Faith and Reason and Usenet

No, I'm not really going to say anything significant about that grand topic. Rather, something specific that falls under that rubric. I look at the Usenet when time permits, particularly Alt.Religion.Christian.Roman-Catholic (ARCR-C to the cognoscenti). Usenet, and this group especially, is not for the faint of heart or those sensitive to rude and salacious comments.

I'm not always sure its worthwhile scanning this group because it seems to attract some of the loopiest people. And they invariably have obnoxious and disrespectful ways of communicating their anti-Catholicism. But I remember my first year or two looking at the posts (lurking, as they say). And it's the lurkers that I worry about. If they don't see a Catholic respond to some the more rational criticisms, will they assume that there is no reasonable answer and begin to doubt the rational underpinnings of the faith.

So, once in a blue moon, I'll see a post that has the right combination: an issue I think I know something about and content that is wrong but that is seemingly plausible in its premises and conclusions. The latest was a response that suggested that Jesus was unknown to First Century historians and that modern thinkers have concluded that he was basically a myth.

This is a seriously misleading idea (supported, in this case, by lists of people that seemed to make it more plausible). So I googled the various names on each list (First Century "historians" who didn't know Jesus & modern intellectuals who say that he is a myth) and found, surprise, the whole enterprise was miscast. I sent a couple of follow-ups to point out the general flaws in reasoning and the specific reason the various names on the list did not support the conclusion reached by the poster.

Why bother? Because, while Faith is something quite different from Reason, it is not opposed to it or completely unrelated to it. Faith, while not rational in one sense, is certainly not unreasonable in the full sense of the term. And undermining the reasonableness of the Faith (by saying "Jesus is a myth" for example) is also undermining the Faith itself.

If there is no Jesus that we can know anything about, then there is no Person to put your Faith in. What you have left, if you insist that you still have faith, is belief in an idea or a set of ideas. And who will lay their life down for ideas that have no basis in fact? When the first Christians died they died for the Name. And that name is a real person named Jesus. Christians have a right to know that a reasonable reading of history shows us that he really existed and that we can know something about him without turning our brains off or making a (premature) leap of faith.