All Hands On Deck

Ok, fair warning.  This is a call to (metaphorical) arms.  Religious people everywhere are being pigeonholed like mad.  We are portrayed as bigoted, misogynistic, illogical sheeple.  Hateful, all of us.  It doesn't really matter what you are, or what denomination, the fact remains that in our modern society atheist and agnostic extraordinaires like Christopher Hitchens (God rest his soul) and Richard Dawkins and a host of others have done a bang-up job of convincing a whole lot of people that we're basically a bunch of deluded, brainwashed morons.  

Taken from Catholic Memes

But you know what's worse?  We let them do it.

Now, to be fair, there COULD be a great many vague, moronic people who happen to be religious.  And there are a lot of us who haven't been very well catechized.  And a lot of us who haven't gone to college to study in detail what we believe.  And there are yet more of us who HAVE been, but we are lazy.  Seriously, I know I am.  So yeah, a lot of us could be perfectly capable of defending the faith, or at least talking about it without sounding like a buffoon, but a lot of us don't, for a variety of reasons.  And that has to stop.

Because when did Faith become synonymous with illogic?  It happened when enough of us refrained from standing up and saying something so we wouldn't be "that guy."  I get it, guys.  I do.  We've got family who would be offended if we just laid it all out there.  Our working environment isn't exactly "friendly" to religious discussions.  We have a fear of public speaking, or of speaking to people we don't know well, or we're afraid of getting something wrong, or of not having a ready answer.  But guys.  Guys.  We gotta say something, or we will continue to be the blinded, brainwashed sheeple that so many think we are.

So let's stop with the niceness and letting people assume that only irreligious people have a monopoly on logic.  I can't tell you how many times I've heard from agnostic acquaintances that they "use logic in all my decision making," as though I'm over here playing BINGO or Russian Roulette with how I live my life.  Or "just taking someone else's word for it," like I can't figure out what a brain is even for.  Do they honestly think that they've managed to come up with some irrefutable awesomeness that the Catholic Church hasn't seen in it's 2000 year history?  Do they think that one of the largest religious groups in the world is seriously led by a few guys in dresses who sit around in Italy and just make crap up, and we just nod our heads?  

Also Catholic Memes.  I love them so much.

Can I ask you a question?  A person has an experience that lies beyond the norm for every day life; possibly a vision, or hearing a voice, or a sudden conviction in how they've been living.  Should they seek to find an explanation for said experience, or just ignore it and hope it goes away?  Should we assume that the person, who seems sane in every other possible way, is now just crazy and that the experience they claim to have had was just wrong?  Or could it be possible that they seek an explanation, and find that explanation within a system of belief that also resonates coherently with what they already know and continue to learn about life?

I will absolutely grant you that not everyone has had an experience like the one I'm talking about here.  Some people were just brought up in some faith or another, and they may have gone along with that for years, just because it was what they did as a family, or whatever.  But there comes a point in every persons life when they need to make a decision about what they're going to believe, how they're going to live.  And call me crazy, but I think most people try to at least make an educated decision about it.

True story:  I was once told, by an agnostic friend, that people who profess to be Christians but act in a prejudicial manner toward others give real Christians a bad name.  And then, in the same conversation, he said that we should simply expect that kind of prejudice from religious people, and it should be obvious to everyone.  I'm sorry, but it seems to me that a lot of people who claim to be perfectly logical in their decision making have not yet learned about the Principle of Non-Contradiction.  Buddy, you have to decide if religious people are generally reasonable people who get a bad rap on the basis of a loudmouthed few, or if we're all prejudiced in some way (in which case, we darn well earned our reputation).  You should also probably consider whether, if a lot of us are saying the same thing, it might be for an actual reason. 

And just in case you needed a little extra evidence in favor of religious people valuing human reason, let me give you a neat little (Ok, not so little) list:

Fathers of Science

Abbot Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics.

Franciscan Friar, Roger Bacon, the Father of Scientific Laws.

St. Archbishop Nicolas Steno, the Father of Geology.

Rene Descartes, the Father of Modern Rationalism.

Fr. Marin Mersenne, the Father of Acoustics.

Andreas Vesalius, the Father of Modern Anatomy and Physiology.

Antoine Lavoisier, the Father of Modern Chemistry.

Blaise Pascal, the Father of Hydrostatics.

Louis Pasteur, the Father of Pasteurization.

Archdeacon Nicolaus Copernicus, the Father of Heliocentrism.

Pierre Duhem, the Father of the History of Medieval Science.

Fr. George Coyne, the discoverer of asteroid 14429 Coyne.

Dr. Martin Nowak, discoveries in evolutionary dynamics.

Guglielmo Marconi, the Father of Radio.

Christian Andreas Doppler, Father of the doppler effect.

Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Father of biomechanics.

Thomas W. Hilgers, the father of NaProTechnology.

Alessandro Volta

Charles Augustin de Coulomb

Andre Marie Ampere

Pierre Gassendi- formulated the modern "scientific outlook", of moderated scepticism and empiricism.

Universities

University of Paris

Universitas Magistrorum et Scholarium

Abbey of St. Denis

University of Reims

Collège de Bons Enfants

University of Cologne

University of Vienna

Charles University in Prague

Notre Dame

University of Dallas

Michigan University

Boston College

Ave Maria University

Georgetown

Gonzaga University

Villanova

Fordham University

All of the above are Roman Catholic in affiliation.

So next time, I'll give some pointers for how to deal with these problems when they arise.  But in the meantime, accustom yourself to the idea!