A Messenger from God

Let me share with you a wonderful blog that was published in the Huffington Post a few days ago. Stephen White, the author, writes about the Pope’s role in the Catholic Church. I found his piece interesting and thought you would too!

Here is an excerpt:

Religion, we are told, is an escape — an attempt to explain away the pain and suffering and impossible contradictions of human life. Religion, we are reminded, is full of stuff we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. Or worse. Religion is something we tell others in order to control them. It’s not belief in God, per se, that disturbs our sophisticated, post-modern sensibilities. It’s religion; especially of the organized sort. So we’re all spiritual, but fewer and fewer of us are religious.

Our culture’s complicated relationship with organized religion is closely tied to our culture’s complicated relationship with truth. We love our truth, all right, but we treat truth a lot like religion — it’s fine, so long as everyone else keeps their truth to themselves. Tolerance — which our culture values over all other virtues — consists in not imposing your truth on someone else.

The problem with this well-meaning attempt at tolerance is that it is unsustainable. It’s self-cannibalizing. If there is only your truth and my truth, but no Truth, then there is no common ground upon which to meet one another. Either I’m right, or you are, and since there’s no middle ground, the matter is only ever settled when one side wins and the other side loses. A world without truth isn’t a world liberated from conflict; it’s a world without the possibility of reconciliation.

Click here to read the whole blog.