God or Logic?



"Who are you gonna believe? God or logic?"

Foul Mouthed Atheist Dusty Smith, AKA #CultofDusty
This is the challenge issued by the 5th most popular Atheist on Youtube, known as "CultofDusty". In this video, he manages to embody pretty much all of the things that concern me most about society in the new age of instant internet answers where, if you want to know something, you hit Google first. Because of the instantaneous nature of information from such sources, we think we are much more intelligent and better informed than any generation who went before us. But we have failed to understand that knowing something is different from reading it and making up a subjective opinion on what it means. This is obviously all the more appropriate when one is reading a book which contains numerous literary genres, written thousands of years ago.

I do bang on about this quite a bit, I know, but I think it is because of the benefit formal study has been to my own faith. It also means that I am not at all concerned when I hear attacks like Dusty's, and, like the woman who so intelligently refutes his assertions in the video, they sound deeply, deeply ignorant to me.

This video is also a good argument for the Magisterium, because it shows how you need a teaching authority in order to properly understand the Bible in context. The Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church given to it by Jesus. F. K. Bartels explains that the Christian faith is not a "religion of the book." Christianity is the religion of the "Word" of God, a word which is "not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living" (Catechism of The Catholic Church, No. 108).

The notion that Scripture could be, or even should be interpreted in an isolated fashion apart from Tradition was foreign to the apostolic Church, as St. Paul attests:
"Therefore, brothers, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours" (2 Thess. 2:15). 
It was not until Martin Luther and the Reformation in the sixteenth century that sola scriptura became entrenched in parts of Christendom. Thomas Bokenkotter wrote that for "Luther, 'Scripture alone' was the supreme authority in religion-and henceforth this phrase became the rallying cry of all Protestants" (A Concise History of the Catholic Church, 208).

Further, the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church Christ founded and which the reformers so often sought to dismiss is just as integral and inseparable from the fullness of truth as is Tradition and Scripture. For apart from the Magisterium (teaching authority) of the Church, the fullness of God's revelation cannot be maintained on earth in its integrity.

Pope St. John Paul II probably would not be overly impressed with #CultofDusty's reasoning!
"It is clear therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others. Working together, each in its own way, under the action of the one Holy Spirit, they all contribute effectively to the salvation of souls" (Catechism of The Catholic Church, No. 95).

Pope Benedict XVI reminds those faithful who thirst for the fullness of God's revealed truth where the nourishing fount of "the supreme rule of faith" is to be found: "In short, by the work of the Holy Spirit and under the guidance of the magisterium, the Church hands on to every generation all that has been revealed in Christ. The Church lives in the certainty that her Lord, who spoke in the past, continues today to communicate his word in her living Tradition and in sacred Scripture. Indeed, the word of God is given to us in sacred Scripture as an inspired testimony to revelation; together with the Church's living Tradition, it constitutes the supreme rule of faith" (Verbum Domini, 17-18).

All this means that #CultofDusty is hopelessly out of his depth here and has hugely fallen prey to his own hypocrisy; hoisted by his own petard, one mine say. At the beginning of the video, he makes a great show of criticising "Quote Mining", a technique which he then demonstrates he is rather expert in when it comes to Biblical criticism!

You will find this valuable, because it exposes the maxim that a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing:




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