All right, Deacon Duncan owes me. He cruelly pointed me at a site where a Catholic tries to justify his faith.
Just that phrase alone is enough to send alarms in your head whooping, doesn’t it? You know it’s going to be a pointless exercise in sophistry, and the only reason you might be tempted to follow the link is to see how awful it is. If you are a connoisseur of bad reasoning, go ahead — it’s an excellent example of the genre.
After the prelude, in which he says that he’s trying to explain his belief to atheists why Christians exist, here is his very first sentence.
Any philosophy that claims that there exists nothing supernatural cannot grant purpose to suffering.
I lost my will to read further. He needs to examine his premises: why must there be a purpose to suffering?
I had stopped caring. But I glanced ahead through the long, tortured prose and shameful excuses for logic (purposelessly, I suffered), and found this little jewel of a dingleberry of thought:
All atheism has its ultimate source in Jesus Christ then, for by his death he negated the existence of God. And in his death, sin itself died, for he became sin itself. And if sin died, suffering died, for suffering is the result of sin. And if all suffering died, than death itself — the ultimate human suffering — dies.
What the hell…do not try to understand. It’s a Catholic thing. Just soak your cortex in a childhood of lies, and while it will never make sense, you’ll just accept without questioning, which is all a good Catholic wants.
I gave up. But I thought I’d check the comments to see if somehow, magically, that fecal slurry somehow resonated with anyone, and gosh, it did.
I love how simply you put it when you said “Christianity doesn’t end suffering. It just redefines it as a positive.” I think a lot of Christians don’t understand why they suffer, and knowing that their suffering is united with Christ’s is beyond comforting.
Catholics. Their logic is of another realm.