Letters to the editor - Lake County

Debate must show understanding

Mr. Barr's July 29 Fence Post letter is a sequence of non-sequiturs.

Firstly, arrogance is of no matter in debates concerning truth, historical or otherwise. For example, given my competence in mathematics, I may state that 2 + 2 = 4 follows from Peano's axioms. We could then discuss the veracity of my claim (it is true), but the strength with which I make my argument (arrogance?) is of little importance.

The same goes for the pope's statement concerning other Christian confessions -- generally they were not founded as churches in the normative, ecclesiological sense, but essentially as laicizing, nationalistic movements. The Orthodox confessions are churches, properly so-called, but share the nationalistic tendencies of most Western European Protestant sects.

Mr. Barr also attempts to demonstrate that, because of the fractured nature of human society, God could not have formed a Church for the reformation of fallen souls. This is (1) a strange presumption about God's nature, derived from human frailty, and (2) a seemingly self-contradictory knot of assertions.

Let me offer a cleaner framework for the facts:

A) Humans, including Catholics, are frail creatures. It is possible that for psychological reasons, they would reject a good thing not because it is actually bad, but because it is hard to live up to (this involves rationalization).

B) A loving God might, within history, found a Church, to guide that fallen group. It would have to teach the truth, even if this is (1) unpopular and (2) not very well followed, even by those in that Church. The latter would occur because God decided to people the Church with imperfect humans instead of robots.

Religious debate can be a wonderful thing, if one's opponent is not entirely ignorant of the subject matter.

Henry Potrykus

Lindenhurst