[undershirt]

Most of what I know about Catholicism I learned after becoming Orthodox. I've been seeing more Catholics here, which makes sense, as the history of Western thought is rooted in post-schism scholasticism, which eventually birthed rationalism and the Enlightenment and our modern presuppositions. So there is a sense that modern people will feel at home in the ancient expressions of the ideals we already have.

One worry I havr about the Catholic faith is that I see a lot of emphasis on miracles, which I think would astonish a lot of atheists and agnostics if they had the interest to look at it, and trust in the sources for those evidence. Hinduism is also known for this, and obviously occult practices and witchcraft is also real. But once you're past the point of incredulity, which I am, I would be interested in learning more about the framework that is used to discern between genuine holiness and deception.

Orthodoxy has a word for deception, "prelest", for example, and there are guidelines to not communicate with or pay attention to apparitions when they appear or to be skeptical of them, and to be mindful of whether the encounter is producing the fruit of repetance and humility, or if it produces pride— as a way of discerning if it is from God or something else. I have an orthodox friend who says thr miracle of Guadalupe which converted Mexico over night was genuine, but recent (relative to the age of the Church) saints displaying stigmata or the eucharist blossoming hear tissue in a test tube are treated with less eagerness. I'm not sure how this compares to the Holy Fire in Jerusalem, which is probably our most famous miracle.

I am also interested in the relationship between reason and trust, which I haven't figured out yet, since in the Christian worldview, reason is fallen, which I think denotes the danger of over-rationalizing the faith at least, but I am astonished by things like thr Christology unearthed by the Ecumenical Councils, which is only really motivated when the Church is forced to answer heresies with the Grace of correct explanations, so I don't quite understand the impulse to proactively crank the engines of reason, so to speak, to systemize things in the way the Latins have done.

This is the Orthodox perspective I've picked up in the past few years, but I am in awe of the feeling of irreducible belief that I think this touches on.

[jacquesm]

Just imagine, one little planet and so many gods to choose from. And coincidentally the 'right' god always happens to be the one associated with the dominant religion in the region where you were born.

I suspect that at some point in the distant future religion and the search for god as some conscious entity will be classed as a mental illness.