Sections:

1)Some Ideas on the Existence of God

2)Why be a catholic?

3)Crisis of Faith & the instiutional church

4)Atheism: "Help My Unbelief"

5)Atheism, faith and love

6)"Faith Through Crucible of Doubt" (Two Prophets: Dostoevsky and St. Thérèse of Lisieux)

7) In search of God - and of Christ

 

Atheism, Faith and Love

From the point of view of his book, "Help my Unbelief", Gallagher writes: "It is useful to insist that the deepest denial of God is a refusal to love, and that in the light of the Last Judgement parable of Matthew, chapter 25, the simple truth is that active love is more important than explicit faith. The ideal of Christian education is not ethics but a committed life with Christ, a faith alive in action. For many of the socially alert young people, it is faith-minus justice that has become incredible… and St James might say, "rightly so".

Faith is so much more difficult living today in a world of so much hedonism and inequality. The crucial point here is that so many people try to survive on childhood images of God - and so they court immaturity of faith. Without some personal relationship with Christ, nothing will last long in one's religion and that relationship must be centred on the Mass and the Eucharist. Never expect the Church or the Mass to meet your spiritual needs if you simply turn up on Sundays - that's too passive by far. The Mass must be lived elsewhere than in the Church building - constant concern for other people and justice for all.

You must work at your faith and bring your personal needs into the Mass:

1. Pray to get your values right.
2. Thank God for all your blessings.
3. Repent for your sins, especially sins against love.
4. Petition for all your needs, spiritual and material.

So often, unbelief has much more to do with one's experience of life than with any purely religious conclusions and this experience is often the case where a person used to have passive but shallow belief - and now has passive but shallow Unbelief!

There can be no simple explanation of the phenomenon of unbelief today. There is a clear picture of the uprooting of many traditional ways of relating within families and certainly the emergence of a new culture. What is required is a recognition of the new changes and then a response to these new challenges. Everywhere a different ethos is dominant and faced with this new "real world", impoverished images of an unreal God become even more unreal and thin.

Above all, try always to be optimistic in your faith. Some people seem incapable of believing any good news - especially the Good News of being loved by God. Indeed the Gospel seems too good to be true! Was it not the famous atheist, Nietzche, who said he would seriously consider the claims of Christianity if he could see optimism on the faces of Christians? Christ's stupendous promise is forever valid: "I am with you all days, even to the end of time."