Why is Your Religion the Right One?

we can have good conversations and arguments about religion without killing each other welcome back to the word on fire show I'm Brandon Vaught the host and the senior publishing director there are thousands of religions out there so why think that Christianity is the right one and why Catholic Christianity in particular that's what I'm going to be asking Bishop Baron today who joins us from his own Diocese of Winona Rochester Bishop good to see you hey Brandon always good to see you we're recording this in mid-December but I think it's not going to air until February which means you either just went on or you're about to go on your big trip to London maybe anticipate that for us tell us what it's going to be like it was a trip we were supposed to make back in September and literally the night before we were supposed to go up to England the queen died and so the trip was called off and it was postponed until February um it's involving a mass at Westminster cathedral which I'm looking forward to immensely uh it's gonna involve a talk at Parliament to I think it's Catholic members but anyone's invited the talk will be at Parliament it'll involve a major uh kind of Jamboree uh day for Catholics there I think a meeting with word on fire and suit members who are in the UK um a trip to Thomas Moore's cell at the Tower of London so I'm super excited about it and it'll be and it won't be tropical weather but probably a little better than Minnesota weather her to spend a week in London I remember last time we recorded this podcast you said it was sunny in three degrees yeah that's that's mid-winter in in southern Minnesota well you've done a couple of these Reddit amas now at Reddit has these types of interactions called amas ask me anything where a well-known uh person comes on and says ask me anything and anybody can leave comments asking them questions we've covered those here on the podcast before looking at some of the trends and popular questions people ask but one of them that in both times was near the very top it got the most upvotes many people were interested in and the question was something like why are you so confident that of all the religions and the history of the world you just happen to have chosen the right one now I know we've discussed this before at in small bits but I I thought we'd devote a whole episode to it unpacking it in more detail so let me start off by just asking you that question directly to get your answer to it um you're a Christian you're a Catholic Christian in particular do you think Catholic Christianity is the one true religion and if so so why yes I do and you know Brandon in a way by John Henry Newman's side will come out here to answer a question like that adequately you have to take into account the illitive sense so Newman says when you ascend to something it's very rarely on the basis of like a clinching argument like oh got it you know relatively simple things you can show with that kind of you know intellectual rigor usually it's a combination of all kinds of elements right as reason it's experience it's the witness of saints it's it's the sacraments it's looking at Notre Dame Cathedral it's uh it's hunch it's intuition it's a whole range of things our friend Chesterton you know wine better than I is and he say like why'd you become a Catholic and I said well there are a thousand reasons but all adding up to it's true and I think he's reflecting the Newman Instinct there that you know to say here's the clinching argument why I'm I think catholicin is the right religion uh so that's a first observation let me also um illuminate it this way you can with reason show that many of the tenets of Catholic Christianity are correct are rationally defensible so it's not simply a matter of an arbitrary choice or like you got your hobby I've got mine you know your favorite color is blue mine's green um no you can show in a rationally compelling way using philosophy using reason that many of the tenets of Catholic Christianity are true so Thomas Aquinas called these the Preamble of fide the preambles to the faith and they include the existence of God God's uh infinity God's omnipotence uh the existence of the Soul we can go through a whole slew of things that can be demonstrated through reasons so you say hey you're convinced this is right to some degree I can say yeah let me show you let me demonstrate to you why I think this is the case so it's not just an arbitrary thing but here's the second observation there we say reason and faith so the claim of Catholic Christianity is that God whose existence I think can be known through reason God has revealed to us not just in many in fragmentary ways but in the fullness of time according the letter of the Hebrews now in the fullness of time he's spoken to us through his son which means through his logos through his word so that God in an unsurpassably efficacious way has spoken himself in Christ Jesus moreover in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead Jesus claimed to be the logos to be uh Divine was ratified I think when you take all that into consideration you say well there is something that's unsurpassable therefore about the Revelation contained uh in in Christianity so again I'm speaking kind of very broadly here adequately answered that question we'd have to invoke the illitive sentence and say for all these different reasons and many others that are probably unconscious to me I've come to this uh Ascent but I want to avoid the implication that's behind the critique that you're alluding to that it's just a matter of you know a happy accident or well yeah I was born in a Christian countries and of course I'm a Christian and I just have my little hobby you have yours well no no there's a there's a rational Integrity to it that can be shown I'm kind of Playing devil's advocate here and I'm trying to use the language that I've seen uh critics and questioners voice to you yeah they often use the language of the one true religion so you think about Catholic Christianity is the one true religion the implication seems to be that every other religion is false so let me ask you what's your view of other religions in that case yeah well my view is that of Vatican too and Vatican II was not a great novelty there it reflects you know moves within the great tradition namely that in in all the great religious traditions and religious philosophies and so on you can find elements of Truth you can find truth to some degree you can find rays of light you know and that seems obvious to me I mean there's no religious tradition there are a lot of let's say silly Fringe sort of you know religious Expressions but think of the mainstream religious expressions in in the human race if if there was nothing true in them there was nothing good or beautiful or valuable they would never have survived they would never have fed people for so long so the church I think very gratefully acknowledges these these facts but the fullness of Truth the fullness of it in that sense the one true religion it doesn't mean all the other ones are simply false it means they're they participate in the truth to a lesser degree now let me let me give you a analogy for this maybe so do you remember that scene in the beginning of Goodwill Hunting the famous film where the professor at MIT puts this complex formula or equation or something problem on the on the board he challenges the students you know can anyone solve this and the students all try different ways and the you know the star of the movie solves it but my point is this is there one correct answer to that problem well yeah there is there's there's one perfectly correct adequate answer but might a professor MIT you're gonna bring it down to grade school math if you want minor professors say yeah the answer you give that's not correct but it's it's close it's it's getting there right you've gotta you did a lot of it correctly you know and then another one yeah it that's good and that's good but no you see how you're falling short of of the full answer and then maybe there's some no no that's just ridiculous no no you're not even in the ballpark you're not you're not even close to solving it or maybe some never even tried you know my point is you can say there's the one correct answer yeah that's right but you don't have to therefore simply denigrate every other answer you can say no to varying degrees they approach the the fullness of the correct answer now let me just stay with that analogy because I it helps me a little bit so there I'm looking at okay major problem and finding the solution that's putting the stress all on on us that we're going to strive to figure this out and some get it and some don't right but let's suppose the guy that writes the equation for you and and watch as you as you try to solve it at some point gives you the answer and says no this is actually the answer and I I realize that you're none of you is really going to get this completely right and I now want to reveal the answer to you and I'm the one who posed the problem so I I know the solution to it and I want to give it to you now we're getting into the realm of Faith as opposed to Mere reason if the puzzle is let's say human life you know the meaning of it all or whatever you want to say that's the puzzle that's the that's the the conundrum and we're all striving to figure it out and some are getting closer than others right but then in the fullness of time the one who gave us the conundrum also deigned to give us the answer to it revealed to us the answer well then I would say yeah yeah that's it that's the right answer you know uh and that would be that's the one true answer was was given to me by the one who originally posed the conundrum now we're getting in the ballpark of what we mean by a revealed religion accepted in faith you know now once that answer is given can I strive to understand it more fully using my reason of course that's called theology right now fida's querens intellectum Faith seeking understanding so once the answer was given maybe it's like I'm not really bright enough to really see why that's the answer but now having studied it more ah ah now I now I get it now I see why yes that is the answer see what I'm doing here Brandon in a way I'm trying to just get at this thing from different angles because it's in a way a notoriously complex problem there isn't like a neat single argument that that sums it up but there's different ways of approaching this problem you've highlighted before how in religion there seems to be a unique hesitancy to land on one definitive position and say this is the right one you know you don't see that in let's say economics or politics where people are very eager to say right this is the right path that's the wrong path but when it comes to religion in your amas I know you got accused often of being arrogant for thinking right you have the one right religion is it arrogant to think that no and stay with your analogy which I like of politics so we've math and coming to different you know answers look at politics now our country is not as clear as we only have two major parties but let's say go to a country like like the UK a parliamentary system where there's like a whole slew of parties and let's say you are a Tory you're a mainstream conservative and you say without hesitation yeah this is the right party to be in this this is the right best way to get at all these problems and face our society okay then you look at other parties and you say yeah there's there's some that are kind of close to my position but you know we differ on X Y and Z but they're you know pretty close then there's people over there no I think they're they're way off that's not correct at all and then people on the way far left and the way far right they're both crazy no no nothing to do with them well we made those judgments all the time all the time and and no one hesitates to say yeah I've got after careful consideration after living life a little bit and trying different things and listening to a wide variety of perspectives I now say yeah I I want to be a conservative uh party member and I can say you're relatively right you're relatively wrong you're really wrong and so are you okay we do it in politics why wouldn't we do it in religion now I know what the answer is and it's true of politics too to some degree but you know the terrible history we have of religious violence so I get it you know that we should always be uh prudent and and charitable when talking about what's of ultimate concern so if I were just in a Cavalier way say well your religion is obviously ridiculous you know I wouldn't recommend that but to your overall point I don't think it's arrogant to say or to claim no I think this is the right religion and now look at the other religions with both prudence and charity and see them as to varying degrees maybe approximating the fullness of One's Own religion I want to bring forth a couple of challenges that I saw in your AMA discussions to this idea that you have landed on the one true religion the first challenge is what I might call the statistically unlikely Challenge and the second one is the birthplace challenge let's take the first one uh critics sometimes will say look statistically it's just highly highly unlikely that you would land on the right religion I'm quoting Wikipedia here which says there are 4 300 different religions in the world today and that that number Rises to ten thousand if you account for all the different religions throughout history so really what are the chances that you would hit on the right religion among those ten thousand possibilities statistically it's point zero one percent chance that you've randomly landed on that one so do you think that you just got really lucky well what's behind that that proposal is that I think of like this big container with the you know a different uh colored balls in it or something and and there's only one you know that's the right color that you need to say you have to reach in there and hey I I was lucky enough to get it well I mean that completely removes religion from anything like a critical uh analysis that you can to some degree step back from the religion which you've received and look I'm sorry that's just the way uh life works you know I was born in Chicago Illinois which means I speak English with a particular uh Midwestern twang it means I had parents who gave me a particular form of education so yeah of course everybody is is conditioned you know in some way but that doesn't mean that at some point in my life I didn't step back from the religion that I received and asked a lot of critical questions about it in fact I did that's a big part of my own intellectual formation was asking a lot of serious questions about my religion and testing it thereby you know so the problem with with the way the question is set up is that it just it's uh it's uh counterfactual uh and it assumes that I can never find some kind of critical distance from my own uh religion here's a another criticism you've gestured at it just a moment ago I I call it the birthplace criticism somebody will say well a person's religion is determined primarily by where they were born for example you think Christianity is true because you were born in America in Chicago as you just said where it's the dominant religion you were raised by Christian parents in a Christian culture but if you had been born in India you would probably think Hinduism is the one true religion or if you've been born in Pakistan it'd be Islam or if you've been born in China it'd be Buddhism so it all seems pretty arbitrary a person's religion seems determined by where they were born not determined it it begins there I mean and of course that's what I say um it's like shaking your fist of the Clear Blue Sky I mean if you if you say I should be born in some completely neutral setting where I have complete you know independence from all perspectives and make an utterly you know uh unbiased judgment well I mean hello welcome to Fantasy or what are the British say Cloud Cuckoo Land I mean no one no one lives in that world we all come up out of a conditioned world of some degree I'll give you an example this is I had this talk the other day with uh a big follower of the World Cup as we record these words the World Cup soccer right and then they were so excited about it and and so I'm listening you know and I said yeah I I know I I just I can't get excited about the World Cup and he looked at me like what and I said look I I just think soccer is the most boring sport in the world to watch I said the the field is too big there's no action they just seem to be wandering around and you know if they get one goal everyone gets excited so then I said to him right away I said look I get it I I didn't grow up playing soccer I don't really understand it it's not my culture and I said I love baseball and he's all baseball what a boar you know I said I know we came from different worlds so I'm just acknowledging there of course that's the way it goes but see could we that guy and I could we step back from our formation and could I say hey here's why I love baseball let me explain it to you and could he say hey here's why I think soccer is terrific and I hope I'd have the open mindedness to say okay let me you know take that in and let's see and let's maybe argue about it and so I mean yes we're all conditioned by where we're from but but at certain point we can find a critical distance look at the writing of Thomas Aquinas I mean so here's someone who's obviously born completely and raised within a Catholic you know framework but Thomas asks every possible question about his own religion and entertains the point of points of view from all across the philosophical and religious spectrum and you know through God's grace I I was introduced to Thomas Aquinas is a very young man and that had a huge impact on me uh so I don't think we're just stuck in our cultural conditioning and that we can never rise above that I'm sure we can sure we can here's another response I saw on Reddit to this topic people said okay look you are convinced that Catholicism is the one true religion and and let's grant that for a moment however other people seem to find deep fulfillment in their own religions too if someone finds God or finds happiness through another religion such as Judaism Islam Buddhism why not just encourage them why not let them practice the religion that works best for them because it's not up to me because the Lord Jesus Christ said go and preach the gospel to All Nations so I'm under I'm under a missionary command uh I I sure I could if someone is finding joy and peace in their religion I mean great I have nothing against that but I've got an obligation to preach the gospel and I do think the gospel is the fullness of life and joy and I want to share that with everybody so it doesn't mean I'm going to become this obnoxious imperialistic um jerk you know I was trying to impose My Religion on everybody so that's the caricature of our post-modern time than anyone that claims that they have religious truth is ipso facto going to be a boar no no I hope I'd always do it in love but it's not just up to me I I've been commanded by the one that I claim is Lord to go and preach to All Nations he didn't say just preach to your own culture or preach to your you know fellow Believers or priests to people that you like he said preach to All Nations and if he is the law gods and not just one philosopher among many well of course everyone is meant to belong to him if he's the logos of God you know I mean I mean if there's a philosopher that I think is great let's say I you know I like William James or I like Thomas Aquinas or fine I'll share that with people but I'm not under some some existential obligation to make everybody a a strict homist but I am under existential obligation to draw people toward the logos when the son of man is lifted up He will draw all people to himself um Paul like a madman is racing around the Eastern Mediterranean I'm just announcing the lordship of Jesus I want to go to Rome and I want to go to Spain and for Paul that meant I want to go to Timbuktu I want to go to the end of the world to announce this so that's the obligation I have as a as a missionary um and see what I don't appreciate is when that is automatically interpreted as oppression I've maybe we talked about this branding because it rings the bell as I'm looking at you now that years ago I'm in Chicago and um it was a Jewish Christian dialogue and Cardinal George was there and he was talking about evangelization and I had just been named by Cardinal George to do this work in evangelization and one of the the Jewish um interlocutors got up and he said you know I just have to say it when I hear the word evangelization I think genocide well I remember thinking oh come on you know that's so uh it's unfair yes this horrible history of anti-Semitism that culminated in the horrific genocide of Jews in the 20th century but to say to a Christian when I hear evangelization I think Auschwitz or genocide that's to take what's kind of most fundamental to my missionary identity and identify it with mass murder you know and so that's not helpful I would suggest let's close with this question and it kind of gets at what you were just wrapping up with namely how to settle religious disputes you know so people on Reddit would recognize okay Bishop Barron thinks he's got the one true religion other people I know think they have the one true religion therefore how do we settle this other than by killing each other is it even possible to determine which religion is true or do we just have to agree to disagree no we talk to each other and and we argue with each other as I've been saying for years arguing religion's a good thing I agree with Stanley Howard was we have to learn how to have arguments about religion in public we forgot that art or we set it aside and the result is I've often said either it's violence or Bland Toleration and there is a very good middle ground which is called religious argument the model for which in my judgment is Thomas Aquinas who had these marvelous marvelous religious arguments basically in his great text where he allows all these voices to be heard the time is a very contemporary figure that way you know all the stress on you know the many voices and let them be heard well he does see here's all kinds of voices engages them takes them seriously respects their point of view steal man's their argument to use that term that I've learn to to appreciate Thomas is a beautiful example then he's steel mans he doesn't straw man he's steel mans the arguments of his opponent and then he argues with them and comes to a resolution and then then moves to the next question that's a good way to do it we can have good conversations and arguments about religion without killing each other [Music] [Music] well it's time now for our question from one of our listeners if you have a question for Bishop Barron send it in to us at the website askbishopbarren.com today we have a really interesting one from a young woman in Britain she's a non-practicing Muslim who's been listening the word on fire is attracted toward Catholicism but wants your advice Bishop on what to do next here's your question hi Bishop I hope you're well um I'm Leila I live in Britain and uh I'm a non-practicent Muslim who's been enjoying your homilies and I've been considering uh converting to Christianity especially Catholicism but I'm scared um I'm worried that I will lose my parents and especially my mother who's a devout Muslim and I was wondering what your advice was let me know and thank you well with that question our discussion really uh comes to to a concrete expression doesn't it uh and thank you for the you know the Courage the beauty of that of that question you know here's a first instinct is um follow the promptings of Grace I mean grace is is working in you it seems to me and if it's happening through you know my sermons or other sources um follow that Grace here's my practical advice to you though find somebody find a priest who's close to home uh who knows you and knows your situation with whom you can really talk and share the particulars because as you suggest in the question I'm sure it's very complicated uh you know given your family's background and your own background and I'm just very reluctant because I don't know you and I don't want to give advice that wouldn't be helpful but find somebody find a priest your Parish priest um near you that you can share this with share your life with and and I think he'd be able to give you much better advice than I could but in the meantime pray you pray please and I promise I'll pray for you too and it's a it's a difficult and important discernment that you're going through yeah we'll all pray for you Leela thank you so much for sharing that with us and all of us at word on fire I'm sure will keep you in prayer as well as we wrap up here uh another new book from word on fire seems like I say that every time we're together Bishop Baron but this time it is the second and final volume in our word on fire Vatican II collection so many of you will remember that last year we released the first volume which contained the four major constitutions of Vatican II but there's actually 16 documents that came out of the second Vatican Council so this second volume includes the final 12 documents they're all declarations and decrees to give them the official title you'll find the church's teachings on education religious freedom evangelization and much more what's unique about our Edition is that we take the text of Vatican II and we surround them with commentary from not only Bishop Baron but also the post-concealer popes so John Paul II Benedict XVI Pope Francis so you're reading the council through the lens of the church it's the best way to do it the book also has a forward by Bishop Barron and an afterward by the steam Theologian Matthew Levering and helpful appendices with key terms and figures and answers to frequently asked questions so if you've been hearing about Vatican II but you've never actually read the documents of Vatican II pick up the second volume of our world on fire Vatican II collection I'll include a link in the show notes well thanks so much for watching and listening and we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 177,255

Keywords: which religion is right, which religion is correct, religion, christianity, which religion is true, bishop barron, bishop robert barron, catholicism, which religion makes the most sense, is catholicism true, is catholicism correct, is christianity true, is christianity correct, truth of christianity, truth, word on fire show, catholic podcast, catholic show, catholic youtube, christian podcast, brandon vogt, bible, arguments for christianity, arguments for catholicism

Id: 04pYd0X6c4Q

Length: 29min 7sec (1747 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023