Tag Archives: Blaise Pascal

Ep40 Doubt Can Be a Virtue

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:02 — 26.6MB)

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Father Len reveals how doubts and questions about how God works in the world lead to wisdom and faith.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len explains the difference between doubt that is healthy and holy and doubt that is not healthy or holy.
  • True faith is believing in a God of love and impossibilities.
  • Doubt can be a blessing or a curse. Doubt about how God is working in your life and why is a blessing. Doubt about God’s love and your relationship with God is a curse.
  • “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.” – Paul Tillich
  • “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” – Francis Bacon
  • Doubt can be a great friend of the truth.
  • Real learning occurs when we allow doubts and questions to arise.
  • The Greek word for doubt means two separate views. So, doubt is being torn apart by seeing two opposite things and trying to reconcile them.
  • “Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.” – Khalil Gibran
  • Jesus allows and encourages people to challenge and question him throughout the Bible. Jesus is comfortable with questions because he wants them to lead to wisdom and certainty.
  • “People should question what’s going on in the world, question church authority, but not question that they’re in an unbreakable relationship with God.” – Father Len

Ep38 Why is There Nothing about Dinosaurs in the Bible?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:13 — 17.6MB)

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Father Len explains the relationship between science, history and the Bible and why dinosaurs aren’t present in the Bible.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len reveals that some Christians and members of a group known as “young earth creationists” believe that dinosaurs aren’t present in the Bible because they didn’t exist. They fear science is driving God out of the human experience and therefore they deny rigorous scientific evidence of such things as the age of the earth and the existence of dinosaurs.
  • Demanding that belief in God requires rejecting scientific facts is committing intellectual suicide and damaging to religion and the image of God.
  • When science challenges us, we should be grateful, discerning, and welcoming of scientific truths.
  • There is an ancient belief in Catholicism that God gave us two books of Revelation. The Bible and the book of nature.
  • Thomas Aquinas believed that if nature and scientific facts prove your interpretation of something in Scripture is wrong then clearly your interpretation of the Bible is wrong.
  • The Catholic view is that religion supports science and science supports religion.
  • “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein
  • Galileo believed that scientific exploration is a noble endeavor of faith saying, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
  • The first book of the Bible is not Genesis. It is the back story for the first book of the Bible which is Exodus. The purpose of Genesis is to explain that God created everything to be good.
  • The Bible is not a science or history book. Its purpose is to explain what it means to be a human being. There is no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible because they are not relevant to becoming a free and loving human being.

Ep18 Politics, Religion and the Slogan “Black Lives Matter”

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:37 — 18.0MB)

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Father Len and Irish grapple with the difficulty of having a spiritual, moral, and meaningful conversation about the slogan “black lives matter.”

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len explains why he is reticent to make statements about political slogans.
  • It’s cowardice for religious leaders not to lead and speak out about spiritual and moral issues.
  • People have to come to the truth by themselves, but religious leaders can and should help lead them there.
  • “We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.” – Blaise Pascal
  • We have become so politically rigid, polarized, and hell-bent on winning in the United States that the search for truth gets lost.
  • There are good people and evil people. The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart.
  • Father Len is reading “Black like Me” by John Howard Griffin to become more compassionate and feel the pain and suffering that can come from discrimination and being a minority.