attempt.

Chesterton writes better on this subject here.

Lumen Fidei: A commentary by Fr. Robert Barron

Jennifer Fulwiler on Deep In Scripture

Jennifer Fulwiler: Scientific Atheism to Christ

Answering Atheism by Chris Stefanick

A Young Atheist is Led to Faith by Reading Her Catholic Foes

The following comes from the Catholic Herald:

Last Easter, when I was just beginning to explore the possibility that, despite what I had previously believed and been brought up to believe, there might be something to the Catholic faith, I read Letters to a Young Catholic by George Weigel. One passage in particular struck me.

Talking of the New Testament miracles and the meaning of faith, Weigel writes: “In the Catholic view of things, walking on water is an entirely sensible thing to do. It’s staying in the boat, hanging tightly to our own sad little securities, that’s rather mad.”

In the following months, that life outside the boat – the life of faith –would come to make increasing sense to me, until eventually I could no longer justify staying put. Last weekend I was baptised and confirmed into the Catholic Church.

Of course, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Faith is something my generation is meant to be casting aside, not taking up. I was raised without any religion and was eight when 9/11 took place. Religion was irrelevant in my personal life and had provided my formative years with a rolling-news backdrop of violence and extremism. I avidly read Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, whose ideas were sufficiently similar to mine that

I could push any uncertainties I had to the back of my mind. After all, what alternative was there to atheism?

As a teenager, I realised that I needed to read beyond my staple polemicists, as well as start researching the ideas of the most egregious enemies of reason, such as Catholics, to properly defend my world view. It was here, ironically, that the problems began.

I started by reading Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address, aware that it had generated controversy at the time and was some sort of attempt –futile, of course – to reconcile faith and reason. I also read the shortest book of his I could find, On Conscience. I expected – and wanted – to find bigotry and illogicality that would vindicate my atheism. Instead, I was presented with a God who was the Logos: not a supernatural dictator crushing human reason, but the self-expressing standard of goodness and objective truth towards which our reason is oriented, and in which it is fulfilled, an entity that does not robotically control our morality, but is rather the source of our capacity for moral perception, a perception that requires development and formation through the conscientious exercise of free will.

It was a far more subtle, humane and, yes, credible perception of faith than I had expected. It didn’t lead to any dramatic spiritual epiphany, but did spur me to look further into Catholicism, and to re-examine some of the problems I had with atheism with a more
critical eye.

First, morality. Non-theistic morality, to my mind, tended towards two equally problematic camps: either it was subjective to the point of meaninglessness or, when followed logically, entailed intuitively repulsive outcomes, such as Sam Harris’s stance on torture. But the most appealing theories which could circumvent these problems, like virtue ethics, often did so by presupposing the existence of God. Before, with my caricatured understanding of theism, I’d considered that nonsensical. Now, with the more detailed understanding I was starting to develop, I wasn’t so sure.

Next, metaphysics. I soon realised that relying on the New Atheists for my counter-arguments to the existence of God had been a mistake: Dawkins, for instance, gives a disingenuously cursory treatment of St Thomas Aquinas in The God Delusion, engaging only with the summary of Aquinas’s proofs in the Five Ways – and misunderstanding those summarised proofs to boot. Acquainting myself fully with Thomistic-Aristotelian ideas, I found them to be a valid explanation of the natural world, and one on which atheist philosophers had failed to make a coherent assault.

What I still did not understand was how a theology that operated in harmony with human reason could simultaneously be, in Benedict XVI’s words, “a theology grounded in biblical faith”. I’d always assumed that sola scriptura (“scripture alone”), with its evident shortcomings and fallacies, was how all consistent, believing Christians read the Bible. So I was surprised to discover that this view could be refuted just as robustly from a Catholic standpoint – reading the Bible through the Church and its history, in light of Tradition – as from an atheist one.

I looked for absurdities and inconsistencies in the Catholic faith that would derail my thoughts from the unnerving conclusion I was heading towards, but the infuriating thing about Catholicism is its coherency: once you accept the basic conceptual structure, things fall into place with terrifying speed. “The Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole,” wrote Edith Stein in The Science of the Cross: “If we become immersed in one, we are led to all the others.” The beauty and authenticity of even the most ostensibly difficult parts of Catholicism, such as the sexual ethics, became clear once they were viewed not as a decontextualised list of prohibitions, but as essential components in the intricate body of the Church’s teaching.

There was one remaining problem, however: my lack of familiarity with faith as something lived. To me, the whole practice and vernacular of religion – prayer, hymns, Mass – was something wholly alien, which I was reluctant to step into.

My friendships with practising Catholics finally convinced me that I had to make a decision. Faith, after all, isn’t merely an intellectual exercise, an assent to certain propositions; it’s a radical act of the will, one that engenders a change of the whole person. Books had taken me to Catholicism as a plausible conjecture, but Catholicism as a living truth I came to understand only through observing those already serving the Church within that life of grace.

I grew up in a culture that has largely turned its back on faith. It’s why I was able to drift through life with my ill-conceived atheism going unchallenged, and at least partially explains the sheer extent of the popular support for the New Atheists: for every considerate and well-informed atheist, there will be others with no personal experience of religion and no interest in the arguments who are simply drifting with the cultural tide.

As the popularity of belligerent, all-the-answers atheism wanes, however, thoughtful Christians able to explain and defend their faith will become an increasingly vital presence in the public square. I hope I, in a small way, am an example of the appeal that Catholicism can still hold in an age that at times appears intractably opposed to it.

Pope Francis on Atheism

The following comes from Strange Notions:

Before he was elected Pope Francis, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio spent fourteen years as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina. During that time he built a strong friendship with Abraham Skorka, an Argentinian rabbi and biophysicist. Together they promoted interreligious dialogue on faith and reason, seeking to build bridges among Catholicism, Judaism, and the world at large.

Last month, Image Books released the English translation of On Heaven and Earth, originally published in Argentina in 2010. The book contains several conversations between both men where they discuss various theological and worldly issues, including God, fundamentalism, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and globalization. From these personal and accessible talks comes a first-hand view of the man who would become pope to 1.2 billion Catholics around the world in March 2013. In the excerpt below, the two men share their thoughts on modern atheism and agnosticism.

Cardinal Bergoglio (Pope Francis):

When I speak with atheists, I will sometimes discuss social concerns, but I do not propose the problem of God as a starting point, except in the case that they propose it to me. If this occurs, I tell them why I believe. But that which is human is so rich to share and to work at that very easily we can mutually complement our richness. As I am a believer, I know that these riches are a gift from God. I also know that the other person, the atheist, does not know that. I do not approach the relationship in order to proselytize, or convert the atheist; I respect him and I show myself as I am. Where there is knowledge, there begins to appear esteem, affection, and friendship. I do not have any type of reluctance, nor would I say that his life is condemned, because I am convinced that I do not have the right to make a judgment about the honesty of that person; even less, if he shows me those human virtues that exalt others and do me good.

At any rate, I know more agnostic people than atheists; the first are more uncertain, the second are more convinced. We have to be coherent with the message that we receive from the Bible: every man is the image of God, whether he is a believer or not. For that reason alone everyone has a series of virtues, qualities, and a greatness of his own. If he has some vileness, as I do, we can share that in order to mutually help one another and overcome it.
 

Rabbi Abraham Skorka:

I agree with what you have said; the first step is respecting your fellow man. But I would add one more point of view. When a person says, “I am an atheist,” I believe he or she is taking an arrogant position. He who doubts has a more nuanced position. An agnostic thinks that he or she has not yet found the answer, but an atheist is 100 percent convinced that G-d does not exist. It is the same arrogance that leads some to assert that G-d definitely exists, just like the chair I am sitting on.

Religious people are believers, but we do not know for certain that He exists. We can perceive Him in an extremely profound sense, but we never see Him. We receive subtle replies from Him. According to the Torah, Moses was the only person to have spoken directly, face to face, with G-d. As for everyone else—Jacob, Isaac, etc.—the presence of G-d appeared to them in dreams or by some messenger. Even though I personally believe that G-d exists, it is arrogant to say that He exists as if it were just another certainty in life. I would not casually affirm His existence because I need to live the same humility that I demand of the atheist. The right thing to do would be to point out—as Maimonides did in his thirteen principals of faith—that “I believe with complete faith that G-d is the creator.”

Following Maimonides’ line of thought, we can say what G-d is not, but we can never be sure of what G-d is. We can talk about His qualities and attributes, but in no way can we describe His form. I would remind the atheist that the perfection of the natural world is sending us a message. We can gain an understanding of how it works, but not its essence.

Read the rest here.

Jennifer Fulwiler: How Music Led Me to God

The following comes from Jennifer Fulwiler at Strange Notions:

A while back I mentioned to an atheist acquaintance that I’d cried at Mass that morning. I explained that it was one of those times when I felt overwhelmed with the presence of God; I was so perfectly at peace, so surrounded by love, that I couldn’t help but be moved to tears.

“Maybe it was the music,” he responded. He went on to offer an erudite analysis of how music is known to produce certain positive sensations in the brain, noting that religious leaders from time immemorial have used the evolved human response to the stimulus of music to delude the faithful into believing that they’ve experience the divine.

I had to smile at his suggestion, because I actually agreed with part of his argument.

I never had a “religious experience” before my conversion from atheism to Christianity, and couldn’t even imagine what that might be like. Would harp-playing angels appear in front of you? Would you hear a booming voice fill the room? I had no idea.

There had been a handful of moments in my life, however, when I experienced something that was unlike anything else I’d ever felt. On a few rare occasions I felt overcome with an odd sensation, an ecstatic elation on top of inner stillness that was so powerful that it made me feel as if I’d slipped into some other dimension. It was a moment of feeling compelled to relax, to let go, to just trust (trust in what or whom I didn’t know, but that was definitely an overriding feeling when I had those experiences). Those moments were…well, if I hadn’t been so certain that nothing existed beyond the material world, I might have said “spiritual.” And they always occurred when I was listening to music.

It seemed illogical, really, that a mere arrangement of certain sounds in a certain order could transport me, for however brief a moment, into such a sublime state. I was aware of all the natural explanations for music’s impact on the human brain; yet when I’d read about how the cochlea transmits information along the auditory nerve as neural discharges into the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe, I’d think, “Uhh, yeah, that’s true…but I feel like there’s something more going on as well.”

One of the many things that rang true when I began studying Catholic theology was the emphasis on art—music, in particular—as a reflection of God. I came to see art as a sort of “secret handshake” of beings with souls: We share 96% of our DNA with chimps, but chimps don’t write symphonies. Dogs don’t rap. Dolphins can be trained to reproduce musical rhythms, but they don’t sing songs. Only the creature made in the image and likeness of God can speak the secret language of music.

In other words, I realized that all those experiences I’d had while listening to music were so tremendous because they were experiences of my soul having a brush with its Creator. Or, in Pope Benedict’s words:

“The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said:

“Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true.”

The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer’s inspiration.”

Christianity doesn’t deny that beautiful music can move us to feel something; in fact, it acknowledges it, and then takes it a step farther by articulating exactly what it is we’re feeling. And that’s why I smiled when I heard my atheist friend’s comment. It is actually because I am a Christian that I take that moment at Mass when I became filled with so much love and hope that I felt like I could explode with joy, and I say: Yes, maybe it was the music.

Strange Notions: “You bring some strange notions to our ears; we should like to know what these things mean” (Acts 17:20)

What is StrangeNotions.com?

StrangeNotions.com is the central place of dialogue between Catholics and atheists. It’s built around three things: Reason. Faith. Dialogue. Each day you’ll find articles, videos, and rich comment box discussion concerning life’s Big Questions.

What does “Strange Notions” mean?

The name “Strange Notions” carries a double meaning. The first sense comes from a colorful story in the Biblical book of Acts. The first great Christian missionary, Paul, sailed to Athens where he debated in the synagogue with the Jews, and in the public square, before being invited to the Areopagus, a prestigious hill where Athenian philosophers gathered “for nothing else but telling or hearing something new.” (Sound like the Internet, eh?) Paul stood among the circle of pagan philosophers and appealed to what they all held in common—devotion, philosophy, poetry. His message intrigued the Athenian elite, who said, “you bring some strange notions to our ears; we should like to know what these things mean” (Acts 17:20).

This website is designed to mimic that first meeting of Christians and atheists, allowing both to discover intriguing “strange notions” on either side.

The second meaning acknowledges the fact that both Catholics and atheists think the other side’s views are strange. Atheists see Catholics worshiping an invisible, three-in-one God and who is not empirically verifiable. Catholics see atheists dismissed the Creator behind this rich and complex cosmos, a supreme Big Banger who loves the world into being. Both groups have trouble seeing why the other believes as it does.

StrangeNotions.com is meant to help that strangeness fade away. In the end, we may still disagree, but at least the opposing views won’t be confusing “strange notions”—we’ll more clearly know what we reject, and thus what we hold, too.

Visit Strange Notions here!

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Dr. Peter Kreeft Interview on Atheism

One Minute Apologist With Dinesh D'Souza

Scott Hahn and Fr. Robert Barron on the New Atheism

Fr. Robert Barron on Christopher Hitchens

Atheist Dies and Meets Jesus

Fr. Robert Barron: On atheism and Christopher Hitchens

You may know that Christopher Hitchens, the well known atheist, has passed away. We surely pray for the repose of his soul. Fr. Robert Barron has spoken thoughtfully of the arguments of Hitchens and the Christian response: