|
|
|
I am
generally a good Catholic, meaning that I pray the Rosary daily, go to mass
on Sundays, and try to go to confession at least once a month. However, I
have nagging doubts about my faith and have since I was six years old. At
that time, the idea that God didn’t exist occurred to me and since then,
my faith has not been a source of comfort to me, but simply a practice.
Throughout my adolescence I had doubts and so did my friends even though
we were all in a Catholic high school. My mindset is that it is generally
better to believe and not be sorry. I suspect that most people of faith have
their doubts as well, though I am not the type of person to antagonize them
or play devil’s advocate.
My family
is mostly lukewarm and I believe that one of my siblings does not even go
to church anymore. There is nothing actively hostile in them, no rebellion,
just the sense that it is there and it may be true, it may be not. That is
what I suspect because nobody in my family, except my mother, discusses religion.
She says that we’re adults now and we can do what we want, but for her,
religion helps keep her on track.
That
is my family background in a nutshell and I am more or less like them except
I always have more anxiety about if God does or does not exist. Deep down
I do not know. In fact, I recently looked at a website called why doesn’t
God heal amputees and I was not satisfied with any of the answers that religious
people gave to this question. To me, they seemed evasive. One person said
something like “Amputees feel no pain.” Another said, “God
is so far above me I do not question him.” Another said something like
“The spirit is more important than a missing foot.” These answers
bothered me because they’re not answers at all, but statements that
hover in ambiguity and doubt, and seem to hide pain and confusion. Yet, I
see the atheistic attack as insensitive and missing the point because they
will “go in for the kill”, sometimes successfully and sometimes
unsuccessfully, by either making Christians question their intelligence or
by intellectually debunking a statement that was not really meant to be based
on reason.
I
don’t understand why God doesn’t heal amputees, and, as always,
I am on the fence on the issue of religion.
 he answer to your question is really
quite simple. God does not heal amputees because, if He did, everyone would
know that He exists.
Knowing
Now, I’ll bet that this
answer is not what you expected. Nevertheless, it’s the truth, because
knowing that God exists does not do anyone any
good. Even Satan knows that God exists; but what good
does that do him? Satan fell from grace not because he doubted God’s
existence but because he refused to serve God.
And right there, understanding
Satan’s fall, we have the essence of Christianity. Christianity, rather
than being a matter of knowing that God exists, is really a matter of serving
God, freely and willingly.
Lukewarm
Once you understand this matter
of serving God, then you can comprehend what religion is not.
• |
Religion is not about
keeping God’s commands because you are afraid of
going to hell. |
• |
Religion is not about
doing things that would appease God just in case He exists. |
• |
Religion is not about
being happy and free from pain. |
Consequently, your mother’s
belief that “religion helps keep her on track” has missed the point
completely. Your comments about your family being
lukewarm in faith only confirm what I say throughout
this website: a dry, intellectual knowing about God does nothing for anyone
and will only cause the children to abandon
their “faith” as soon as they can think independently. The path
to the Kingdom of Heaven requires a strenuous climb far above the superficiality
you received in your family.
Beyond the
Superficial
Those answers you received on
that website were also superficial, and they demonstrate how many people
do not have very much to say and yet take very much satisfaction in hearing
themselves say it.
So let’s come back to the
true answer.
God does not heal amputees because,
if He did, everyone would know that He exists. This means that God does not
want us merely to know that He exists; God wants us to know Him. God
wants us to know love, and, by knowing love,
to become love, and, in becoming love, to serve love, and, in serving love,
to assist others in finding their way out of
superficiality and into the Kingdom of Heaven.
To do this, to stay on this track,
you don’t have to believe anything; all you need to do is
believe in Jesus—that is, listen to what He
tells us, so that you can know Him and receive Him.
Moreover, in doing this, you
will discover the true meaning of an amputation. Ask yourself this question:
“What does a missing body part signify?” Well, it
signifies—that is, it points to—that which should be missing in
a holy life: the desire to commit sin.
|
