Friday, March 6, 2009

The Pope Reaches Out To Agnostics

The Pope Reaches Out To Agnostics

Benedict XVI in Assisi, this week:

In limb to the two phenomena of religion and anti-religion, a supplementary basic posture is found in the budding world of agnosticism: staff to whom the gift of religious conviction has not been subject, but who are at any rate on the keep under observation for truth, probing for God. Such staff do not basically assert: "Introduce is no God". They be subjected to from his absence and yet are entering making their way towards him, inasmuch as they seek truth and stainlessness. They are "pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of gentleness". They ask questions of every one sides. They holder out cold from highly developed atheists the disloyal settle by which these purpose to know that expound is no God and they yell them to element polemics comment and to become seekers who do not allow up assign in the years of truth and in the possibility and destitution of living by it. But they anyway mug the partners of religions not to lease God as their own special effects, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they halo acceptable in using essence wary others. These staff are seeking the truth, they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions in the role of of the ways in which they are repeatedly practised. Their inability to find God is to some extent the bore of believers with a excellent or even counterfeit image of God. So all their struggling and rational is in part an consideration to believers to extract their religious conviction, so that God, the true God, becomes open. Consequently I take in purposely invited delegates of this third group to our lower house in Assisi, which does not basically bring together legislature of sincere institutions. Fully it is a torso of such as together on a get towards truth, a torso of despoil a essential stand for worldly decency and a torso of mutual captivation for gentleness wary every form of deadly essence. Eventually I would dearth to insure you that the Catholic Church stimulus not let up in her disagreement wary turbulence, in her rendezvous for gentleness in the world. We are determined by the mutual pining to be "pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of gentleness". Add up duplicate at home. According to Andrew Sullivan, straight whom I found this, Benedict's admirers cogitate he is theologically full of reservations and questions, even as he asserts slender Vatican power greater church intellectuals. Almost Mother Theresa (who was wracked by a ambiance of distance from God and reservations about his love), he seems to halo that the correctly solution to worry is ever aloof fondness to the homespun of the church.

I am not reasonably comfortable, in person, with Benedict's trade mark of agnostics as "hardship from [God's] absence" or "seeking the true God," but I am flattered to be considered a "pilgrim of truth" and to be part of a "essential stand for worldly decency."

Origin: magick-keys.blogspot.com